THE INITIAL EPIGRAPH is from Mario Cuomo’s keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 1984. The Preface is written without endnotes. The quotations appear elsewhere in the text and are fully cited at that point. I am indebted to Michael Barone for the final observation concerning FDR.
ONE | Heritage
The epigraph is from Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 18–19 (New York: Doubleday, 1981). As governor and later as president, Franklin enjoyed teasing his mother about the family’s forebears. According to FDR’s son James, when important people were dining at Hyde Park, the president would often hint that “old Claes left Holland because he was a horse thief or worse … or would take off on the subject of the Delanos who went into the China trade, implying that they smuggled everything from opium to immigrants. Sometimes he sounded as if he were taking his text, chapter and verse, from the columnist Westbrook Pegler.” James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 18 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
1. The most accessible sources for the history of the Roosevelt family are Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 17–26 (New York: Putnam, 1972); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 5–9 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 13–60 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Also see Karl Schriftgiesser, The Amazing Roosevelt Family: 1613–1942 (New York: W. Funk, 1942); Nathan Miller, The Roosevelt Chronicles (New York: Doubleday, 1979); Alvin Page Johnson, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Colonial Ancestors (Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1933); Allen Churchill, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Bellamy Partridge, The Roosevelt Family in America (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1936). The Herald Tribune quotation is by Gerald W. Johnson. A more disparaging observation is by Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer, who in her History of New York in the Seventeenth Century noted that “at no pre-Revolutionary period was the Roosevelt family conspicuous nor did any member of it attain distinction.”
2. Theodore Roosevelt, Autobiography 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1913). TR’s emphasis.
3. Clara and Hardy Steeholm, The House at Hyde Park 38–39 (New York: Viking, 1950).
4. The quotation is from Dr. Isaac’s brother-in-law, William Henry Aspinwall, reported in Ward, Before the Trumpet 21. Also see Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 46.
5. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 27 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
6. Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 40. John Aspinwall Roosevelt, Dr. Isaac’s second and last child, was born in 1840.
7. 3 FDR: His Personal Letters 1224, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). Like many family stories told by FDR, the Garibaldi tale was artfully embellished. Roosevelt records show that James was in Naples in March 1849, but Garibaldi was encamped at the time at Rieti, some forty miles northeast of Rome. The siege of Naples did not begin until 1860. See Christopher Hibbert, Garibaldi and His Enemies 275–293 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
8. For Silliman’s eminence at the New York bar, see 6 National Cyclopedia of American Biography 54–55 (New York: J. T. White & Co., 1879).
9. Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 54–55.
10. Anna “Bamie” Roosevelt’s reminiscences, quoted in David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback 57 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981). Also see Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 8–10 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979). Theodore, Sr., did not serve in the war in deference to his wife, Mittie Bulloch, the daughter of a prominent Georgia family. Indeed, Mittie’s brother, James Dunwody Bulloch, was the principal Confederate agent in London, and it was he who arranged for construction of the Alabama and other rebel raiders. At the same time, William Henry Aspinwall, Isaac Roosevelt’s brother-in-law, was Lincoln’s confidential agent in the British capital.
I am grateful to Professor John Y. Simon, editor of the Grant Papers, for alerting me that it was James Roosevelt who first notified the U.S. government of James Bullock’s presence in London to arrange for construction of the Alabama. On July 10, 1861, Hiram Barney, the collector of customs in New York, advised Secretary of State William Henry Seward, “These vessels will sail from Liverpool under the flag of the Confederacy and will operate upon our merchantmen and navy ships.… Of course I know not the grounds of this apprehension, but give it on Mr. Roosevelt’s authority exclusively. Mr. Roosevelt is an ardent Union man and would feel bound to denounce a brother probably to save the government, but he does not wish his name used if it can be avoided.” 2 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion (Series 2) 18. James Bullock was excluded from the general amnesty President Johnson proclaimed at the end of war and lived out his life in Liverpool. He occasionally visited the United States under an assumed name and once asked James Roosevelt to dine with him. The president’s father refused, horrified at the thought of dining with a traitor. 2 Roosevelt Letters 23n.
11. McClellan graduated from West Point in 1845 and quickly established a reputation as a brilliant engineer and mapmaker. He resigned from the army in 1855 to become superintendent of the Illinois Central. See Stephen W. Sears, George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon 64–70, 388–390 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988).
12. During his wedding trip abroad in 1853, James briefly worked as Buchanan’s private secretary. Buchanan was then American minister in London. He suddenly found himself shorthanded and asked James to pitch in until additional help arrived. James admired Buchanan personally, which may have facilitated his switch to the Democrats. For FDR’s version of the episode, see President’s Personal File 3012, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library (FDRL).
13. James Roosevelt to John Roosevelt, December 23, 1865, in John Aspinwall Roosevelt’s Collection of Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.
14. For FDR’s notes on Leland Stanford’s purchase of Gloster, see his “History of the President’s Estate,” FDRL.
15. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 172 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
16. As quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 52. James’s marriage to Rebecca is lovingly described in Aileen Sutherland Collins’s Rebecca Howland & James Roosevelt: A Story of Cousins, based on Rebecca’s diary. (Virginia Beach, Va.: Parsons Press, 2005).
17. Ibid. 55.
18. With respect to marrying advantageously, the Roosevelts were not unlike the Hapsburgs, of whom it was said:
Bella gerant alii! Tu, felix Austria, nube,
Nam quae Mars aliis dat tibi regna Venus.
(Let others make war. Thou, happy Austria, marry,
for Venus gives thee those realms which on others Mars bestows.)
19. Dollar conversions are from Robert G. Sahr, “Inflation Conversion Factors for Years 1700 to Estimated 2012,” Political Science Department, Oregon State University, 2002.
20. Ward, Before the Trumpet 59–60, 350–351. Eleanor Roosevelt called Bamie “one of the most interesting women I have ever known. [She] had a mind that worked as a very able man’s mind works. She was full of animation, was always the center of any group she was with.” Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 57–58 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
21. Davis, Beckoning Destiny 34. Also see Peter Collier with David Horowitz, The Roosevelts: An American Saga 53–54 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
22. “The Delanos,” said Eleanor, “were the first people I met who were able to do what they wanted to do without wondering where to obtain the money.” Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt 47 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
23. Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady 5–6 (New York: D. Appleton–Century, 1935).
24. Daniel W. Delano, Jr., Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence 31–33 (Pittsburgh: J. S. Nudi Publications, 1946).
25. Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 13; Freidel, Apprenticeship 13–14; James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts 19 (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Warren Delano’s million-dollar fortune would translate into roughly $24 million in 2006. Perhaps a more accurate gauge would be that when John Jacob Astor, the nation’s first millionaire, died in 1848 he left an estate valued at somewhat less than $20 million: a sum “as incomprehensible as infinity,” according to one obituary writer. Ward, Before the Trumpet 130.
26. Colonnade Row was designed in the 1830s by Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, noted Greek Revival architects whose work included the New York Customs House and state capitols in Connecticut, Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio.
27. Within the family, Sara was called “Sallie” to distinguish her from Aunt Sarah, Warren’s sister. For simplicity, I have referred to the president’s mother as “Sara” throughout.
28. Downing’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America, published in 1840, is an American classic. Also see his The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: D. Appleton, 1850).
29. Quoted in Kleeman, Gracious Lady 35.
30. For an extended treatment of Chinese complicity in the opium trade, see William Travis Hanes and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another 42–49 (Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2002). Also see John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast 65–68 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1969); William O. Walker III, Opium and Foreign Policy 4–14 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); David Edward Owen, British Opium Policy in China and India 204 ff. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).
31. Warren’s letter was written from Canton on April 11, 1839, but the sentiments expressed apply a fortiori to his stint in Hong Kong in the 1860s. Warren noted that if the Chinese authorities disapproved of the opium trade, they could easily extinguish it. Quoted in Frederic D. Grant, Jr., “Edward Delano and Warren Delano II: Case Studies in American China Trader Attitudes Toward the Chinese, 1834–1844” (honors thesis, Bates College, 1976) 183–185, 260–261. Also see the lengthy notation concerning Warren Delano and the opium trade in Ward, Before the Trumpet 87–88n as well as Daniel Delano, Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence 163, which frankly acknowledges, “Warren was now engaged in the opium trade and it paid large and handsome returns.” For additional background, see Jacques M. Downs, “American Merchants and the China Opium Trade, 1800–1840,” 42 Business History Review 418–442 (1968), and the sources citied therein.
32. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 90.
33. R.J.C. Butow, “A Notable Passage to China: Myth and Memory in FDR’s Family History,” Prologue, Fall 1999, 159–160. Also see Kleeman, Gracious Lady 43–60.
34. FDR to Felix Frankfurter, April 18, 1942, in Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence 656, Max Freedman, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
35. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 95.
36. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 65.
37. Suzannah Lessard, The Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family 203 (New York: Dial Press, 1996).
38. Quoted in Steeholm, House at Hyde Park 36. Also see Davis, Beckoning Destiny 35.
39. Quoted in Kleeman, Gracious Lady 111.
TWO | My Son Franklin
The epigraph is from Sara (Mrs. James) Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin 7 (New York: Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1933).
1. James’s handwritten diary entry is displayed in the museum at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.
2. The conflict between Sara and James is described in James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 34 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
3. Warren Delano’s comments are from letters to his son Warren III, in the Delano Family Papers, FDRL.
4. Sara Roosevelt diary, March 19, 1882, FDRL. A facsimile of Sara’s entry is reproduced in Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady 129 (New York: D. Appleton– Century, 1935).
5. Warren Delano to Warren Delano III, FDRL.
6. Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, The Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 7, 23, 57 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965); B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750–1970 85, 89 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975).
7. GDP (in millions of 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars):
|
1870 |
1882 |
|
|
France |
71,419 |
89,167 |
|
Germany |
44,101 |
55,126 |
|
United Kingdom |
95,651 |
122,459 |
|
United States |
98,418 |
177,153 |
Source: Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820– 1992 180, 182 (Paris: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1995).
8. Statistical History of the United States 207, 212, 369, 416–417.
9. Franklin D. Roosevelt, untitled, undated reminiscences dictated at the White House, FDRL.
10. SDR, My Boy Franklin 44–46.
11. Mittie Roosevelt to Elliott Roosevelt, June 7, 1882, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. Mittie’s emphasis.
12. Rita Halle Kleeman, untitled notes, FDRL.
13. Sara was an indefatigable journal keeper and recorded daily events at Algonac and Springwood with clipped precision. This was a trait bred into the Delanos, who seemed to believe everything that happened to them was noteworthy. Yet for some reason Sara destroyed her journals for the years 1884 to 1887. No one knows why. Various authors suggest that evidence of marital stress might have found its way into the diaries and Sara chose to obliterate it. See Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet 124–125 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985); also see Nona Ferdon, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Psychological Interpretation of His Childhood and Youth” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Hawaii, 1971).
14. SDR, My Boy Franklin 6.
15. FDR to Jeanne Rosat-Sandoz, March 31, 1933, FDRL.
16. FDR to SDR, 1888. 1 The Roosevelt Letters: Being the Personal Correspondence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt 30, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1949). A facsimile copy of FDR’s letter is reproduced between pages 128 and 129.
17. SDR, My Boy Franklin 33.
18. Ibid. 20–21. The president’s son Elliott wrote, “In some sense of the word, [FDR] had no father, only a man old enough to be his grandfather, who, no matter how hard he tried, could not keep up with his growing son.” Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 35 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
19. FDR to JR, June 7, 1890. 1 Roosevelt Letters 32.
20. Ward, Before the Trumpet 140.
21. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 151–152. Germanic was not only the newest but the fastest ship on the North Atlantic run and won the Blue Riband for record transatlantic crossings three times. In February 1899 the vessel sank in New York harbor, covered with 1,800 tons of ice accumulated during a severe North Atlantic storm. She was raised and refitted, sailed under a number of flags, and after seventy-five years of service was scrapped at Messina, Sicily, in October 1950.
22. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 144.
23. Ibid. 146.
24. SDR, My Boy Franklin 4.
25. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 138.
26. The Philadelphia Record, April 6, 1913.
27. SDR, My Boy Franklin 7. “His father felt that an only son should not choose a profession which would take him so much away from home,” said Eleanor. Autobiography 47 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
28. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 47 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
29. Admiral Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician 78–79 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946). At his death, Roosevelt’s stamp collection was appraised at $79,267. Shortly afterward it sold at auction for $212,847, or roughly $2.5 million in today’s currency. That figure neglects the value the collection would have accrued in the intervening fifty-eight years. The New York Times, June 7, 1945. For FDR’s collection, see Brian C. Baur, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Stamp Collecting President (Sidney, Ohio: Linn’s Stamp News, 1999).
30. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 48; SDR, My Boy Franklin 27.
31. No detail of the St. James’ operation escaped FDR’s attention. In 1941, when the church treasurer resigned, the president proposed a candidate of his own. “What would you think of the young man who runs the drug store?” he wrote his neighbor Gerald Morgan. “He seems up and coming. He is a violent Republican!” President’s Secretary’s File (PSF) 154, FDRL. Also see Ward, Before the Trumpet 156–157.
32. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 149–150 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937). After the president’s death, Eleanor wrote, “I think he felt that in great crises he was guided by a strength and wisdom higher than his own, for his religious faith, though simple, was unwavering and direct.… I have always felt my husband’s religion had something to do with his confidence in himself.” This I Remember 69–70 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
33. FDR to Muriel and Warren Robbins (Aunt Kassie Delano’s children by her first marriage), May 30, 1891. 1 Roosevelt Letters 35. FDR remained in contact with the Robbinses for the rest of his life and in 1933 appointed Warren to be U.S. minister to Canada.
34. The New York Times, January 17, 1933. Also see Christian Bommersheim to Roosevelt family, July 1, 1891, FDRL.
35. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 166. On the eve of World War II, when he was under fire from isolationist critics for being pro-British and pro-French, Roosevelt could not resist alluding to his youthful days in imperial Germany. “I did not know Britain and France as a boy,” the president said, “but I did know Germany. If anything, I looked upon the Germany I knew with far more friendliness than I did on Great Britain or France.” 3 Roosevelt Letters 943.
36. Quoted in Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs 24 (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
37. September 18, 1896, 1 Roosevelt Letters 47–48.
38. Ibid. 45. Also see Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton 45 (New York: Coward McCann, 1944). “We had a sad shooting affray the other day,” Peabody wrote to a friend back east on July 8, 1882. “[A] worthy young deputy sheriff was murdered by a drunken Mexican. They tried to get up enough excitement among the populace to lynch the murderer—but there was no leader. I really think that an example of frontier justice with the next white murderer would be a good thing—for the place is full of desperados who hold the lives of others and themselves very cheap.” Ibid. 59.
39. Statistical History of the United States 91.
40. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 321 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
41. Roosevelt was so impressed with the elder Peabody’s reading of A Christmas Carol that as soon as he had a family of his own he undertook to read a condensed version every year on Christmas Eve, insisting that the assembled family join him in repeating the final words of Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.” James Roosevelt, Affectionately, F.D.R. 57. Also see Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt 510 (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
42. Peabody to Camp, November 23, 1909, reproduced in Ashburn, Peabody 195.
43. The New York Times, June 3, 1934. Shortly after he became president, FDR wrote Peabody, “I count it among the blessings of my life that it was given to me in my formative years to have the privilege of your guiding hand and the benefit of your inspiring example.” Reprinted in Ashburn, Peabody 349.
44. Quoted in 1 Roosevelt Letters 47. Not all students fared as well as FDR. For example, Peabody considered Dean Acheson [Groton ’11] “an undesirable citizen … so flippant and unpleasant” that the faculty wanted nothing to do with him. Peabody to Acheson’s father, March 13, 1909, Peabody Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
45. FDR to Mama and Papa, May 14, 1897, 1 Roosevelt Letters 97.
46. Ibid., June 25, 1900, 356–357.
47. In 1933 FDR ascribed the remark about boyhood ideals to Phillips Brooks, 1933 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 419, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1948).
48. Quoted in 1 Roosevelt Letters 362. Philosopher William James lamented that the young men who lived in the Yard “seldom or never darken the doors of Pudding or the Porcellian; they hover in background on the days when the crimson color is most in evidence, but they nevertheless are intoxicated and exultant with the nourishment they find there.” William James, “The True Harvard,” 12 Harvard Graduates Magazine 7 (September 1903).
49. Eliot, strongly influenced by the intellectualism of German universities, subscribed to the unity of the quest for knowledge. As he expressed it in his famous address on the aims of higher education, “There is today no difference between the philologist’s method of study and the naturalist’s, or between the psychologist’s method and the physiologist’s. Students of history and natural history, of physics and metaphysics, of literature and the fine arts, find that, though their fields of study are different, their method and spirit are the same. This oneness of method characterizes the true university.” For criticism, see Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 342–346 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936).
50. 1941 Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt 460.
51. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 209; Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 77 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
52. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 218–219; Ward, Before the Trumpet 230.
53. 47 Harvard Alumni Bulletin 444 (April 28, 1945). Bowie subsequently became pastor of New York City’s Grace Church.
54. FDR Diary, October 1, 1903, FDRL.
55. FDR to SDR, October 7, 1903, 1 Roosevelt Letters 434–435.
56. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order 324. “Perhaps the most useful preparation I had in college for public service was on the Harvard Crimson,” Roosevelt said many years later. Quoted in Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 39 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
57. The Oregonian (Portland), April 20, 1914.
58. Kleeman, Gracious Lady 213.
59. FDR to SDR, January 6, 1902, 1 Roosevelt Letters 403.
60. SDR, My Boy Franklin 55–56.
61. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 243.
62. To Sara, FDR wrote, “Last week I dined at the Quincy’s, the Armory’s and the Thayer’s, three as high-life places as are to be found in blue-blooded, blue stockinged, bean eating Boston!” January 12, 1904, 1 Roosevelt Letters 447.
63. Roosevelt’s remark was made to Bamie’s son, W. Sheffield Cowles, Jr., who was returning from Europe with President Wilson in 1919. Letter, Cowles to Nathan Miller, March 18, 1980, in FDR: An Intimate History 35, 513.
64. Lathrop Brown was elected to Congress from New York as a Democrat in 1912 and later served as joint secretary to President Wilson’s Industrial Conference in 1919. His remark was made to Frank Freidel and is reprinted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 237. Brown himself was a member of Porcellian.
65. Freidel, Apprenticeship 52.
THREE | Keeping the Name in the Family
The epigraph is from James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 17 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976). Also see David B. Roosevelt, Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt 168 (New York: Warner Books, 2002).
1. The New York Times, March 18, 1905; Town Topics, March 9, 1905.
2. James Roosevelt, My Parents 33. Or, as their son Elliott wrote, “If [father] was no more than a boy in terms of his experience with women at the time of their marriage, mother was no more than a child in her knowledge of men.” Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 25 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
3. “Who do you think it would be nice to have at Hyde Park with the crowd?” Franklin asked Sara. “You’d better send me a list.” Two days later Sara complied: “I send a short list of girls either one of whom you may be pleased to dance with, and you ought to write at once—
Mary Newbold [Hyde Park neighbor]
Mary Soley [cousin]
Muriel [Delano Robbins—cousin]
Helen [Roosevelt—Rosy’s daughter and FDR’s niece].
As you know very few girls you ought to make haste.” FDR to SDR, December 4, 1898; SDR to FDR December 6, 1898, 1 The Roosevelt Letters 213–214, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1949).
4. FDR to SDR, October 16, 1901, ibid. 396.
5. Elliott Roosevelt, Untold Story 33–34; James Roosevelt, My Parents 18. After the romance disintegrated, Frances Dana married FDR’s classmate Henry de Rahm. Roosevelt remained on friendly terms with both and spent much time with them in Florida in the 1920s, when he was recovering from polio.
6. The account of FDR’s relationship with Alice Sohier is derived from Geoffrey Ward’s original research with the Sohier family and described in detail in Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt: 1882–1905 253–255 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Alice’s 1910 marriage to Herbert Bramwell Shaw, an insurance executive, ended in divorce in 1925. All her life she remained a Republican, professing not to be surprised that FDR was “so careless with the country’s money since he had always overspent his allowance as a youth.” Alice died in 1972, having made sure that all of FDR’s letters to her had been burned. Ibid. 255n.
7. FDR to Robert D. Washburn, August 18, 1928, FDRL. There is no record of FDR traveling to the West or the South in 1902.
8. FDR was an usher at Alice’s coming-out ball, January 13, 1904. Thirty years later, Alice’s father came across a photograph of the ushers and mailed it to the president. FDR wrote back immediately, “That photograph brings back many delightful memories. I well remember Alice’s coming out dance. Of all the debutantes of that year she was the loveliest.” FDR to Colonel Sohier, March 21, 1934, FDRL.
9. FDR diary entry, November 17, 1902, FDRL.
10. Corinne Robinson Alsop, unpublished memoir, Alsop Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
11. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 101 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
12. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 41 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Eleanor’s first letter to Franklin, or at least the first that survives, was October 3, 1905, a matter-of-fact note that she signed “yours in haste.” FDRL.
13. ER, Autobiography 41. “It was years later before I understood what being in love or what loving really meant,” wrote Eleanor. Ibid.
14. Eleanor Roosevelt Genealogy, FDRL.
15. Philip Livingston (1716–1778) was one of four New York signatories to the Declaration of Independence; Brockholst Livingston, then the nation’s leading authority on commercial law, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Thomas Jefferson in 1806 and served until 1823; Robert R. Livingston was the first U.S. secretary of foreign affairs under the Continental Congress, 1781–1783; his brother, Edward, served as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of state from 1831 to 1833. William Livingston, who signed the Constitution, served as governor of New Jersey from 1776 to 1790.
16. Anna (1863), Elizabeth, known as “Tissie” (1865), Valentine, Jr. (“Vallie”) (1868), Edward (1870), Edith (1873), and Maude (1877).
17. According to Joseph Lash, who examined the medical records, there were reports of epilepsy, “but there is no other record of epilepsy in the family and the seizures … were too infrequent to fit such a diagnosis. Some doctors … have noted that Elliott’s seizures occurred when he was confronted with demands that evidently were too much for him and have suggested that they may have been … a form of escape.” Eleanor and Franklin 8. Also see Ward, Before the Trumpet 261; Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 33–35 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
18. Dollar conversion factors are based on the table prepared by Professor Robert G. Sahr of the Political Science Department at Oregon State University.
19. Shandigaff, better known as “shandy,” is one-half beer and one-half ginger beer. Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Association Collection, Widener Library, Harvard University, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 11.
20. Elliott’s account of a tiger shoot in Hyderabad and an elephant hunt in Sri Lanka was edited by Eleanor and published by Scribner’s in 1933 under the title Hunting Big Game in the Eighties.
21. New York Herald, The New York Times, December 2, 1883. David McCullough and Geoffrey Ward assert that TR was Elliott’s best man. Contemporary coverage in the Herald and Times suggests otherwise. Compare David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback 250 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981); Ward, Before the Trumpet 264.
22. In Loving Memory of Anna Hall Roosevelt, FDRL, quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 265.
23. John Sargeant Wise, Recollections of Thirteen Presidents 241–243 (New York: Doubleday, 1906).
24. The quotation is from ER, Autobiography 5. Hall’s full name was Gracie Hall Roosevelt. James King Gracie was Elliott’s uncle, having married his mother’s sister, Anna Bulloch.
25. TR’s comment is in a letter to Bamie, August 22, 1891.
26. News of the suit was featured in all New York dailies on August 17, 1891. “Wrecked by Liquor and Folly,” said the Herald. “His Brother Theodore Applies for a Writ of Lunacy,” reported the Sun.
27. Elliott’s letter was reprinted in the New York edition of the Herald, August 21, 1891.
28. TR to Bamie, January 21, 1892 (TR’s emphasis).
29. Undated letter from TR to Bamie, cited in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 447 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
30. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 65n.
31. Mrs. Sherman blamed Anna for Elliott’s demise. Blanche Wiesen Cook states the case to the contrary with uncompromising directness. “Throughout the entire period,” she writes, “Anna struggled desperately against medical advice, TR’s bullying, and what must have been her own doubts to persuade his family that Elliott was curable. She stood virtually alone in her effort to find an alternative and loving approach to Elliott’s treatment. Only when Elliott became uncontrollable and vindictive, did she agree to leave him in [Paris], and consent to TR’s suit to establish a trust that would protect her children’s financial interest. But she continued to hope for Elliott’s recovery, and to worry about his peace of mind.” Ibid. 66–67.
32. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 12–13 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937). ER omitted this passage when she republished This Is My Story in her Autobiography in 1961.
33. The New York Times, December 8, 1892.
34. Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 848–849; Ward, Before the Trumpet 278.
35. TR to Bamie, July 29, 1894; August 18, 1894.
36. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 80. For the tension between Eleanor and Anna, see pages 70–72. See also Ward, Before the Trumpet 288.
37. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, quoted in Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 151 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
38. ER, Autobiography 11–12.
39. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 95.
40. Teague, Mrs. L 154.
41. Ibid. “I had a lot of admiration for her,” Alice recalled. “But I did get bored with her type of piety.… She always wanted to discuss things like whether contentment was better than happiness and whether they conflicted with one another. Things like that I didn’t give a damn about.”
42. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds., 1 The Diary of Beatrice Webb 277 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); also see vol. 2, pp. 340–341.
Before moving to England, Mlle. Souvestre had founded Les Ruches, a girls school at Fontainebleau, in partnership with another woman. This was the school Bamie attended. After Bamie left, the two women quarreled and the school disbanded. A charged account of the breakup is in Olivia, a roman à clef of Les Ruches and Allenwood written by Dorothy Strachey Bussy in 1933 and published under a pseudonym in 1948. Dorothy Strachey Bussy had been a student with Bamie at Les Ruches and taught Eleanor English at Allenwood. In her biography of ER, Blanche Wiesen Cook discusses Olivia perceptively: “It is a very simple love story of a young, uncontrollable romance. A lesbian romance. The passions that devastated Olivia did not devastate Eleanor. But she understood the book.” 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 116–120, 515–517.
43. Quoted in Joseph Lash, Love, Eleanor 27 (New York: Doubleday, 1982). From an interview with Helen Gifford by the London Daily Mail in 1942.
44. Mlle. Souvestre to Mrs. Hall, 1899, n.d., FDRL.
45. ER, Autobiography 29–30.
46. In her memoirs, Eleanor said Auntie Tissie “was always kindness itself to me.… She was one of those people whom the word ‘exquisite’ describes best.” Ibid. 20.
47. The comment is by Eleanor’s classmate Dorothy Horn, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 84.
48. Marie Souvestre to Corinne Robinson (ER’s cousin). Corinne entered Allenwood during Eleanor’s final year. “When I arrived she was ‘everything’ at the school. She was beloved by everybody. Saturdays we were allowed to sortie into Putney which had stores where you could buy books, flowers. Young girls have crushes and you bought violets or a book and left them in the room of the girl you were idolizing. Eleanor’s room every Saturday would be full of flowers because she was so admired.” Corinne Robinson Alsop, unpublished memoir, Alsop Family Papers, Harvard University.
49. ER, Autobiography 35.
50. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 303.
51. Elliott Roosevelt, Untold Story 33.
52. “Eleanor has a very good mind,” Franklin told Sara. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 307.
53. Elliott Roosevelt, Untold Story 33.
54. ER to FDR, January 4, 1904, FDRL.
55. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 139.
56. ER’s letter is in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 135.
57. Quoted in Ward, Before the Trumpet 319. Also see Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 138.
58. ER to FDR, October 12, 1904, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 136.
59. Corinne Robinson Alsop’s unpublished journals, Alsop Family Papers, Harvard University.
60. The congratulatory letters, variously dated, are in the wedding folders, Box 20, FDRL.
61. TR to ER, December 19, 1904; TR to FDR, November 29, 1904, Box 20, FDRL.
62. TR received 7.6 million votes to Parker’s 5.1 million. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, received .4 million. Roosevelt carried every state except the Solid South, which went for Parker.
63. January 8, 1938, 1938 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 38, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1939).
64. Contrary to popular belief, TR did not mention his trademark “square deal” in his inaugural address. See instead his Labor Day speech to the New York State Fair in Syracuse, September 7, 1903, or his remarks to the veterans of the Civil War in Springfield, Illinois, July 4, 1903.
65. James Roosevelt Roosevelt, FDR’s half brother, was in Florida at the time of the wedding and unable to attend.
66. ER, Autobiography 50. The New York Times noted that Eleanor was “considerably taller than the head of the nation, suggesting to many present her beautiful mother.… She has much of that simple grace that characterized her mother.” March 18, 1905. Town Topics reported one guest to have said, “the bridegroom had been especially handsome,” to which another added, “Surprising for a Roosevelt.”
67. Teague, Mrs. L. 156.
FOUR | Albany
The epigraph is from a conversation between Ed Perkins, Democratic chairman of Dutchess County, and FDR in September 1910, preparatory to Roosevelt’s acceptance of the Democratic nomination for the State Senate. Interview with Ed Perkins, quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography112 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
1. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 201 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Donovan, who won the Distinguished Service Cross at Saint-Mihiel, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his action at Landres-et-Saint-Georges, October 14 and 15, 1918. According to the citation: “Lt. Col. Donovan personally led the assaulting wave in an attack upon a very strongly organized position, and when our troops were suffering heavy casualties he encouraged all near him by his example, moving among his men in exposed positions, reorganizing decimated platoons, and accompanying them forward in attacks. When he was wounded in the leg by machine gun bullets, he refused to be evacuated and continued with his unit until it withdrew to a less exposed position.” War Department General Order 56, 1922.
2. FDR to SDR, August 22, 1905, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 72–73, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950). I have used the current term, “civil procedure,” rather than “pleading and practice,” as it was delineated in FDR’s time. For FDR’s law school absences, see Morgan, FDR 106.
3. Interview with Professor Jackson E. Reynolds (1949), Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University. Reynolds, a lifelong Republican, was a good friend of Herbert Hoover from their undergraduate days at Stanford. He was also president of the First National Bank of New York and a committed foe of the New Deal. See Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 62n (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
4. Of the 106 men who entered Columbia Law School with FDR, only 84 remained by third year. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 76 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
5. ER to SDR, August 29, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 79.
6. Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 151 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). “You can imagine what a speech on gardening, and the raising of vegetables in general, by your son must have been like,” FDR wrote Sara. “I will say nothing more except that my appetite for those damned weeds has since that time departed.” FDR to SDR, September 7, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 81.
7. FDR to SDR, July 3, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 35–36. “We went to two churches or so—San Toy and Santa Claus, and in one of them I drew a picture of the ceiling to be copied in the addition to the Hyde Park house,” wrote Franklin.
8. FDR to SDR, July 5, 1905, ibid. 44–45.
9. In 1903, seven years after the death of her first husband, William Howard Forbes, Dora married his younger brother, Paul Forbes, who was also associated with Russell and Company in the China trade. After thirty years’ residence in Hong Kong, the Forbeses then moved to Paris, and their spacious Right Bank apartment became the headquarters for the Delano and Roosevelt families in Paris. In 1940, with France at war, Sara returned to escort Dora back to the United States. Sara’s interviews with the French press, which she conducted entirely in French, did much to cement Franco-American relations at that critical time. See Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, 1882–1905 61–62 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
10. ER to SDR, June 23, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 31. Madame Howland was the widow of Rebecca Howland Roosevelt’s brother. (Rebecca was James’s first wife.) After her husband’s death, James became one of the two trustees of Hortense Howland’s estate. When the other trustee absconded with all her funds, James drew upon his own resources to provide her with the means to continue her style of life in Paris. Ibid. Madame Howland repaid James’s consideration by sending home in Eleanor’s luggage a pair of diamond earrings for Sara said to have belonged to Marie Antoinette. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 132 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
11. FDR to SDR, August 14, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 67–68.
12. ER, This Is My Story 131. This passage was omitted by ER when she republished This Is My Story in her Autobiography.
13. FDR to SDR, June 16, 22, July 8, August 14, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 24–25, 29–30, 39, 67–68.
14. FDR to SDR, July 22, 1905, 2 Roosevelt Letters 50.
15. ER to SDR, August 1, 1905, ibid. 59. “[We] will be quite happy if the plumbing is good and the paint and papers fresh and new. If there is a telephone please don’t let it be taken out and is there a safe in the house?”
16. ER to SDR, August 8, 1905, ibid. 62. “Altogether we feel very jubilant,” wrote Eleanor, “and I am looking forward so much to getting it in order with you to help us. I am afraid my unaided efforts would not be very successful.” Later, Eleanor asked Sara whether the kitchen and basement could be whitewashed (August 13, 1905).
I have devoted more space than may be warranted to Sara’s renting the Draper house for Franklin and Eleanor because ER in her autobiography implies that she was surprised and put out by Sara’s action, which was made to appear the unilateral meddling of an overprotective mother-in-law. Eleanor’s letters from Europe suggest otherwise. Compare, Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 55 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). Also see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 197 (New York: Putnam, 1972).
17. The houses are at 47–49 East Sixty-fifth Street. Sara’s 1908 journal entry indicates that the total price for the two houses, each 17½ feet wide, was $247,345.19 (roughly $5 million currently). The two lots cost $105,284.25; construction, painting, and papering, $134,554.84; and Mr. Platt’s architect fee, $7,506.10. Except for a small $26,000 mortgage on her own house at 49 E. Sixty-fifth, Sara paid cash. SDR Journal, 1908. FDRL. Also see James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn, The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America 108 (New York: Grove Press, 2001). In 2003, the City University of New York undertook to restore the houses for the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute, at a cost of $15 million. The New York Times, March 18, 2003.
18. ER, Autobiography 61. Eleanor was not as divorced from the project as she later suggested. On August 22, 1907, she wrote Sara from Campobello, “Franklin and I have been working over the plans for lighting, bells, and telephones which [Charles A. Platt, the architect] sent us two days ago. All of the arrangements seem very good except in one or two bedrooms where I think he has made a mistake as one would want lights over dressing tables it seems to me and not in the four corners of the room.” 2 Roosevelt Letters 112.
19. For this early confrontation, I have relied on the treatment of ER’s friend and biographer Joseph P. Lash. Mr. Lash was privy to Mrs. Roosevelt’s thoughts and offers the most objective appraisal of the episode. See Eleanor and Franklin 162.
20. ER, Autobiography 61. “I pulled myself together and realized that I was acting like a little fool, but there was a good deal of truth in what I had said, for I was not developing any individual taste or initiative.”
21. ER interview with Arnold Michaelis, on the recording “A Recorded Portrait” (1958), FDRL.
22. ER, This Is My Story 162–163.
23. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 40 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
24. Horace Coon, Columbia: Colossus on the Hudson 99 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947).
25. ER, Autobiography 62.
26. Ibid. 57–60. Also see Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 178–180.
27. ER, This Is My Story 142–146.
28. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 40 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
29. John R. Boettiger, A Love in Shadow 62. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
30. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 152.
31. 157 U.S. 429 (1894). Carter’s argument to the Court made few friends among his corporate clients. Granted, the income tax would fall upon only the nation’s wealthiest 2 percent, said Carter. “But that two percent received more than fifty percent of the country’s income. The rapid concentration of wealth in the hands of the few creates an inequitable situation that Congress has the right to correct.” Carter reminded the Court that its authority was limited and it would transgress those limits if it invalidated an act of Congress simply because the justices disagreed with the economic principles involved. Five justices disagreed, and the Court overturned the tax. Carter also represented the United States before the Tribunal of Arbitration in Paris in 1893, pertaining to sealing rights on the Pribilof Islands. Once asked by Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody of Harvard why he was so successful at law, Carter replied, “I never take lunch.”
32. United States v. American Tobacco Co., 221 U.S. 106 (1911). For Ledyard’s role in 1907, see Stanley Jackson, J. P. Morgan 272–275 (New York: Stein and Day, 1983); Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier 584–589 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000).
33. Standard Oil Co. v. United States, 221 U.S. 1 (1911). Milburn and Ledyard lost back-to-back challenges to the Sherman Antitrust Act in the Supreme Court but then succeeded in reorganizing the two trusts so effectively that the government’s dissolution order was rendered nominal. Shareholders suffered no damage, competition remained minimal, and management was barely affected.
34. Grover Cleveland once said of Milburn, “He usually had a lawbook under his arm in the street and I used to wonder if he was trying to absorb the law through his armpits.” Francis M. Ellis and Edward F. Clark, Jr., A Brief History of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn 30 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Peter E. Randall, 1988).
35. Quoted in Davis, Beckoning Destiny 213.
36. Grenville Clark, “Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882–1945: Five Harvard Men Pay Tribute to His Memory,” 47 Harvard Alumni Bulletin 452 (April 28, 1945).
37. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., Farewell to Fifth Avenue 245 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1935).
38. Extemporaneous remarks at Vassar College, August 26, 1933, 1 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 338, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
39. Interview with Edward E. Perkins, quoted in Morgan, FDR 112. Geoffrey Ward suggests that the quote is most likely apocryphal, but compare Allen Churchill, The Roosevelts: American Aristocrats 209 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965); Henry Noble MacCracken, Blithe Dutchess: The Flowering of an American County from 1812 79 (New York: Hastings House, 1958).
40. FDR to L. J. Magenis, August 15, 1928; also see Campaign Expenditures Account in FDR manuscripts, FDRL.
41. Rita Halle Kleeman, Gracious Lady 252 (New York: D. Appleton–Century, 1935).
42. Sara Delano Roosevelt Journal, FDRL.
43. Quoted in Kleeman, Gracious Lady 252–253.
44. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 185.
45. ER, Autobiography 63.
46. TR to Bamie (Mrs. Anna Roosevelt Cowles), August 10, 1910, in Theodore Roosevelt, Letters from Theodore Roosevelt to Anna Roosevelt Cowles 289 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1924). As they grew older, Franklin and TR had what amounted to a two-man mutual admiration society. “I’m so fond of that boy, I’d be shot for him,” Theodore told Sara shortly before his death. Quoted in Kleeman, Gracious Lady 204.
47. In 1884, when Grover Cleveland headed the Democratic ticket, Thomas Jefferson Newbold, a Roosevelt neighbor in Hyde Park, slipped through in a freakish three-man race.
48. Poughkeepsie Eagle, October 7, 1910.
49. 1 Public Papers and Addresses 339.
50. Reminiscences of Harry Hawkey, in Clara L. Dawson to Eleanor Roosevelt, December 13, 1937, FDRL. Also see Morgan H. Hoyt, “Roosevelt Enters Politics,” 1 F.D.R. Collector 3–9 (May 1949).
51. Interview with Thomas Leonard, conducted by George Palmer and Fred Rath, National Park Service, FDRL. Leonard was the third member (with Perkins and Judge Mack) of the Dutchess County Democratic Executive Committee and remained a friend of FDR throughout the president’s life. Tom Leonard always accompanied FDR to the poll in Hyde Park on election day and in 1944 accompanied him there for the last time. Roosevelt had trouble closing the curtain and said, “Tom, the Goddamned thing won’t work.” Time magazine reported the comment, triggering an avalanche of protests from the nation’s clergymen. When asked about the remark, FDR said he had been misquoted. Presidential press conference, November 21, 1944.
52. Interview with Judge John Mack, National Park Service, FDRL.
53. The New York Times, September 5, 1932.
54. Judge John Mack interview, FDRL.
55. Speech at Hudson, N.Y., October 27, 1910, speech file, FDRL.
56. FDR to John Anthony, June 11, 1911, FDRL.
57. Poughkeepsie News-Press, October 22, 1910.
58. Ibid., October 27, 1910.
59. Quoted in Freidel, Apprenticeship 93.
60. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 22 (New York: Knopf, 1962).
61. Poughkeepsie Eagle, October 28, 1910.
62. FDR to L. J. Magenis, August 15, 1928; Ward, First-Class Temperament 120.
63. FDR, address at Hyde Park, November 5, 1910, speech file, FDRL.
64. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 186.
65. Ward, First-Class Temperament 4.
66. Quoted in Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 78 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
67. ER, Autobiography 64.
68. ER to Isabella Ferguson, November 26, 1910, quoted in Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 525.
69. FDR’s comment is in a diary he began keeping January 1, 1911. Referring to their New York City town house, Franklin said “it is a comfort to have only three stories instead of six.” Sara’s comment is quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 170.
70. FDR diary, January 1, 1911, FDRL.
71. Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior, Alfred E. Smith: A Study of a Public Servant 4 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).
72. Quoted in Lindley, Roosevelt 82–83.
73. New York Herald, January 18, 1911.
74. The New York Times, January 18, 1911.
75. New York Post, January 17, 1911.
76. New York American, January 18, 1911.
77. The New York World, January 17, 1911.
78. New York Globe, February 6, 1911.
79. Edmund R. Terry, “The Insurgents at Albany,” 71 The Independent 538 (September 7, 1911).
80. The New York Times, January 22, 1911.
81. ER, Autobiography 66.
82. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 173.
83. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 189.
84. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 85.
85. Ibid. 97.
86. Saratoga Sun, April 1, 1911.
87. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 150–151.
88. FDR to H. W. Lunger, January 30, 1928.
89. Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 30, 1911.
90. Raleigh News & Observer, April 1, 1911.
91. TR to FDR, January 29, 1911. “I am delighted with your action and told Woodrow Wilson today how he and you are serving the nation,” William Grosvenor, a prominent clergyman, wrote FDR. Quoted in Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 75.
92. The New York World, January 26, 1911.
93. Quoted in Jon Margolis, “The Boss Who Out-Daleys Daley,” Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1976.
94. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story: The Roosevelt Years 68 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948). Said Farley, “Never was I invited to spend a night in the [White House]. Only twice did I ever make a cruise on the presidential yacht. Both were political. Never was I invited to join informal White House gatherings.”
95. Quoted in Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 101.
96. The New York Times, December 25, 1911. The remarks are those of Senate clerk Patrick E. McCabe, who fired both barrels at FDR: “Disloyalty and party treachery is the political cult of a few snobs in our party … who are political accidents [and] who come as near being political leaders as a green pea does to a circus tent.”
FIVE | Awakening
The epigraph is a remark FDR made to Frances Perkins while he was president. Quoted in Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 12 (New York: Viking, 1946).
1. For Smith on FDR, see Matthew and Hannah Josephson, Al Smith: Hero of the Cities 95 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). Wagner’s remarks were made while presiding over the senate as president pro tem, June 1, 1911. New York Globe, June 2, 1911. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 118–119 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952); Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 11–12.
2. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 11–12. Miss Perkins writes with great affection for the self-made men of Tammany. “The warm, human sympathies of these people, less than perfect as I examine their record, gave me insight into a whole stratum of American society I had not known. In contrast with these roughnecks, I don’t hesitate to say now, Franklin Roosevelt seemed just an ordinary, respectable, intelligent young man.… I was not much impressed by him.”
3. New York Tribune, March 26, 27; April 6, 1911. For a vivid depiction of the inferno, see David Von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire That Changed America 116–170 (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). On March 25, 2003, the building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist factory (the Asch Building) was designated an official city landmark by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The New York Times, March 26, 2003.
4. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 31. Von Drehle, Triangle 207–208. The quote also appears in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 263 (New York: Putnam, 1972).
5. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 127 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); also Geoffrey Ward, A First-Class Temperament 165 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
6. Von Drehle, Triangle 216–217; Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 14. “I seen my sister go out to work when she was fifteen,” said Sullivan, “and I know we ought to help these gals by giving ’em a law which will prevent ’em from being broken down while they are still young.”
7. Elizabeth Dutcher, “Frances Perkins, Doctor of Politics,” Women Voter 12–13 (September 1912). The fifty-four-hour bill was reluctantly signed into law by Governor Dix on April 19, 1912. “I don’t think it is a good idea,” said Dix. “I think it will put women out of work. I think they’ll hire men instead. I think women will lose their jobs. Anyhow, it’s not good for them not to be fully occupied.” Quoted in Morgan, FDR 131.
8. Frances Perkins Interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University; Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 14.
9. Quoted in Morgan, FDR 129.
10. Presidential press conference, August 26, 1938.
11. Louis Howe, “The Winner,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 25, 1933. The fact is, it was The MacManus who held the floor until the Sullivans arrived. Von Drehle, Triangle 217.
12. FDR to Anna G. W. Dayley, February 1, 1911, FDRL.
13. FDR to Frances G. Barlow, May 24, 1911, FDRL.
14. Linda J. Lumsden, Inez: The Life and Times of Inez Milholland 75 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). “No suffrage parade was complete without Inez Milholland,” wrote the New York Sun, “for with her tall figure and free step, her rich brown hair, blue eyes, fair skin and well cut features, she was an ideal figure of the American woman.” November 6, 1916. Also see Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 195 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992); Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 173 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
15. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 68 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
16. “An Advocate of Christian Patriotism,” American Issue (March 1913).
17. [Ray Thomas Tucker], The Mirrors of 1932 85 (New York: Brewer, Warren, Putnam, 1931).
18. FDR to Dexter Blagden, February 21, 1912, FDRL.
19. Poughkeepsie News-Press, March 5, 1912 (emphasis added).
20. Freidel, Apprenticeship 134–135.
21. Wilson’s Ph.D. dissertation on the American system of government is considered a classic and is now in its fifteenth edition as Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002).
22. FDR to Ray Stannard Baker, 3 The Roosevelt Letters 467, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
23. Freidel, Apprenticeship 134–139. Wilson had attracted Wall Street’s attention while president of Princeton with a series of conservative pronouncements attacking Bryan, who he once suggested should be “knocked into a cocked hat.” Led by Colonel George Harvey, an associate of J. P. Morgan, Wall Street had bankrolled Wilson’s gubernatorial campaign as a preliminary to running him for president.
24. Champ Clark, like Wilson, was a former college president, having headed Marshall College, now Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia, before entering politics in Missouri.
25. The Orange County delegation nominated FDR as an alternate but was pressured by the Murphy forces and “concluded to get out from under and withdraw your name.” J. J. Bippus to FDR, April 12, 1912, FDRL.
26. FDR to O’Gorman, June 10, 1912; O’Gorman to FDR, June 15, 1912. FDRL. See especially Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 102–104 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
27. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace, 1910–1917 125 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
28. Thomas R. Marshall, a dry-as-dust midwestern politico, is best remembered for his observation “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar!” Quoted in Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People 882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).
29. 2 Roosevelt Letters 192.
30. FDR’s speech is in the papers of the Empire State Democracy, July–August 1912, FDRL.
31. Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt 556 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931); William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, rev. ed. 404–409, 419–420 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). Also see TR to Herbert Spencer Hadley, February 29, 1912, in 7 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt 513, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
32. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 187.
33. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, observation is in The Vital Center 23–24 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949). For the Armageddon and Bull Moose quotes, see Harbaugh, Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt 405–406, 419–420.
34. On November 6, 1912, the day after his election victory, Wilson told his campaign manager that he owed him nothing. “Whether you did little or much, remember that God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented that!” William E. McCombs, Making Woodrow Wilson President 208 (New York: Fairview Publishing Company, 1921).
35. The New York Times, September 30, 1912.
36. 1 Diary of Edward M. House 1 (September 25, 1912), Yale University Library. One of the best analyses of the New York convention and its impact on the Wilson campaign is in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House 494–497 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947).
37. Shortly after he took office, Sulzer refused Murphy’s request to appoint Big Jim Gaffney of the New York Contracting and Trucking Company as state highway commissioner. “It will be Gaffney or war,” said Murphy. Sulzer again refused, and Murphy pulled the plug. None of Sulzer’s legislative program made it out of committee. On May 20, 1913, Murphy upped the ante and told Smith and Wagner that Sulzer would have to be impeached. Smith found the votes in the Assembly, and the articles of impeachment passed, August 13, 1913. Wagner followed through on October 17, and Sulzer was removed from office by a Senate vote of 43–12, the only time a New York governor has been impeached. Characteristically, Murphy made no public comment. Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York 252–255 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). Also see M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall 529–555 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
38. New York Evening Post, October 3, 1912.
39. The New York Times, August 25, 1912.
40. Thomas Mott Osborne to Thomas Ewing, Jr., October 17, 1912, Osborne Papers, Auburn, New York.
41. Rudolph W. Chamberlain, There Is No Truce: A Life of Thomas Mott Osborne 182–184 (New York: Macmillan, 1935).
42. Freidel, Apprenticeship 146–147.
43. ER, Autobiography 69–70.
44. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 56 (New York: Knopf, 1962).
45. Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 340 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
46. Howe to FDR, undated (circa August 1, 1912), FDRL.
47. Quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order 314.
48. Freidel, Apprenticeship 151.
49. Howe to FDR, October 1912, FDRL.
50. ER, Autobiography 70–71.
51. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 60.
52. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 197n.
53. Quoted in Davis, FDR: Beckoning of Destiny 296.
54. ER, Autobiography 71.
55. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 198.
56. When the votes were tabulated, FDR had 15,590 (virtually identical to the 15,708 he had received in 1910). His Republican opponent, Jacob Southard, a Poughkeepsie banker and utility owner, had 13,889, and George A. Vossler, the Progressive candidate, 2,628. The New York Red Book677 (Albany: New York State, 1913).
57. In addition to 291 Democrats and 127 Republicans, the House of Representatives contained 17 Independents, Progressives, and Socialists. Guide to U.S. Elections 928.
58. Walker to FDR, November 7, 1912.
59. FDR to ER, January 1913, Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, FDRL. In addition to Agriculture and Forest, Fish, and Game, Roosevelt was placed on the standing committees on Codes; Railroads; and Military Affairs.
60. FDR to Joseph Tumulty, January 13, 1913, FDRL.
61. Eleanor Roosevelt, interview with Frank Freidel, May 1, 1948, cited in Freidel, Apprenticeship 154–155.
62. Garrison summarized his view of his duties in a revealing letter to a friend in 1915: “I have made it a rule ever since I have been in the Department, not to interfere in any way with the ordinary disposition, location of duty, etc., of the officers of the Army. Whenever the commanding officer needs service to be done in a certain place, he, as a matter of routine, selects the proper command to perform the duty, and I of course would know nothing whatever about such matters.” Garrison to Ollie M. James, November 17, 1915, Lindley M. Garrison Papers, Princeton University Library.
63. Baker led the unsuccessful fight by Wilson delegates against the unit rule, and his mention of Wilson set off a thirty-minute demonstration when the convention began. See Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Crowded Hours 206–207 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933).
64. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom 117 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956).
65. The banquet for Wilson was hosted by eight hundred Princeton alumni. “There are some emotions that are much deeper than a man’s vocabulary can reach, and I have a feeling tonight that moves me very much indeed,” said Wilson, more choked up than was his wont. Ibid. 57.
66. Daniels, Wilson Era 124. “It is singular that I never thought of any other man in that connection,” Daniels noted in his diary on March 15, 1913.
67. Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, 1913–1921 10, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).
68. TR to FDR, March 18, 1913, FDRL. “When I see Eleanor,” the former president continued, “I shall say to her that I do hope she will be particularly nice to the naval officers wives. They have a pretty hard time, with very little money to get along on, and yet a position to keep up, and everything that can properly be done to make things pleasant for them should be done.”
69. New York Herald, March 10, 1913.
70. Daniels, Cabinet Diaries 4; Wilson Era 124–129.
71. Wagner’s satisfaction at FDR’s departure from Albany was attested by his son, Robert F. Wagner, Jr., in an ABC documentary, “FDR and His Times.” Additional evidence suggests that Charles Murphy did his utmost to ensure that FDR joined the Wilson administration in Washington. Some in the Navy Department thought that it was Murphy who actually engineered Roosevelt’s appointment. Admiral Frederic Harris, interview with Frank Freidel, Freidel Papers, FDRL.
SIX | Anchors Aweigh
The epigraph is from Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 20 (New York: Viking Press, 1946), discussing FDR’s formative years in Washington.
1. Wilson was a terrible golfer. He almost never broke 100 and sometimes needed fifteen putts to finish a hole. But he played relentlessly. Don Van Natta estimates that Wilson played as many as 1,600 rounds while president, roughly twice as many as Dwight D. Eisenhower. Golf, said Wilson, was “the perfect diversion” from the pressures of the Oval Office. Don Van Natta, Jr., First off the Tee 135–151 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
Bryan announced the no-alcohol policy at an April 21, 1913, farewell dinner he hosted for Lord Bryce, who was retiring as British ambassador. Bryan told the guests that when Wilson asked him to be secretary of state, he had asked whether that would necessitate serving liquor and had been told to use his own judgment. “We have always been teetotalers,” said Bryan, and “could not depart from this custom without contradicting our past.” William Jennings Bryan and Mary Baird, The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan 351 (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1925).
2. The term “New Freedom” derives from a collection of Wilson’s campaign speeches, arranged and edited by William Bayard Hale and published by Doubleday in early 1913. In retrospect, writers rarely distinguish between TR’s New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and lump the two together as manifestations of the progressive wave that swept the country in the early twentieth century. In fact, the election of 1912 turned on the difference. Both movements sought to benefit the common man, but each reflected a different stream of thought. Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism embraced the Hamiltonian tradition of a strong central government, dominated by executive power, that intervened vigorously in the economy on behalf of the many. Taken literally, it exhorted voters to put national needs ahead of sectional or individual advantage. Wilson’s New Freedom, by contrast, hewed more closely to Jeffersonian states’ rights, minimized the role of the federal government, and sought to achieve prosperity purely through regulation of the market place. It stressed individual liberty rather than collective action. Once in office, Wilson gradually accepted a greater role for the national government than he had originally espoused. FDR’s New Deal was much closer to TR’s New Nationalism than to Wilson’s New Freedom. See Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom 242–243 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), and the sources cited therein.
3. Josephus Daniels dates the decision to segregate the federal government to a cabinet meeting on April 11, 1913. According to Daniels, Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson, a former Texas congressman who helped swing the Lone Star State behind Wilson at Baltimore, raised the issue, complaining of the distaste white mail clerks felt at working with blacks: “It is very unpleasant for them to work in a [railway mail] car with Negroes where it is almost impossible to have different drinking vessels and different towels, or places to wash and he was anxious to segregate white and Negro employees in all Departments of the Government. The President said he made no promises in particular to Negroes, except to do them justice, and he wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.” No member of the cabinet objected, then or later. With Wilson’s approval, cabinet officers immediately began to segregate their departments, though no formal executive order was ever issued. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels32–33, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). Also see Kathleen Wolgemuth, “Woodrow Wilson and Federal Segregation,” Journal of Negro History 158–173 (April 1959); Nancy J. Weiss, “The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,” Political Science Quarterly 61–79 (March 1968).
4. W. E. B. DuBois, “An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” The Crisis, September, 1913. Booker T. Washington, who had not supported Wilson, expressed a similar sentiment to the journalist Oswald Garrison Villard on August 10, 1913: “I have recently spent several days in Washington, and I have never seen colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.” For Washington’s view of the 1912 election, see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 353–355 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). When Washington attended Wilson’s 1901 inauguration as president of Princeton, he was the only honored invitee who was not accommodated in a faculty house.
5. Josephus Daniels, who ran Wilson’s publicity organization in the South during the campaign, made the party’s position crystal clear in an editorial in his Raleigh News & Observer a month before the election. The South, he said, was solidly Democratic because of “the realization that the subjugation of the negro, politically, and the separation of the negro, socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself. And we shall recognize no emancipation, nor shall we proclaim any deliverer, that falls short of these essentials to the peace and welfare of our part of the country.” Raleigh News & Observer, October 1, 1912.
6. The newly empowered Southern Democrats demanded that Washington’s streetcars be segregated, that Congress enact a miscegenation statute for the District of Columbia, and that all black appointees be dismissed, especially those in a position “to boss white girls.” As the newly appointed collector of internal revenue in Atlanta asserted, “There is no Government position for negroes in the South. A negro’s place is in the cornfield.” Atlanta Georgian and News, October 7, 1913.
7. FDR to ER, March 17, 1913, FDRL. Eleanor wired to congratulate Franklin. “I ordered your 17th of March present as we couldn’t do anything else together.” FDRL.
8. The State, War, and Navy Building, now refurbished as the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, is the finest remaining example of what architectural historians call “General Grant style,” a reference to the monumental federal buildings constructed during Grant’s presidency, most of which were designed by Alfred B. Mullett. For an assessment, see Elsa M. Santoyo, ed., Creating an American Masterpiece: Architectural Drawings of the Old Executive Office Building, 1871–1888 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Office of the President, 1988); Donald H. Lehman, Executive Office Building (Washington, D.C.: General Services Administration, 1964). For an iconoclastic view, see Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation 9 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Mr. Acheson’s criticism stems from his service as assistant secretary of state under FDR in the 1940s.
9. FDR and Daniels posed for a picture on that balcony shortly after they took office (see illustrations). FDR was caught smiling broadly, and Daniels noted his expression. “We were both looking on the White House,” said the secretary, “and you are saying to yourself, being a New Yorker, ‘some day I will be living in that house’—while I, being from the South, know I must be satisfied with no such ambition.” Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace, 1910–1917 129 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
10. FDR to SDR, March 17, 1913; SDR to FDR, March 18, 1913, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 170–171, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap. 1950).
11. Navy Department, Ships’ Data: U.S. Naval Vessels 6–14 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914); Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 711, 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965). To convert 1913 dollars, multiply by 18. Thus, $144 million would equal $2.592 billion in 2006.
12. 19 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed. 310–311 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1911). The United States’s first two modern battleships, the Nevada and Oklahoma, were laid down at the end of TR’s presidency but were not launched until 1914 and not commissioned until 1916. They and their sister ships Pennsylvania and Arizona, obsolescent but serviceable, continued on active service until Pearl Harbor in 1941. The Arizona and Oklahoma were sunk, the Nevada was run aground, and the Pennsylvania, in dry dock, was heavily damaged. Edward L. Beach, The United States Navy: 200 Years 429–430 (New York: Henry Holt, 1986).
13. Testifying before the Select Committee on the Budget of the House of Representatives in 1919, FDR said, “We feel that the present bureau system concentrates too much dog-in-the-manger policy on the part of each bureau as against every other bureau, that they are not all working sufficiently for the common end of the Navy Department, and that they are working too much for the particular good of their own particular bureau.” Transcript, October 1, 1919, FDRL.
14. Daniels steadfastly resisted all efforts to make the bureaus responsible to the chief of naval operations, believing that would “Prussianize” the Navy. As Daniels saw it, such a reorganization would make the secretary of the Navy a figurehead sitting on top of the Washington Monument without a telephone. “I would be ashamed to draw the salary, and I would go home,” said Daniels. FDR did not share Daniels’s view. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 241–243.
15. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 606 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
16. Transcript, October 1, 1919, House of Representatives Select Committee on the Budget, FDRL. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR preempted traditional congressional support for the bureaus with a masterly two-step maneuver. On December 20, 1941, he appointed Admiral Ernest J. King to the newly established post of commander in chief, U.S. Fleet (COMINCH), and placed the bureaus under him (Executive Order 8984). In March 1942, Roosevelt named King to be chief of naval operations (CNO) as well, in effect combining the two posts (Executive Order 9096). That gave King command of the entire Navy, similar to the authority General Marshall exercised as Army chief of staff. It was wartime, and no one on Capitol Hill questioned the president’s decision. And in the Navy no one dared question King—a hard-drinking, self-styled sonofabitch who gave no quarter. For King’s discussion of the transition, see Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record 349–359 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952).
17. Paragraph 2 (1) of section 415 of the Revised Statutes of the United States provided that there be “an Assistant Secretary of the Navy … and he will perform such duties as may be prescribed by the Secretary.”
18. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 253 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).
19. As acting secretary of the Navy on February 25, 1898, TR cabled Dewey:
ORDER THE SQUADRON, EXCEPT THE MONOCACY, TO HONG KONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION OF WAR SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. KEEP OLYMPIA UNTIL FURTHER ORDERS.
ROOSEVELT
20. New York Sun, March 19, 1913. Beginning with TR, five Roosevelts (Theodore, 1897–1898; Franklin, 1913–1920; TR, Jr., 1921–1924; Theodore Douglas Robinson [son of Corinne Roosevelt, TR’s sister], 1924–1929; Henry L., 1933–1936) have served as assistant secretary of the Navy. TR’s birthday, January 27, was officially celebrated as Navy Day from 1922 until the unification of the services in 1949.
21. “He was young then and made some mistakes,” Daniels wrote many years later. “Upon reflection, although I was older, I made mistakes too.” Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 129.
22. On November 9, 1932, Daniels, who had always written to FDR as “Dear Franklin,” posted a letter to the president-elect with the salutation “My dear Chief.” Roosevelt would not hear of it. “My dear Chief,” he replied. “That title still stands! And I am still Franklin to you.” And so it continued until Daniels’s death. Quoted in Joseph L. Morrison, Josephus Daniels: The Small-d Democrat 167 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966). The extensive twenty-two-year correspondence between FDR and Daniels was collected and edited by Carroll Kilpatrick and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1952 under the title Roosevelt and Daniels: A Friendship in Politics.
23. Rex Tugwell, an early brain truster, remembers the deference FDR exhibited toward Daniels on the train carrying the president-elect’s party from Albany to Washington for the inauguration in 1933. “Rex, this is the man who taught me a lot that I needed to know,” said Roosevelt as he introduced Daniels to Tugwell. Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt 105 (New York: Doubleday, 1957). For Daniels’s contribution as ambassador to Mexico, see E. David Cronon, Josephus Daniels in Mexico (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960).
24. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 124.
25. When FDR first met Daniels at the 1912 Baltimore convention, he thought he was the “funniest looking hillbilly I ever saw.” William D. Hassett, “The President Was My Boss,” The Saturday Evening Post 38–39 (October 31, 1953).
26. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 117 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
27. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 290–292. Also see Brian Johnson, Fly Navy: The History of Maritime Aviation 25 (London: David & Charles, 1981).
28. TR to California governor Hiram Johnson, November 16, 1914. This was TR’s famous “speak softly and carry a big stick” letter in which he said, among other things, that Bryan and Daniels were “the two most wretched creatures we have ever seen at the head of those great departments [State and Navy].” 8 The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt 846, Elting E. Morison, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954).
29. Daniels shared the racism of the Wilson administration; the enlisted men he was concerned about were white. Shortly after assuming office, he wrote that there was no discrimination in the Navy: “All Negroes are messmen.” Later he expressed surprise to Eleanor that the Roosevelts employed white servants and suggested they be replaced by blacks. Daniels’s views changed over the years, and by the time the New Deal came to power he and Eleanor stood shoulder to shoulder in the struggle for black equality. Daniels to J. J. Adkins, May 27, 1913, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress; Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence 79–80 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954). Also see Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 204 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
30. Stimson’s reference is to Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914), whose book The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 became the Bible for advocates of naval expansion. Quoted in Beach, United States Navy 421.
31. “I soon observed as I voyaged on the Navy ships,” Daniels wrote, “that sailors and marines had spare time that was not employed. I also learned that many of them were lacking in elementary education. Some did not even have knowledge of the three R’s.… I determined to strengthen the Navy as an educational institution with schools on every ship.… Opposition did not deter me, and I issued instructions that schools should be open to every enlisted man and marine, that attendance should be compulsory, and that young officers should do the teaching (General Order 53, issued October 1, 1913). I followed it up with detailed instructions [General Order 63, December 16, 1913] and a magazine article entitled: ‘The Navy’s Universities Afloat.’ ” Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 253–254.
32. The rum ration for sailors was abolished under Andrew Jackson, and in 1899 John D. Long, McKinley’s secretary of the Navy, prohibited the sale or issue of all alcoholic beverages to enlisted men. In the first years of the twentieth century, prohibitionist sentiment was such that battleships named for dry states (e.g., Mississippi) were christened with lemonade rather than champagne.
33. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 148 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). I was unable to find the text of Daniels’s condom order in the archives of the Navy Department but did locate an October 10, 1917, letter from Raymond A. Fosdick, chairman of the Navy’s civilian advisory panel, to Daniels in which Fosdick referred to the secretary’s order banning the distribution of “Individual Prophylactic Packets.” Fosdick complained that Commander Berryhill, chief medical officer at the Mare Island Naval Station in California, was critical of Daniels’s order. Berryhill, said Fosdick, believed “men were animals and needed sexual activities, and the only sensible way was to have a red light district with the women examined periodically.” Fosdick recommended that Berryhill be transferred, and Daniels complied the following week. Daniels to Fosdick, October 17, 1917. Both letters in the Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
34. FDR to Louis Howe, April 9, 1914, Howe Personal Papers, quoted in Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 118 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962). Many years later, FDR could not resist taking credit for the order. “The Chief took the blame, but he didn’t formulate the order at all,” Roosevelt told press secretary William Hassett. “I did it.” If FDR did formulate the order, the evidence is elusive. Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence 129 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954).
35. The sobriquet derives from a Tillman speech in 1896 in which he proposed to stick a pitchfork in the broad posterior of Grover Cleveland. Daniels accumulated a unique record as secretary of the Navy: during his eight-year tenure, Congress approved every request he made except for the large construction program he submitted after the armistice in 1918. Paolo E. Coletta, “Josephus Daniels,” in Coletta (ed.), 2 American Secretaries of the Navy 530 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
36. Wilson and Daniels remained close throughout their eight years in Washington. Professor Arthur Link, Wilson’s principal biographer, attributes it to the fact that “Daniels was willing to give friendship on Wilson’s terms. There was nothing calculated about the North Carolinian’s devotion and loyalty; he simply loved the President and supported him without question. Wilson returned Daniels’s love and trust with an affection equally warm … and the more Daniels’s critics raged, the stronger Wilson’s affections grew.” Wilson: The New Freedom 125.
37. In 1923 the Supreme Court upheld the California statute, holding that the right of Japanese aliens to own land was not secured by treaty. Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923). But twenty-five years later, in Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948), the Court found the law in conflict with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a view subsequently adopted by the California Supreme Court in Sei Fujii v. State, 242 P. 2d 617 (1952).
38. The New York Times, May 16, 1913; The New York World, May 16, 1913.
39. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 163–167. Also see Daniels, Cabinet Diaries 48–68; Link, Wilson: New Freedom 289–304. FDR supported Daniels vigorously. There was “no Japanese scare,” he told the press, since “Japan doesn’t want war and neither does this country. It is a California question purely.” But Roosevelt was always his own best revisionist. Writing to Admiral Mahan a year later (June 16, 1914), he said, “I did all in my power to have the ships return nearer their base.… Orders were sent against my protest to Admiral Nicholson, telling him not to move out of the Yangtze River.” Watertown (Mass.) Standard, May 29, 1913; FDR to Mahan, FDRL.
40. Daniels was not content with simply driving the price down. The Navy, he thought, should have its own plant for making armor plate, and in 1914 he cajoled Congress into passing authorizing legislation. The general board of the Navy recommended that for security reasons the plant be located at least 100 miles inland, and Daniels selected Charleston, West Virginia, for the site. The plant was begun in 1917 but not completed in time to produce armor plate for the war. After the war it produced shells for the Navy, but the Harding administration chose not to complete the armor plate facilities. “Monopoly won when it put Harding in the White House,” said Daniels. Wilson Era: Years of Peace 355–363.
41. Roosevelt paid approximately $2,000 annually in club dues, roughly 40 percent of his $5,000 salary as assistant secretary. His checkbook stubs are among his personal papers at the FDRL.
42. Henry B. Wilson to FDR, July 7, 1913.
43. William F. Halsey and J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story 18 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947).
44. Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 205 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
45. ER to FDR, July 1913, FDRL.
46. FDR to Charles A. Munn, March 26, 1913, FDRL.
47. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 24 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
48. Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 352 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
49. Quoted in Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 88–89 (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
50. Camp to FDR, July 25, 1917, FDRL.
51. In 1912 Longworth became the victim of his father-in-law’s presidential candidacy and lost a three-way race for his congressional seat in Cincinnati by 101 votes. Longworth, running as a Republican, received 22,229 votes; Stanley Bowdle, his Democratic opponent, received 22,330; and Millard Andrew, the Progressive candidate, 5,771. In 1914 Longworth defeated Bowdle 29,822 to 24,054, essentially the margin Andrew had siphoned off in 1912. Longworth was elected House majority leader in 1923, and became Speaker on December 7, 1925, a post he held until just before his death in 1931.
52. FDR to ER, July 14, 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 192–193.
53. Don Van Natta, Jr., First Off the Tee 101–111. FDR loved golf and regularly shot in the low eighties. He had been taught the game by his father at Campobello and in 1904 won the island championship. After he was paralyzed FDR no longer played, but he did design a special nine-hole course for polio victims at Warm Springs, Georgia—the only president to design a golf course. Not surprisingly, Roosevelt did more than any president to democratize the game. During his administration, the WPA built more than 250 municipal golf courses, making golf accessible to hundreds of thousands of new players. As Eleanor said, golf was “the game that he enjoyed above all others.”
54. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 71–72 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959). James reports that he often caddied for his father at Chevy Chase for twenty-five cents a week but that the bigger benefit was that “I, too, got to skip church occasionally in favor of the golf course.”
55. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 210.
56. The house at 1733 N Street was demolished in the 1950s to make way for the Canterbury Apartments, which were subsequently converted to the Topaz Hotel. The R Street house, still in good repair but painted white, is now the residence of the ambassador from Mali.
57. FDR’s federal tax returns are filed among his personal papers at Hyde Park. His 1915 return, typical for the period, shows a gross income of $22,845, of which $9,256 came from dividends (untaxed) and $4,177 from interest. The New York town house was valued conservatively at $84,150 ($1.5 million in today’s dollars), which he depreciated at 1% annually. State and local taxes totaled $257.92.
58. FDR to Howe, March 19, 1913, FDRL.
59. Howe to FDR, March 23, 1913, FDRL.
60. Elliott Roosevelt, Untold Story 22.
61. Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe 42 (Cleveland: World, 1954).
62. Kenneth C. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 311 (New York: Putnam, 1971).
63. ER, interview with Louis Eisner, FDRL. Also see ER’s “Foreward” in Stiles, Man Behind Roosevelt vii.
64. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 84 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
65. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 128.
66. FDR to Howe, n.d., Howe Personal Papers.
67. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 12.
68. Quoted in Davis, FDR: Beckoning of Destiny 313.
69. Stiles, Man Behind Roosevelt 49, 40.
70. The Washington Post, April 30, 1913.
71. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 234.
72. Speaking in Butte, Montana, August 18, 1920, FDR, running for vice president, claimed credit for the Navy’s exemplary labor relations. The only exception was at the Norfolk Navy Yard, where there was ongoing friction, attributable mainly to dangerous and unsanitary working conditions. See Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 203 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
73. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 234.
74. Lodge to FDR, August 1, 1913; FDR to Lodge, August 2, September 15, 1913. Afterward, Lodge’s son-in-law, Representative Augustus P. Gardner, wrote that Lodge thought FDR “the promptest and most efficient Assistant Secretary in any Department with whom we have dealt.” Gardner to FDR, June 25, 1913, FDRL.
75. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 20.
76. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 115–116; Freidel, Apprenticeship 237–238n.
77. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 179.
78. For the text of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States promulgated at Montevideo, see Charles I. Bevans, ed., 3 Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States, 1776–1949 145 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969). [TIAS.]
79. The Platt Amendment, named for Connecticut senator Orville H. Platt, gave ultimate control of Cuba’s finances and foreign relations to the United States, permitted the U.S. to intervene to maintain law and order, and provided for a long-term lease for a naval station on Guantánamo Bay. It was added as an appendix to the Cuban constitution and became part of the May 22, 1903, treaty between the United States and Cuba. [6 TIAS 1116.]
SEVEN | War
The epigraph appears in a letter written by FDR to Eleanor on Sunday, August 2, 1914. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 199, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
1. New York Sun, December 10, 1913. Inspired by Howe, the Sun suggested that if Governor Glynn did not establish his independence from Tammany, the Wilson administration would throw its support behind Roosevelt. As with many of Howe’s planted stories, the article was moonshine. Also see New York Post, January 15, 1914; New York Herald, February 10, 1914; New York Times, February 10, 1914.
2. FDR to WW (handwritten), circa March 31, 1914, Wilson Papers, Library of Congress. The message was handed to Wilson by Secretary Daniels after Cabinet on the thirty-first.
3. Wilson to FDR, April 1, 1914. Wilson Papers.
4. George Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement 300–301 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1946). FDR had ingratiated himself with TR earlier by announcing he would not seek the Democratic nomination if Theodore ran for governor on the Progressive ticket. “Blood is thicker than water,” FDR told the press. TR was apparently unmoved and did not reciprocate. Quoted in Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 301 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
5. The New York Times, July 23, 1914.
6. Ibid., July 24, 1914.
7. FDR to ER, July 19, 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 192.
8. The New York Times, July 24, 1914.
9. Philip C. Jessup, 2 Elihu Root 238–242 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1938). Also see The New York Times, May 20, 1914.
10. FDR to ER, July 19, 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 192.
11. The archduke was in Sarajevo in conjunction with the annual summer maneuvers of the Austro-Hungarian Army, which in 1914 were conducted nearby. His party of six open-top vehicles (Franz Ferdinand and his wife rode in the third car) was returning from a reception at City Hall when the column slowed to make a difficult right-angle turn. The car in which the archduke was riding came to an almost complete stop in front of Princip, who stepped from the crowd, approached the vehicle, and fired two shots at point-blank range from a large-caliber military pistol. The first bullet struck the duchess in the abdomen; the second hit the archduke near the heart. Both died instantly. Princip and his collaborators were tried in open court and convicted. Because of his youth, Princip avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment. He died of tuberculosis in prison at Theresienstadt on April 28, 1918. Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo 285–323 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966). For Serbian complicity, see Sidney B. Fay’s magisterial The Origins of the World War, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillian, 1930), particularly volume 2, pages 53–166.
12. Bismarck’s quote, often cited, was repeated by Albert Ballin to Winston Churchill in July 1914, when Ballin was sent by William II to London in an effort to persuade Britain to remain neutral. Winston Churchill, 1 The World Crisis 112 (New York: Scribner, 1928).
13. David Fromkin, Europe’s Last War: Who Started the Great War in 1914? 307–316 (New York: Knopf, 2004). For the text of Austria’s ultimatum and Serbia’s reply, see the World War I documentary Web site maintained by Brigham Young University at www.lib.byu.edu.
14. Russia commenced hostilities with 114 divisions, roughly 2.4 million men, and soon built up to a peak strength of 6 million. Germany called 2 million men to the colors, and by the end of the first week in August fielded 87 divisions of 18,000 men each. Three quarters of these were in the West, one quarter in the East. Between August 2 and 18, France placed 3.8 million men under military orders, two thirds of whom were reservists. Austria initially mobilized 500,000 men and would eventually muster 2.7 million. S.L.A. Marshall, The American Heritage History of World War I 35–36 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964).
15. Princess Evelyn Blücher, An English Wife in Berlin 137 (London: Constable, 1920).
16. Viscount Edward Grey of Falloden, 2 Twenty-Five Years 20 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925).
17. Frederich E. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, 1 Points of View 22 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922).
18. FDR to ER, August 1, 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 195.
19. Ellen Wilson died on August 6, 1914. “It is too horrible about Mrs. Wilson,” FDR wrote Eleanor the next day. “We knew on Wednesday [August 5] that there was little hope and the end came last night. The President has been truly wonderful and I dread a breakdown. The funeral is Monday at the White House. I don’t yet know whether Assistant Secretaries will be expected to go or not. The interment will be private.” Ibid. 204.
20. FDR to ER, August 2, 1914, ibid. 198–199 (FDR’s emphasis).
21. Ibid.
22. ER to FDR, August 7, 1914, FDRL.
23. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 547–551 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928). Americans must be “neutral in fact as well as in name,” said Wilson, “impartial in thought as well as action.”
24. Wilson to Daniels, August 6, 1914. Wilson Papers.
25. 2 Roosevelt Letters 204 (FDR’s emphasis).
26. FDR to ER, August 5, 1914, ibid. 202 (FDR’s emphasis).
27. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 132.
28. FDR to Howe, August 13, 1914. Howe Papers, FDRL.
29. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace 131 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
30. FDR to Montgomery Hare, August 31, 1914, FDRL.
31. FDR to Howe, August 22, 1914. Howe Papers. For Hearst’s refusal, see New York American, August 27, 1914.
32. Howe to FDR, August 24, 1914, FDRL.
33. Gerard cabled the State Department on September 10 that he would accept the nomination only if the president and Secretary Bryan approved. Bryan passed the query on to Wilson:
Asst. Sec. Roosevelt is as you know a candidate and has, as I understand, the endorsement of Secs. McAdoo and [William C.] Redfield [Secretary of Commerce]. I have also felt Roosevelt would be the best man—having the advantage of being actively progressive and an upstate man. Gerard could not of course leave Berlin in the near future. What do you wish said to Gerard? He will do as you wish.
Wilson declined to intervene, and Gerard took the president’s silence as approval. Bryan to Wilson, n.d., Wilson Papers.
34. Walton Chronicle, September 23, 1914.
35. SDR to FDR, September 30, 1914, FDRL.
36. 2 Roosevelt Letters 212.
37. FDR to Langdon P. Marvin, October 19, 1914, FDRL. Ernest K. Lindley, writing one of the earliest Roosevelt biographies, accepted FDR’s version of the election, which then became gospel until after the president’s death when biographers checked the facts. See Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 133.
38. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 132.
39. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 347 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). For Sara and Franklin’s half brother, Rosy, FDR’s embrace of Tammany required considerable adjustment. “Rosy was in town yesterday,” Sara wrote her son a few days later, “and says ‘they all feel quite upset at [your] T. Club appearance as T. is working against [John P.] Mitchel [the reform candidate for mayor] and Franklin’s speaking strengthens Tammany.’ Uncle Warren [Delano] says one of the papers has pictures of you and Murphy side by side—All of this rather upsets me I confess.” Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt 376–368 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
40. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 133–134.
41. The House letter is in the collection of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, FDRL. On October 11, 1914, Thomas D. McCarthy, Gerard’s campaign manager, wrote FDR asking for an endorsement. “I do not know any one thing that would have a greater influence on the vote that Ambassador Gerard will receive on Election Day than your support of his candidacy during this campaign,” wrote McCarthy. FDR did not reply. FDRL.
42. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 56 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948). Gerard told Farley that FDR “would never forget the defeat he suffered … in the Democratic senatorial primary of 1914.”
43. Evidently at Eleanor’s suggestion, Gerard prepared a six-page summary of his services to the Democratic party and the promises he believed had been made to him and then broken. ER sent the memo to Franklin with a penciled comment: “F.D.R. read the end. He is very bitter. E.R.” FDRL.
In his autobiography, Gerard does not mention the 1914 primary but notes that in 1932 he “contributed money whenever [FDR] needed it for his [campaign] payroll, giving it to Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s grand vizier,” and suggests he had been promised the embassy in either London or Rome. James W. Gerard, My First Eighty-Three Years in America 324 (New York: Doubleday, 1951).
44. The New York Times, October 22, 1914.
45. FDR to ER, October [22?] 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 212.
46. FDR, Memorandum for the Press, November 14, 1914, FDRL.
47. The text of Wilson’s 1914 State of the Union message is most easily accessible online at http://janda.org/politxts/State%20of%20Union%20Addresses/1913=1920%20Wilson/wilson.1914.html.
48. U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Naval Affairs, Hearings, 1915 571–572, 586 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1915).
49. Ibid. 921.
50. Ibid. 921–995.
51. New York Herald, December 16, 1914; New York Sun, December 17, 1914. The extensive New York Times coverage of FDR’s testimony is reprinted in 2 Roosevelt Letters 216–218.
52. FDR to SDR, December 17, 1914, 2 Roosevelt Letters 215.
53. ER to Isabella Ferguson, December 19, 1914, FDRL.
54. William Graham Greene, permanent undersecretary, to Commander Powers Symington, U.S. naval attaché, December 19, 1914. Symington forwarded Greene’s note to FDR with the following message: “I regret to tell you that the Admiralty would find it very inconvenient for you to come over here for the purpose of studying the war organization of the British Navy.… I am afraid that at this time it is hardly worthwhile to send any more officers over as observers. The lid is down tight and we get almost nothing.” Symington to FDR, December 23, 1914, FDRL.
55. For a report of the London dinner, held at Gray’s Inn, see Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship 3–5 (New York: Random House, 2003). “I always disliked [Churchill],” FDR told Joseph P. Kennedy in 1939. “At a dinner I attended he acted like a stinker.” Quoted in Amanda Smith, ed., Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy 411 (New York: Viking, 2001).
56. Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jones (eds.), Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence 5–6 (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1975).
57. For the text of the German proclamation, see “Memorandum of the German Government,” February 4, 1914, Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 96–97.
58. British Ambassador to Secretary of State, March 1, 1915, ibid. 127–128. Also see The New York Times, March 2, 1915.
59. Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality 321–323 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960). For the complete text of the U.S. note, see Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 98–100.
60. March 30, 1915, ibid. 152–156.
61. Wilson’s remarks were made to an audience of four thousand newly naturalized citizens at Convention Hall in Philadelphia, May 10, 1915. For text, see The New York Times, May 11, 1915. For the American note to Berlin, see Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 393–396.
62. “Resting Our Case,” The New Republic 57 (May 22, 1915). A survey of newspaper opinion is reprinted in Literary Digest 1197–1199 (May 22, 1915). Also see The New York Times, May 15, 1915. Not surprisingly, TR had nothing but contempt for Wilson’s effort to avoid war, which he alleged was supported “by all the hyphenated Americans … [by] every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease.” TR to his son Archibald, May 19, 1915. Theodore Roosevelt Papers.
63. German foreign minister Gottlieb von Jagow told The New York Times, “The issues involved are of such importance, and the views in regard to the Lusitania show such variance, that the German Government believed it essential to attempt to establish a common basis of fact before entering into a discussion of the issues involved.” May 31, 1915.
64. To allay German public opinion, military and naval authorities were explicitly instructed to keep the emperor’s order secret. Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the Navy’s head, and Admiral Gustav Bachmann, the emperor’s naval aide, immediately submitted their resignations, which William II refused. “My order stands. If there are political consequences, the Imperial Chancellor carries the responsibility.” Quoted in Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 409.
65. The text of the American note, June 9, 1915, is in Foreign Relations, 1915, Supplement 436–438.
66. WJB to WW, June 3, 1915, 1 The Lansing Papers 419–421. Library of Congress. For the text of Bryan’s resignation and Wilson’s reply, see Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 422–423.
67. FDR to ER, June 10, 1915, 2 Roosevelt Letters 222. Numerous biographers, eager to put daylight between FDR and Daniels, suggest that Roosevelt was disappointed Daniels was not quitting as well. Nothing supports that assertion. To the contrary, Daniels did not believe Wilson’s note to Germany meant war, tried to dissuade Bryan from resigning, and was determined to remain loyal to the president, whom he adored. Taken in context of the Washington furor, FDR’s italicized comment that J. D. would not resign was a commendation of his boss. See Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 424–435.
68. FDR to WW, June 9, 1915, Wilson Papers.
69. WW to FDR, June 14, 1915, Wilson Papers.
70. WW to Garrison, July 21, 1915; WW to Daniels, July 21, 1915, cited in Link, Wilson: Struggle for Neutrality 591–594. Professor Link provides an extensive analysis of why Wilson changed his mind, which I have summarized.
71. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 327–328.
72. FDR to ER, August 28, 1915, 2 Roosevelt Letters 235–236.
73. The council was composed of six members of cabinet, chaired by the secretary of war, plus a nonpartisan advisory panel made up of leaders of industry, labor, and science. Ibid. For the council’s operation, see Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 586–590.
74. Samuel I. Rosenman, ed., 8 The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 205, 243 (New York: Random House, 1950). This was the National Defense Advisory Commission (NDAC). See David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 478 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
75. FDR to Daniels, February 16, 1916, Daniels Papers.
76. The New York Times, September 3, 1916.
77. FDR to ER, September 2, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 237–238.
78. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 425–426 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971).
79. Elihu Root dutifully contested the nomination as a conservative alternative and trailed Hughes 253–103 on the first ballot. Hughes won the nomination 328–98 on the second ballot, and the third ballot made it unanimous. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 151 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1975).
80. FDR to ER, June 15, 1916, FDRL.
81. Washington Evening Star, June 15, 1916; New York Sun, rotogravure, June 25, 1916.
82. FDR to the Navy League Convention, April 13, 1916, FDRL.
83. 1940 Public Papers and Address 606–615.
84. William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt 491 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
85. FDR to ER, November 8, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 273.
86. FDR to ER, November 9, 1916, ibid. 273–274.
87. The reference is to Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, Hermann Hagedorn, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926). FDR to ER, November 9, 1916, 2 Roosevelt Letters 273–274.
88. Quoted in Marshall, History of World War I 204; also see Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era and After 18 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946). The Zimmermann telegram did not come entirely out of the blue. In 1913–14 the German government had supplied arms to the Huerta regime in Mexico, which the United States refused to recognize. The telegram was drafted by Dr. Klaus von Kemnitz, the Latin American specialist in the German Foreign Office. Whether it was approved beforehand by Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and the Supreme Command is unclear, but both were in sympathy with its contents. Friedrich Katz, Deutschland, Dias, und die mexikanische Revolution: die deutsche Politik in Mexiko, 1870–1920 337–473 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag des Wissenschaften, 1964).
89. Housatonic, sunk off the Scilly Islands, was carrying contraband and was a legitimate target. But the German U-boat fired without warning, which became the basis of the American complaint. All twenty-five members of the crew were rescued. The New York Times, February 4, 1917.
90. Daniels’s message, in a private code he and FDR used, stated, “Because of political situation please return to Washington at once. Am sending ship to meet you and party at Puerto Plata tomorrow morning.” FDR, “Trip to Haiti and Santa Domingo, 1917,” FDRL.
91. Ibid.
92. Harrison J. Thornton, “The Two Roosevelts at Chautauqua,” 28 New York History 55 (January 1947).
93. Daniels autobiography, Daniels Papers; also see Wilson Era: Years of War 23.
94. Washington Evening Star, March 10, 1917. The Chicago Post urged Daniels’s replacement by his “virile-minded, hard-fisted, civilian assistant. Uncuriously enough his name is Roosevelt.” Chicago Post, March 20, 1917.
95. FDR to Edwyn Johnstone, November 22, 1916, FDRL.
96. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 23.
97. Wilson was the first president since John Adams to address Congress in person, and the Supreme Court, respecting the separation of powers, normally did not attend when the president’s State of the Union message was read. It departed from tradition in 1917 under Chief Justice White’s leadership to show its support for Wilson and war. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 31–33.
98. For the text of Wilson’s speech, see The New York Times, April 3, 1917. Martin Luther’s words were “Ich kann nicht anders [I can do no other.],” refusing to recant in 1518.
99. Diary of Thomas W. Brahany, chief clerk, White House executive office, entry for April 2, 1917. Typescript at FDRL.
100. FDR, press statement, April 3, 1917, FDRL.
101. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 87 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
102. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of War 34.
EIGHT | Lucy
The epigraph is from a letter FDR wrote to Eleanor from Washington in the summer of 1917. The emphasis is FDR’s. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 280, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
1. The vote for war was 82–6 in the Senate and 375–50 in the House. La Follette, Norris, and Vardaman were joined by Senators A. J. Gronna of North Dakota, William Stone of Missouri, and Harry Lane of Oregon in voting against the war. La Follette, Norris, and Gronna were Republicans; Vardaman, Stone, and Lane, Democrats. In the House, Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana voted against war, as she would do again on December 8, 1941.
2. A key element of Elihu Root’s 1903 military reforms provided for the equipping and training of the various state militias by the federal government. Under the National Defense Act of 1916, the militias were reconstituted as the National Guard and made to conform organizationally to the regular Army. The guard expanded rapidly in 1917–18 and ultimately provided seventeen divisions (Twenty-sixth through Forty-second) to the AEF.
The 1916 act also provided for a Reserve Officers Training Corps, but there were no organized reserve units until the act was amended in 1920, and even then they were largely paper formations. Department of the Army, The Army Almanac 308–310, 323–324 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).
3. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
4. Robert William Love, 1 History of the U.S. Navy 512–513 (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1992).
5. The Navy lost 48 vessels in World War I: 14 to German U-boats, 5 to mines, 16 to collisions, and 13 to other causes generally associated with poor seamanship. The largest vessel lost, the Cyclops, a 19,000-ton collier, “mysteriously disappeared” on April 21, 1918, with the loss of all 293 aboard. For a list of the vessels lost, see The Army Almanac 188.2.
6. “It is perfectly true that I took the chance of authorizing certain large expenditures before Congress had actually appropriated money,” said FDR in 1920. “I felt confident that Congress would pass the emergency appropriations for which we asked.” Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 140 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
7. Time, May 28, 1923.
8. FDR related the incident to Ernest Lindley while he was governor of New York. Given Roosevelt’s penchant for hyperbole, one should approach the quote with caution. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 140.
9. Josephus Daniels recalled that “Around the [Navy] Department it was said that inasmuch as his cousin Theodore left the position of Assistant Secretary to become a Rough Rider … Franklin actually thought fighting in the war was the necessary step toward reaching the White House.” Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of Peace 130 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
10. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 429 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1971). All four of TR’s sons volunteered for service as enlisted men, but Pershing chose to allow them to serve in the AEF as officers. “It’s rather up to us to practice what father preaches,” said Quentin, the youngest, who became a pilot and was killed in aerial combat. TR, Jr., won the Distinguished Service Cross and twenty-six years later led the First Division ashore at Normandy. Both he and Archie were wounded in the First World War. Kermit, who served in the British Army, won the Military Cross for gallantry.
11. Daniels, Years of Peace 130.
12. Quoted in Davis, Beckoning of Destiny 460.
13. Cited in Langdon Marvin to FDR, July 17, 1917, FDRL.
14. Arthur J. Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 142–143 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961); Love, History of the U.S. Navy 484.
15. Jellicoe’s comment was made to U.S. Rear Admiral William Sims, who had been designated by Daniels to head the American naval efforts in Europe. William S. Sims, The Victory at Sea 9 (New York: Doubleday, 1920).
16. Arthur Marder, the leading historian of naval warfare in the early twentieth century, reported that a “strange dogma had emerged [in the Royal Navy] that to provide warship escorts to merchant ships was to act essentially ‘defensively’ (because it protected ships from attack), which was ipso facto bad, and that to use naval forces to patrol trade routes, however futile the result, was to act ‘offensively’ against the warships of the enemy, and this was good.” Marder, 4 From Dreadnought to Scapa Flow 157–158.
17. Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy 355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
18. It is Navy lore that Commander Joseph K. Taussig, commanding the destroyer squadron, was asked upon his arrival at Queenstown when his ships would be fit for duty. “We are ready now, sir,” Taussig is supposed to have replied, although a witness recalled Taussig as saying, “Ready when fueled.” Love, 1 History of U.S. Navy 487.
19. FDR to Livingston Davis, April 28, 1917, FDRL. Also see FDR to Daniels, February 25, 1921, in Carroll Kilpatrick, Roosevelt and Daniels: A Friendship in Politics 72–74 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952). The head of the French mission was former premier René Viviani, but it was Marshal Joffre who attracted the most attention.
20. Love, History of the U.S. Navy 498–500.
21. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 79–80 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959); Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL.
22. Quoted in Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 160–161. “Certainly my own interest in the project was due to [Roosevelt’s] enthusiasm and encouragement,” said Harris.
23. Josephus Daniels, The Wilson Era: Years of War and After 83 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946).
24. Wilson vented his displeasure to officers in the ward room of the Pennsylvania on August 11, 1917. “Every time we have suggested anything to the British Admiralty the reply has come back that it had never been done that way, and I felt like saying, ‘Well nothing was ever done so systematically as nothing is being done now.’ ” Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 474.
25. FDR, Memorandum on Submarine Situation, 1917, FDRL.
26. The mines were laid by eight specially equipped vessels built with three decks to hold the mines and modified railroad tracks so that as the ships traveled at full speed the mines could be put on the rails and dropped at twelve-second intervals. Each mine contained 300 pounds of TNT and was fitted with an anchor and a buoy that deployed automatically when it hit the water. The mines were set at 300-foot intervals in three tiers, the first at 45 feet, the second at 160 feet, and the third at 240 feet. The barrier was many miles wide, requiring several hours for a submarine to traverse it. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 158–159. Also see Morison, Admiral Sims 414–417.
27. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 158–159.
28. Sims, Victory at Sea 308.
29. Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: An Uneasy Alliance 45–46 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980).
30. FDR to John J. Fitzgerald, September 3, 1915; Fitzgerald to FDR, September 8, 1915, FDRL.
31. Frank Freidel, interview with John J. Fitzgerald, June 17, 1948, FDRL.
32. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 193 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
33. New York Tribune, February 11, 1918. For a contemporaneous report of the celebration, see The New York Times, July 5, 1917.
34. James J. Walker to FDR, November 30, 1917, FDRL.
35. New York Tribune, May 28, 1918.
36. FDR to Fred J. Sisson, May 7, 1918. The letter contains the notation “unsent.” FDRL.
37. The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels, June 18, 1918, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).
38. FDR to Wilson, July 8, 1918. Also see FDR to John Mack, June 18, 1918, FDRL.
39. With more than 2 million votes cast in the 1918 gubernatorial election, Smith defeated Whitman by fewer than 15,000 votes. Smith received 1,009,936 to Whitman’s 995,094. Charles W. Ervin, running on the Socialist ticket, received 121,705.
40. Quoted in Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 165. “I feel confident that you would bring to the governorship not only an unsurpassed knowledge of the administration of State affairs, but a single-minded purpose to carry on these affairs for the liberal and progressive good of the State as a whole.” FDR to Al Smith, November 5, 1918. FDRL.
41. Eleanor’s role as a Red Cross volunteer during World War I is described by Joseph P. Lash in Eleanor and Franklin 208–219 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) and in ER’s This Is My Story 250–263 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
42. ER to SDR, January 14, 1918; January 16, 1918, FDRL.
43. ER to SDR, May 12, 1918.
44. Maurice Low, Woodrow Wilson: An Interpretation (Boston: Little, Brown, 1918). Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
45. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 317 (New York: Viking, 1999). ER’s friendship with Baruch began when they sailed for Europe on the same ship in November 1918. Throughout the 1920s Baruch supported Eleanor’s concerns financially, and by the 1930s ER was referring to him as “one of the wisest and most generous people I have ever known.” Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 256 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
46. Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL, quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 251n.
47. Thomas A. Krueger and William Glidden, “The New Deal Intellectual Elite,” in The Rich, the Well Born, and the Powerful 344, Fred Cople Jaher, ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
48. FDR to Philip Slomovitz, March 7, 1935, FDRL.
49. The Comstock Act, passed by Congress on March 3, 1873, was primarily an anti-obscenity measure that closed the mails to “obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious” printed matter. It also made it a crime to disseminate information or devices relating to birth control. Its birth control provisions were challenged by Margaret Sanger following her arrest for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic in 1916 (People v. Sanger, 118 N.E. 637 [N.Y. 1918]), and was not completely overturned until United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries in 1936.
50. ER uttered these words to her daughter, Anna, at the time of Anna’s marriage in June 1926. They were repeated by Anna to her daughter, Eleanor Seagraves, who confirmed them to Blanche Wiesen Cook. 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 536 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
51. James Roosevelt with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View 97 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
52. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 81 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973). Sleeping arrangements at Hyde Park would confirm the children’s assessment. When the house was redone in 1916, there were three new bedrooms above the mammoth first-floor library. Sara occupied the large one facing the Albany Post Road, Franklin had another large one facing the river, and Eleanor had a small one in between. On June 14, 1918, Sara wrote Franklin about buying a new desk for “her” [ER’s] room; a year later Sara wrote her son about the two big rooms, “yours” and “mine.” Roosevelt Family Papers, FDRL. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt, “I Remember Hyde Park,” McCall’s (February 1963).
53. “Standards were different in those days,” recalled Robert Donovan of the Associated Press. “I’m sure there were some reporters, friends of the White House, who knew about Lucy. But none of them ever thought about exposing the situation. The newspaper business in those days was not so damn serious as it is today. It was a hell of a lot more fun.” Quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 518 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
54. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in Ellen Feldman, Lucy: A Novel 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
55. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 73. “Though she was a paid employee … she was a lady to her fingertips.”
56. Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 157–158 (New York: Doubleday, 1981). “I think their relationship [FDR’s and Lucy’s] was very much a lonely-boy-meets-girl thing. The rose behind the ear, the snipped-off lock of hair. That kind of thing.”
57. Quoted in Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs 229 (New York: Doubleday, 1973).
58. Letter, Captain Lyman B. Cotton, Jr., USN, to Jonathan Daniels, January 29, 1967, quoted in Daniels, Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents 157 (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
59. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny 488. Olive Clapper, Washington Tapestry (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946).
60. Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 35–36 (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2003).
61. FDR was the youngest of the fifteen assistant secretaries who served between 1860 (when the position was established) and 1936. He was thirty-one when he assumed office; the average age was forty-eight. He also served longest: seven years and five months. Arthur W. Macmahon and John D. Millett, Federal Administrators 247 (New York: Ames Press, 1967). Reprint.
62. Arthur C. Murray, At Close Quarters 85 (London: John Murray, 1946).
63. Admiral W. Sheffield Cowles to FDR, August 17, 1917, FDRL.
64. Quoted in John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
65. The dowager was the famed Washington socialite Margot Oxford. Ibid.
66. Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 36.
67. Michael Teague, Mrs. L 157–158. Joseph P. Lash quotes Mrs. Longworth in a similar manner, based on his own interview with her. Eleanor and Franklin 226.
68. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 82.
69. Henry Brandon, “A Talk with an 83-year-old Enfant-Terrible [ARL],” The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967.
70. Levi Morton, the son of a Vermont preacher, made a fortune in New York banking, ranking with the Drexels and Morgans in post–Civil War American finance. His firm, Morton Trust Company, later became the foundation of the Guaranty Trust Company. Morton served in Congress and was vice president under Benjamin Harrison and later governor of New York. Ellerslie, his great country house on the Hudson, was near Hyde Park. The Roosevelts and Mortons made several Atlantic crossings together and often went to the Adirondacks for winter sports with Franklin and the Morton daughters in tow. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 163–164.
71. In his edited collection of his father’s letters, Elliott noted that “during the war years F.D.R. frequently spent the evenings with the Eustis family,” 2 The Roosevelt Letters 227n.
72. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 86 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961). The quote originally appeared in ER’s This Is My Story, published in 1937. Also see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 222–223.
73. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 83.
74. Ibid. 86.
75. FDR to ER, July 16, 1917, 2 Roosevelt Letters 280 (FDR’s emphasis).
76. The New York Times, July 17, 1917. The text of the Times article is reprinted in 2 Roosevelt Letters 282–283n.
77. FDR to ER, July 18, 1917, ibid. 282.
78. ER to FDR, July 20, 1917, ibid. 283n.
79. According to Elliott, “Mother arrived with a long list of complaints to make. She was lonely for his presence in Campobello.… She was tired of the string of excuses he had been making for not leaving Washington. He did not even bother to read the letters she sent ‘for you never answer a question and nothing I ask appears.’ She even chided him for neglecting Granny by not taking the trouble to go to Hyde Park.” An Untold Story 89.
80. ER to FDR, August 15, 1917, FDRL (ER’s emphasis).
81. Morgan, FDR: A Biography 205. Ward, First-Class Temperament 369.
82. Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 89.
83. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 224.
84. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 148.
85. Mrs. Daniels was close friends with Mary Patten, ER’s Red Cross co-worker, and Mrs. Thomas R. Marshall, both of whom spread stories about Franklin and Lucy that autumn. Letter, Mrs. Charles Sumner Hamlin to Jonathan Daniels, February 19, 1955, ibid. 132.
86. ER to Lorena Hickok, October 1932, Hickok Papers, FDRL.
87. ER to SDR, January 22, 1918, FDRL.
88. ER to SDR, March 18, 1918, FDRL.
89. Daniels gave FDR a carte blanche. His instructions were to (1) inspect U.S. naval forces with particular attention to administrative and business organization; (2) to coordinate with other branches in order to coordinate naval activities with their enterprises; (3) gather information pertaining to general conditions abroad and their applicability to naval affairs; and (4) investigate any other matters he deemed advisable. 2 Roosevelt Letters 301.
90. FDR’s extensive diary entries for his crossing on the Dyer and his stay in Europe are reproduced in ibid. 301–316.
91. Ibid. 327–328.
92. Ibid 326. FDR’s Aunt Dora, Sara’s older sister, had refused to leave her Paris apartment even when the city’s fall appeared imminent. A quarter of a century later she would do the same. While most Americans in Paris fled home after war began in 1939, Dora would not budge. When asked by newsmen what the president’s aunt intended to do, a spokesman for her responded:
Madame is determined to remain in her Avenue George V home so long as it is tenable. She has lived in Paris forty years. All the friends of her whole life are here.… Madame is in excellent health and in excellent spirits. She is not uncomfortable … and is not making any emergency plans.
Sara made a special trip to Paris to try to extract Dora but was unable to change her mind. Eventually Dora left on one of the last ships to depart France, her fiftieth crossing of the Atlantic. She died at Algonac on July 20, 1940, at the age of ninety-three.
93. Unpublished memoir of Captain Edward McCauley, quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 399.
94. 2 Roosevelt Letters 333–336.
95. The remark is that of Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel, quoted by FDR, ibid. 346.
96. FDR to ER, August 20, 1918, ibid. 350–351.
97. ER, Autobiography 96.
98. I am indebted to Geoffrey Ward for this insight. First-Class Temperament 410n.
99. ER to Joseph P. Lash, October 25, 1943, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 220. “Mother spent the first seven years of her marriage constantly pregnant, and my father went through World War I being busier and busier and busier,” Elliott remembered. “And my mother was such an insecure person during those first few years that I think it became a tremendous blow to her to realize what was going on. I don’t think she had any inkling that such a thing was possible between two people who had said their vows, and so it was horribly upsetting to her.” Elliott Roosevelt, oral interview, June 20, 1975, FDRL.
100. The oft-repeated Roosevelt version was set forth by Alice Longworth in her interview with Henry Brandon for The New York Times Magazine, August 6, 1967. “I remember one day I was having fun with Auntie Corinne [Mrs. Douglas Robinson, TR’s youngest sister] … I was doing imitations of Eleanor, and Auntie Corinne looked at me and said, ‘Never forget, Alice, Eleanor offered Franklin his freedom.’ And I said, ‘But darling, that’s what I’ve wanted to know about all these years. Tell.’ And so she said, ‘Yes, there was a family conclave and they talked it over and finally they decided it affected the children and there was Lucy Mercer, a Catholic, and so it was called off.’ ”
Also see Elliott Roosevelt, An Untold Story 95; David B. Roosevelt, Grandmère: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt 112 (New York: Warner Books, 2002); Linda Donn, The Roosevelt Cousins 158 (New York: Knopf, 2001); and especially Joseph Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 68–71. (New York: Viking, 1982).
101. Letters of Mrs. Lyman Cotton and Miss Mary Henderson (Lucy’s North Carolina cousins) to Jonathan Daniels, quoted in Washington Quadrille 145–146.
102. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 228.
103. Alsop, FDR 70.
104. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 231.
105. Quoted in Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 145.
106. ER, Autobiography 93.
107. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 227. Blanche Wiesen Cook reports that it was during the Lucy Mercer years that Eleanor lost her appetite and that “when she did eat she could not keep her food down.… We now know that one of the results of frequent vomiting is a deterioration of the teeth and gums. During this period Eleanor’s teeth loosened, spread, and protruded more than ever.” 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 235.
108. Quoted in Lois Scharf, Eleanor Roosevelt: First Lady of American Liberalism 56 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987); Alsop, FDR: A Centenary Remembrance 73–74.
109. The first veiled reference to appear in print came in 1946, when Olive Clapper, wife of the famous Washington reporter Raymond Clapper, alluded to “a persistent rumor” in her book Washington Tapestry. Mrs. Clapper wrote, “Mrs. Roosevelt was supposed to have called her husband and the enamored woman to a conference, at which she offered to give her husband a divorce if the woman wished to marry him. A Catholic, the woman could not marry a divorced man. When she expressed these sentiments, Mrs. Roosevelt issued an ultimatum that they must stop seeing each other—to which they promptly acquiesced.” Lucy Mercer was not mentioned by name, and only her Catholicism links her with the story. Ibid. 238.
Also see John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 73 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Gunther cites Mrs. Clapper and also does not name Lucy Mercer.
110. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship 320n. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952).
111. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 67–68 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). Rexford Tugwell in The Democratic Roosevelt, published the next year, makes no mention of the rumor or of Lucy Mercer. (New York: Doubleday, 1957).
In 2001, James MacGregor Burns provided an excellent summary account of the romance in The Three Roosevelts 155–156, with Susan Dunn (New York: Grove Press, 2001).
112. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 354–355 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957). Writing in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1966, Professor Schlesinger thought the story of FDR and Lucy had been exaggerated in the Washington rumor mill but conceded that they had been “emotionally involved.” “No doubt Franklin began to show a delight in Lucy; no doubt this worried Eleanor, as it would any wife.” Ladies’ Home Journal, November 1966.
113. Jonathan Daniels, The End of Innocence (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954); Washington Quadrille: The Dance Beside the Documents (New York: Doubleday, 1968).
114. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends (New York: Doubleday, 1982). More recently the story has been treated effectively by Geoffrey Ward in his perceptive A First-Class Temperament 361–374, 411–417. Another fine account is provided by Blanche Wiesen Cook in volume one of her biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, pages 216–232.
115. Consuelo’s front-page marriage to the duke, which cost the Vanderbilts an estimated $10 million to arrange, ended in separation in 1908 and annulment in 1926. At the hearings before the Rota in the Vatican, Ava Vanderbilt Belmont (Consuelo’s mother) testified, “I have always had absolute power over my daughter.… I ordered her to marry the Duke.”
At the time of Consuelo’s marriage, a New York society writer chirped, “Winty was outclassed. Six feet two in his golf stockings, he was no match for five feet six in a coronet.” Elizabeth Eliot, Heiresses and Coronets 188 (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959); Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society? 233–234 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
116. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, FDR’s Unfinished Portrait 76–77 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
117. Jonathan Daniels, Washington Quadrille 250–251.
118. The president’s official schedule for April 5, 1941, indicates that FDR returned from the Oval Office to his White House study “accompanied by Mrs. Johnson.” The time given is 1555–1740. Cited in Ellen Feldman, “FDR and His Women,” American Heritage 53, 55 (February–March 2003).
119. Interview, Geoffrey Ward with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., cited in Ward, First-Class Temperament 777n.
120. Quoted Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 591–592.
121. Feldman, “FDR and His Women” 59.
122. “Thank you so much,” wrote Lucy. “You must know it will be treasured always. I have wanted to write you for a long time to tell you that I had seen Franklin and of his great kindness to my husband when he was desperately ill in Washington.… I think of your sorrow—you—whom I have always felt to be the most blessed and privileged of women must now feel immeasurable grief and pain and they must be almost unbearable.” Lucy Rutherfurd to Eleanor Roosevelt, May 2, 1945, FDRL.
123. Lucy Rutherfurd to Anna Roosevelt Boettiger, May 9, 1945, FDRL. Franklin’s early letters to Lucy have not been located. Lucy claimed to have burned them, but writers such as Ellen Feldman doubt that is the case.
124. John R. Boettiger, Jr., A Love in Shadow 261 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Additional insight into Franklin’s deep affection for Lucy can be found in Resa Willis’s FDR and Lucy: Lovers and Friends (New York: Routledge, 2004).
NINE | The Campaign of 1920
The epigraph is from a letter by FDR, November 9, 1920. Quoted in Alfred Steinberg, Mrs. R.: The Life of Eleanor Roosevelt 121 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958).
1. The George Washington was built as a passenger liner for North German Lloyd by A. G. Vulcan at Stettin in 1908. Displacing 33,000 tons, with a cruising speed of 18 knots, it was one of the largest liners afloat, accommodating 568 passengers in first class; 433 in second class; 452 in third class; and 1,226 in steerage. When war began in 1914, George Washington sought refuge in New York, a neutral port, where it remained berthed until the United States entered the war in 1917. It was thereupon seized by the United States government, converted to a troopship, and made eighteen round-trips to France during the war, transporting 48,000 troops.
Under the peace settlement, George Washington became the property of the United States and was reconverted to passenger service, where it sailed on the transatlantic run under the flag of the United States Lines until 1931. Laid up by the Depression, it was reacquired by the Navy in 1941 and served again as a troopship until taken out of service in 1947. Damaged by fire at her mooring in Baltimore, George Washington was scrapped in 1951. Arnold Kludas, 1 Die grossen Passagierschiffe der Welt, 2 ed. 122–123, (Oldenburg/Hamburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1972).
2. ER to Isabella Ferguson, July 11, 1919. Greenway Collection, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
3. Among the papers at Eleanor’s bedside when she died was a sonnet by Ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice extolling the statue:
O steadfast, deep, inexorable eyes
Set look inscrutable, nor smile nor frown!
O tranquil eyes that look so calmly down
Upon a world of passion and of lies …
Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 237 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
4. Elizabeth Cameron was the daughter of Senator John Sherman of Ohio and the favorite niece of General William Tecumseh Sherman. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 235, 245–247, 539 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992); Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams 183, 245 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). Also see Otto Friedrich, Clover 330–331 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), and Arline Boucher Tehan, Henry Adams in Love 86–90 (New York: Universe Books, 1983).
5. ER to SDR, January 3, 1919, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 355, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
6. Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President 394 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
7. Ibid. 400.
8. FDR to Daniels, January 9, 1919, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
9. ER to SDR, January 9, 1919, 2 Roosevelt Letters 355.
10. ER to SDR, January 11, 20, February 11, 1919, ibid. 359, 361, 373.
11. Orlando bitterly withdrew from the conference on April 24, 1919, protesting the refusal of Wilson to grant Italy the former Austrian city of Fiume and the province of Dalmatia on the Adriatic. “Now President Wilson, after ignoring and violating his own Fourteen Points, wants to restore their virginity by applying them vigorously where they refer to Italy.” Following his withdrawal, Orlando’s government won a whopping 382–40 vote of confidence in the Italian Parliament. Aldrovandi Marescotti, Guerra Diplomatica 262 (Milan: Mondadori, 1946).
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 Eleanor 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).
16. Lovett Papers, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston.
17. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 591.
18. Dr. Bennett to Dr. Lovett, August 31, 1921, Lovett Papers.
19. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 415–416.
20. The New York Times, September 16, 1921.
21. FDR to Ochs, September 16, 1921, FDRL.
22. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, September 24, 1921, Lovett Papers.
23. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 204 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931).
24. FDR to Daniels, October 6, 1921. FDRL.
25. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, October 11, 1921, Lovett Papers.
26. Lovett notes, October 15, 1921, Ibid.
27. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, November 19, 1921, Lovett Papers.
28. ER to SDR, December 15, 1921, FDRL.
29. Mrs. Lake to Dr. Lovett, December 17, 1921, Lovett Papers.
30. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 147 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
31. Ibid. 58, 146–147.
32. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 118 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
33. Interview, Frances Perkins, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
34. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 616.
35. Ibid. 616–617.
36. ER, Autobiography 117.
37. Ibid. 117–118.
38. Mrs. James [Sara] Roosevelt, My Boy Franklin 101 (New York: Ray Long & Richard R. Smith, 1933).
39. WW to FDR, April 30, 1922, FDRL.
40. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, March 30, 1922, Lovett Papers.
41. Ibid., July 10, 1922.
42. Dr. Lovett to FDR, August 14, 1922, FDRL.
43. FDR to Dr. Lovett, September 28, 1922, FDRL.
44. Anna Roosevelt Interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
45. FDR to Smith, August 13, 1922, FDRL. “I had quite a tussle in New York to keep our friend Hearst off the ticket and to get Al Smith to run, but the thing went through in fine shape,” FDR wrote his friend Joseph E. Davies shortly after the election. FDR to Davies, November 18, 1922, FDRL.
46. Smith to FDR, August 15, 1922, FDRL.
47. Howe to FDR, September 29, 1922, FDRL.
48. Smith to FDR, October 9, 1922, FDRL.
49. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 277 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Eleanor’s recollection differs slightly: “I was pushed into the women’s division of the Democratic State Committee, not because Louis cared so much about my activities, but because he felt that they would make it possible for me to bring into the house people who would keep Franklin interested in state politics.” Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 30 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
50. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 319–320 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
51. Dickerman ran a strong second against the conservative Speaker of the Assembly, Thaddeus C. Sweet, and effectively eliminated him as a potential gubernatorial candidate. Marion Dickerman interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
52. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 320–321.
53. Because most of the correspondence between ER and Cook and Dickerman has disappeared, it is impossible to reconstruct the precise dimensions of their friendship. Blanche Wiesen Cook tackled the task with gusto, and her account should be a starting point for any who wish to untangle the relationship. Ibid. 319–328 and the notes pertaining thereto.
54. Roosevelt was particularly concerned to organize the distaff vote. “Get the right kind of woman in every election district,” he wrote Caroline O’Day of the Women’s Division. “There are thousands of election districts upstate where it is not only unfashionable to be a Democrat, but even where Democrats are rather looked down upon. It is absolutely necessary for us to restore in the country districts … the prestige of the party. Democratic women have too often in the past been rather apologetic for calling themselves Democrats. This should end, and they should let the world and their neighbors know that they take great pride in their Party.” FDR to Caroline O’Day, January 28, 1922, FDRL.
55. ER, This I Remember 32.
56. FDR to Cox, December 8, 1922; FDR to Byrd, November 21, 1921; FDR to Wood, May 22, 1922. FDRL.
57. Turnley Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story 7–9 (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1953). Walker’s account is based on the eyewitness recollection of Basil O’Connor.
58. FDR to Livingston Davis, October 11, 1922.
59. FDR to Black, September 24, 1924.
60. Roosevelt and O’Connor began working together in early 1923 but did not formally announce their partnership until January 1, 1925. See O’Connor to FDR, December 8, 1924, FDRL.
61. FDR to Byron R. Newton, December 20, 1922, FDRL.
62. FDR to Dr. Draper, February 13, 1923, FDRL.
63. ER, This Is My Story 345–346.
64. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 662.
65. FDR to SDR, March 15, 1923, FDRL.
66. FDR to Carter Glass, March 27, 1923, FDRL.
67. Kathleen Lake to Dr. Lovett, March 30, 1923, Lovett Papers.
68. Lovett examination, May 28, 1923, Lovett Papers.
69. Dr. Draper to Dr. Lovett, February 11, 1924, Lovett Papers.
70. Louis Depew interview, January 5, 1948, FDRL.
71. FDR to John Lawrence, April 30, 1925, FDRL.
72. The most complete depiction of life aboard the Lorooco is provided by Donald S. Carmichael, “An Introduction to the Log of the Lorooco,” 1 The Franklin D. Roosevelt Collector 1–37 (November 1948).
73. FDR to Davis, February, 1924.
74. Franklin, Jr., once told a friend that it was Missy, not Louis Howe, whom he most resented as a youth. He especially resented the time she spent with FDR. “Are you always so agreeable?” he once asked her. “Don’t you ever get mad and flare up? Do you always smile?”
“Missy looked as if she would burst into tears,” he remembered. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor Roosevelt: A Friend’s Memoir 210 (New York: Doubleday, 1964).
75. Felix Frankfurter, From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter, Joseph P. Lash, ed., January 18, 1943 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriter, told Frankfurter that he “always regarded Missy as one of the five most important people in the U.S. during the Roosevelt Administration.” Ibid.
76. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 294.
77. Frank Freidel, interview with Frances Perkins, May 1953, FDRL.
78. ER to FDR, February 24, 1924, FDRL.
79. FDR to John Lawrence, April 25, 1925, FDRL.
80. FDR to SDR, postscript to letter originally written March 26, 1926, 2 Roosevelt Letters 479–480.
81. Typewritten copy of statement, FDRL.
82. New York Herald Tribune, April 29, 1924.
83. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 170 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
84. George Herman Ruth to FDR, June 13, 1924, FDRL.
85. Judge Joseph Proskauer interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
86. Ibid.
87. David Burner, “The Election of 1924,” in 2 Running for President: Candidates and Their Images, 1900–1992 125, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
88. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 205.
89. Morgan Hoyt interview, FDRL.
90. Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollection of Marion Dickerman 30 (New York: Atheneum, 1974).
91. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 205.
92. Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior 18 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).
93. Davis, Invincible Summer 31.
94. The New York Times, July 10, 1924; New York Herald Tribune, July 1, 1924; Pendergast’s comment is quoted in Ike B. Dunlap to FDR, July 10, 1924. Pendergast predicted Roosevelt would be the nominee in 1928. FDRL.
95. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
96. Davis, Invincible Summer 31.
ELEVEN | Governor
The epigraph is from a letter Sara wrote FDR after learning of his decision to run for governor. “Eleanor telephoned me before I got my papers that you have to ‘run’ for governorship,” said Sara. “If you do run, I want you not to be defeated.” SDR to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL (Sara’s emphasis).
1. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 316 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
2. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
3. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 631 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
4. Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer: An Intimate Portrait of the Roosevelts Based on the Recollections of Marion Dickerman 35 (New York: Atheneum, 1974).
5. FDR to Elliott Brown, August 5, 1924, FDRL.
6. Quoted in Davis, Invincible Summer 50.
7. Quoted in Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 325.
8. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 740.
9. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 334.
10. Mary McLeod Bethune, “My Secret Talks with FDR,” Ebony (April 1949).
11. FDR to SDR, October, 1924, 2 The Roosevelt Letters 445, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
12. Editor’s note, ibid. 447–448.
13. FDR to SDR, October 1924, 2 Roosevelt Letters 447.
14. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 203–205 (New York: Knopf, 1962). Blanche Wiesen Cook suggests Howe and Sara opposed the Warm Springs venture but offers no evidence. Cf. 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 336.
15. FDR lent the $201,677.83 to the Warm Springs Foundation and in return received a demand note for that amount, dated February 29, 1928. The money was gradually repaid over the years, the last installment after the president’s death. The repayment history is printed in Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 367–368 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
16. “Mrs. Ford and I are deeply impressed with the wonderful work which is being carried out at Warm Springs,” Ford wrote FDR on March 15, 1928. “I am sending herewith a check for twenty-five thousand dollars which I hope you will accept for the Foundation with our best wishes for its complete success.” 2 Roosevelt Letters 500n.
17. FDR to Paul Hasbrouck, Hasbrouck papers, FDRL.
18. Ward, First-Class Temperament 770.
19. Ibid. 758.
20. Roosevelt received 97.8 percent of the votes in Merriweather County in 1932; 94.6 percent in 1936; 93.7 percent in 1940; and 92.0 percent in 1944. His Dutchess County totals were 43.5 percent (1932); 45.0 percent (1936); 44.1 percent (1940); and 40.8 percent (1944). America at the Polls: A Handbook of American Presidential Election Statistics 100–106, 313–317, Richard M. Scammon, ed. (Pittsburgh: Governmental Affairs Institute, 1965).
21. Ward, First-Class Temperament 765 (italics in original).
22. Rexford Tugwell papers, FDRL.
23. FDR to SDR, October 13, 1926, 2 Roosevelt Letters 486.
24. Editor’s note, ibid. 492.
25. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 398–408.
26. ER to Jane Hoey, April 9, 1930, FDRL.
27. The New York Times, October 10, 1929.
28. The New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1932.
29. Jan Pottker, Sara and Eleanor 230–232 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004).
30. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 161 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
31. Howe to FDR, n.d. (summer 1926), FDRL.
32. In a two-man race, Smith received 1,523,813 votes to Republican Ogden Mills’s 1,276,137. Mills, a sitting member of Congress, was a Harvard classmate and Dutchess County neighbor of FDR and later served as Herbert Hoover’s secretary of the Treasury.
33. ER to FDR, June 15, 1928, FDRL.
34. FDR to Lippmann, August 6, 1928, FDRL.
35. Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Happy Warrior: Alfred E. Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928). Louis Howe, for one, was not taken in by the public display of affection for Smith. “Al’s enemies will nominate him, then knife him at the polls,” he told FDR. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe227.
36. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 289 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
37. FDR to SDR, July 14, 1928, 2 Roosevelt Letters 504. Eleanor accepted the co-chairmanship, along with former Wyoming governor Nellie Tayloe Ross, of the Women’s Division of the national Democratic party and worked arduously on Smith’s behalf.
38. “Strictly between ourselves,” FDR wrote Josephus Daniels, “I am very doubtful whether any Democrat can win in 1928.” FDR to Daniels, June 23, 1927, FDRL. Also see Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 226–234.
39. FDR to Smith, September 30, 1928, FDRL.
40. Ernest K. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Career in Progressive Democracy 12 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1931). Also see James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 79 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).
41. Quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal 254–255 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954).
42. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 794. Later, FDR wrote to his uncle Frederic Delano that he “would not allow the use of my name before the convention, but … if, in the final analysis the convention insisted on nominating me, I should feel under definite obligation to accept the nomination.” FDR to Frederic A. Delano, October 8, 1928, FDRL.
43. ER to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL. Interviewed later at Democratic National Headquarters, Eleanor said she was “very proud” FDR had accepted the nomination, though she “did not want him to do it. In the end you have to do what your friends want you to do. There comes to every man, if he is wanted, the feeling that there is almost an obligation to return the confidence shown in him.” Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years. 1928–1933 29 (New York: Random House, 1985).
44. Howe to FDR, October 2, 1928, FDRL.
45. New York Post, October 2, 1928; New York Herald Tribune, October 3, 1928.
46. Lindley, Franklin D. Roosevelt 21.
47. New York Herald Tribune, October 9, 1928.
48. “So long as we have a two-party system of government,” Flynn wrote, “we will have machines. Whether they are good or bad depends upon the interest of citizens in their party government.” Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 231 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
49. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 21 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
50. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
51. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 22.
52. 1 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 53–54, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
53. New York Herald Tribune, October 25, 1928.
54. Francis Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
55. Flynn, You’re the Boss 71–72.
56. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
57. Ibid.
TWELVE | Albany Redux
FDR was one of three speakers (and the only Democrat) to address the Washington newsmen’s Gridiron Dinner in 1929. The epigraph is from the song sung by the newsmen to greet FDR. The New York Times, April 14, 1929.
1. The New York Times, November 13, 1928.
2. Quoted ibid., December 5, 1928.
3. Ibid., November 12, 1928. Samuel Rosenman, who accompanied FDR to Warm Springs after the election, reports that “strangely” no one speculated about the presidency, so busy were they planning for the governorship. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 28 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
4. FDR to Adolphus Ragan (unsent), 3 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 772–773, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1950). “No man,” said FDR, “ever willingly gives up public life—no man who has ever tasted it.”
5. The New York Times, January 1, 1929.
6. FDR to Adolphus Ragan, 3 Personal Letters 772–773. Also see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 49–53 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
7. Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 291 (New York: Knopf, 1974).
8. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University. Caro cites a confidential source for Moses’s characterization of ER and reports that Adolf A. Berle, professor of law at Columbia at the time, said Moses “always talked badly about Eleanor Roosevelt.” The Power Broker 1194.
9. Emily Smith Warner and Hawthorne Daniel, The Happy Warrior: A Biography of My Father, Alfred E. Smith 240 (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
10. FDR to Adolphus Ragan, 3 Personal Letters 772–773.
11. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 30. Mrs. Moskowitz complained bitterly to Frances Perkins about being replaced. “Franklin Roosevelt can never run that show. It’s going to be terrible. He’s got that dreadful Louis Howe up there. Louis Howe will poison his mind about everything. Howe hates Smith. He’s that kind of sour person. It’s going to be very bad.” Elisabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith 207 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
12. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Women’s Field in Politics,” Women’s City Club Quarterly (1928).
13. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 259 (New York: Knopf, 1962).
14. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 62.
15. As Tugwell remembers dinners in Albany, Sam Rosenman and Basil O’Connor “were so disillusioned with the cuisine and so prone to be annoyed with Eleanor’s well-meant probing that they often turned up after dinner rather than before. [Sam] could stand it as long as Missy LeHand was there. Her presence was like a quiet blessing on any company she graced,” Rexford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust 53–54 (New York: Viking Press, 1968).
16. Betsey was the eldest daughter of the famous brain surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. Dr. Cushing had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1925 biography of Sir William Osler, physician in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital (1889–1905) and regius professor of medicine at Oxford University (1905–19).
When ER learned of the engagement, she wrote Franklin that Betsey was “a nice child, family excellent, nothing to be said against it.… Perhaps it will be a good influence and in any case we can do nothing about it.” ER to FDR, November 22, 1928, FDRL.
17. FDR, 3 Personal Letters 43.
18. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 38.
19. Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 326 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
20. Hugh Gregory Gallagher, FDR’s Splendid Deception 76–77 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1985).
21. For background, see Will Swift, The Roosevelts and the Royals, especially 108–151 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
22. New York Evening Post, November 8, 1928.
23. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 46 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
24. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 381 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1992).
25. The New York Times, December 2, 1928.
26. Ibid.
27. Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 229–230 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
28. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 36. Rosenman quotes FDR: “Once you’ve made a decision, there’s no use worrying about whether you were right or wrong. Events will prove whether you were right or wrong, and if there is still time you can change your decision. You and I know people who wear out the carpets walking up and down worrying whether they have decided something correctly. Do the very best you can in making up your mind, but once your mind is made up go ahead.”
29. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
30. Senator George Norris of Nebraska, the national champion of public power, called Roosevelt’s speech to the legislature “a very brave step in the right direction.” He also pointed out that across the Saint Lawrence both Ontario and Quebec were providing electric power to the consumer at cost. The New York Times, March 15, 1929. Also see S. I. Rosenman, “Governor Roosevelt’s Power Program,” Nation, September 18, 1929.
31. Alfred E. Smith, Up to Now 314 (New York: Viking Press, 1929).
32. Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt: Forty-eighth Governor of the State of New York: 1929 40 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Co., 1930).
33. “I am not an ‘Urban leader,’ ” FDR wrote the editor of the Mitchell, South Dakota, Republican in April 1931. “I was born and brought up and have always made my home on a farm in Dutchess County.” FDRL.
34. For an extensive review of FDR’s agricultural program, see the chapter “Parity for the Farmer,” in Bernard Belluch, Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York 76–102 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955).
35. FDR, 3 Personal Letters 24.
36. The New York Times, July 5, 1929.
37. Ibid. July 8, 1929.
38. Howe deleted the persiflage before the statement was released to the press. The final version stated simply that FDR was not a candidate. 3 Personal Letters 40–41.
39. Thomas Wilson, Fluctuations in Income and Employment: With Special Reference to Recent American Experience 118 (New York: Pitman Publishing Corporation, 1948). Also see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 34–42 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
40. The New York Times, October 26 (Hoover), November 22 (Rockefeller), December 11 (Schwab), 1929. John Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said, “I can observe little on the horizon today to give us undue or great concern.” For a compilation of business predictions, see Review of Reviews (January 1930).
41. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 283, 292–295 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
42. Ibid. 140–141.
43. FDR to Howe, December 1, 1929, 3 Personal Letters 92. The day after the market dipped on October 23, Roosevelt wired The New York Times from Warm Springs: “Do not know detailed conditions but firmly believe fundamental industrial and trade conditions are sound.” FDRL.
44. The New York Times, December 11, 1929.
45. “All the evidences,” said Hoover, “indicated that the worst effects of the crash upon employment will have been past during the next sixty days.” The New York Times, January 21, 1930; Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 95–96.
46. FDR statement, March 29, 1930, Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Forty-eighth Governor of the State of New York, 1930 506 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon Co., 1934).
47. “I am convinced we have now passed the worst and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover,” said Hoover. Herbert Hoover, 1 State Papers and Other Public Writings 289–296, William Starr Myers, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934).
48. The New York Times, April 27, 1930.
49. Ibid.
50. FDR to Nicholas Roosevelt, May 19, 1930, FDRL.
51. FDR to Hollins N. Randolph, July 16, 1930, FDRL.
52. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 45.
53. Public Papers of Governor Roosevelt 1930 835–837; The New York Times, November 2, 1930.
54. FDR received 1,770,342 (59.1%) votes to Tuttle’s 1,045,231 (34.9%). Professor Robert Paris Carroll of Syracuse University, running on the Prohibitionist ticket, received 181,000 (6.0%) votes.
55. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 336.
56. Ida Tarbell, in the Delineator (October 1931).
57. Roy Jenkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 61 (New York: Henry Holt, 2003).
58. Marion Dickerman interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
59. Joseph P. Lash, Love, Eleanor 111–123 (New York: Doubleday, 1982). Also see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 340–343. In A World of Love, published in 1984, Lash concedes, “There may have been an affair” (New York: Doubleday, 297n).
60. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 429, 442.
61. James Roosevelt with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View 110–111 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976). David B. Roosevelt, ER’s grandson and the author of Grandmere: A Personal History of Eleanor Roosevelt, accepts James’s judgment. (New York: Warner Books, 2002, 139–141).
62. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 435. In 1937, when ER published This Is My Story, the first volume of her memoirs, she ordered four leather-bound copies. They were for FDR; her daughter, Anna; her longtime personal secretary, Malvina Thompson; and Earl Miller. Lash, Love, Eleanor508–509.
63. Miller later became chief inspector of prison guards in New York State. Lash reports that ER “wrote him faithfully, letters full of warmth and affection,” which suggests that Lash may have seen them. Eleanor and Franklin 481. In Love, Eleanor, published twenty years after ER’s death, Lash referred to “Eleanor’s many letters to Earl, which have disappeared” (page 116).
64. Cook, 1 Eleanor Roosevelt 436, 438.
THIRTEEN | Nomination
The epigraph is from FDR’s acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention, July 2, 1932. Official Report of the Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 374 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1932).
1. James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 62 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938).
2. Ibid.
3. The New York World, November 6, 1930; The New York Times, November 8, 1930. The Times, apparently taken in, reported that Farley’s announcement came as an unwelcome surprise to Roosevelt.
4. Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 82 (New York: Viking, 1947).
5. Farley, Behind the Ballots 67.
6. Professor Raymond Moley of Columbia University, one of FDR’s original brain trusters, said that “Farley possessed and cultivated, more than any man of his generation, the primary talent of a politician mentally to catalogue names and faces, to learn and retain the facts of association among people, to know who is related to whom by blood, business or politics, to labor with meticulous diligence by mail or otherwise to make and retain contacts.” 27 Masters of Politics 107 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1949).
7. Herbert Hoover, 3 Memoirs 55–56 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
8. State of New York, 1931 Public Papers of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt 173 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1937).
9. Roosevelt first broached the necessity for “social consciousness” on the part of government in his June 17, 1929, commencement address to Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard. “A century and a half ago our forefathers spoke in theoretical terms of equality, meaning thereby the equality of right. Much later came the ideal of the equality of opportunity.” FDRL.
10. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph 223 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956).
11. Immediately after the November 1930 election, Raskob composed a conciliatory open letter to President Hoover promising bipartisan support for the administration’s economic policies, including the historically high levels of the Smoot-Hawley tariff. The letter was signed by the last three Democratic presidential nominees, James Cox, John W. Davis, and Al Smith, as well as Senator Joseph T. Robinson, the Democratic leader of the Senate, and the incoming Speaker of the House, John Nance Garner of Texas. The New York Times, November 8, 1930.
12. For background on the Raskob-Shouse strategy, see Charles Michelson, The Ghost Talks 135–137 (New York: Putnam, 1944). Michelson was publicity director for the DNC at the time and a co-conspirator with Raskob and Shouse.
13. Hull and Roosevelt had met at the 1912 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore and remained in contact. Wheeler had been the first prominent Democrat to endorse Roosevelt for president. Byrd was acquainted with FDR through his brother, Admiral Richard Byrd, who had been an intimate friend and hunting companion of Franklin’s since FDR’s stint as assistant secretary of the Navy. In June 1930, Admiral Byrd stayed with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park following his flight to the South Pole and later was decorated by FDR with the Distinguished Service Medal of the State of New York. For Admiral Byrd’s medal ceremony, see 1930 Public Papers of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt 745 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1931).
14. Harry F. Byrd to FDR, February 27, 1931, Virginia preconvention file (1932), DNC. Hull also warned FDR: “I am thoroughly confirmed in the belief that the paramount purpose of the meeting thus far has been to make a wet recommendation to the next national convention and to write all those seeking important special privileges from the government to join the Democratic party on a wet issue alone, by virtually merging the two parties on economics, including special privileges.” February 22, 1931, FDRL.
15. FDR to Harry F. Byrd, March 2, 1931, ibid.
16. FDR to Al Smith, February 28, 1931. 3 The Roosevelt Letters 67, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1952) (FDR’s emphasis).
17. The New York Times, March 3, 1931.
18. Ibid.
19. FDR to Norman E. Mack, March 9, 1931. Mack was New York’s national committeeman and had accompanied Farley to the meeting. FDRL. Also see Farley, Behind the Ballots 73–76.
20. Cordell Hull, 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 143–145 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
21. Farley, Behind the Ballots 73.
22. Other early contributors included William A. Julian of Ohio, Laurence Steinhardt, Guy Helvering, Dave Hennen Morris, Eugene Lorton, and E. J. Machette, all of New York. Steinhardt later served as FDR’s ambassador to Peru (1937–39), the Soviet Union (1939–41), Turkey (1941–44), and Czechoslovakia (1944–48). Julian became treasurer of the United States; Helvering, commissioner of internal revenue; Morris, ambassador to Belgium; and Lorton a member of the International Joint Commission.
23. The New York Times, March 30, 1931. Also see Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph 205.
24. There were no replies from Oregon, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Straus did not poll New York, ostensibly because he thought it safe for Governor Roosevelt. More likely, he recognized it would spell trouble, given Tammany’s long affection for Smith. See Steve Neal, Happy Days Are Here Again 24 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).
25. The New York Times, March 30, 31, 1931. The remaining votes were scattered among thirteen favorite sons, of whom ex-senator Reed of Missouri led with 15.
26. Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly, The 1932 Campaign: An Analysis 60–61 (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935).
27. Flynn, You’re the Boss 84.
28. Farley, Behind the Ballots 82.
29. Ibid. 83.
30. Ibid. 85.
31. “I’ve just come back from New England,” Harris added, “and I found there as much enthusiasm for Governor Roosevelt as I have found in the South. There is no question that Governor Roosevelt is the most popular man … in the country.” The New York Times, October 14, 1931.
32. FDR to James J. Hoey, September 11, 1931, 3 Roosevelt Letters 73.
33. Time, April 27, 1931. The comment was made by Mrs. Jesse W. Nicholson, president of the National Women’s Democratic Law Enforcement League.
34. FDR to Hamilton V. Miles, May 4, 1931, FDRL.
35. Looker to FDR, February 23, 1931. Reprinted in Earle Looker, This Man Roosevelt 134–135 (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932).
36. “Being assured of your integrity,” Roosevelt wrote Looker, “I am prepared to permit you to make an investigation of my physical fitness, to give you every facility for thoroughly making it, and authority for you to publish its results without censorship from me.” Ibid. 135.
37. Ibid. 156–157. The technical portion of the report, which was not reprinted in Looker, was first published by John Gunther in Roosevelt in Retrospect 267 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). It states:
Heart: regular; rate, 80; no increased cardiac dullness; no murmurs; aortic dullness is not widened. Blood pressure 140/100.
Pulse: Regular 80—after examination by three physicians rate is 84, returning to 80 after 3 minutes. Electrocardiogram—left preponderance. Inverted T3. PR and QRS intervals normal.
Lungs: No dullness, no changes in respiratory murmurs, no extraneous sounds or rales; no abnormalities in voice sounds or fremitus. Chest expansion good.
Abdomen: Liver and spleen, not enlarged, no pain, no masses. Abdominal muscles show slight bulging on left. No hernia. Umbilical excursion upward.
No evidence of columnar degeneration of spinal cord. Both optic nerves normal. A false Babinski reflex is present on both sides (old “polio” symptom). Right knee jerk absent. Left shows responses in upper and outer portion of quadriceps extensor.
Some coldness of feet below knees; cocktail makes them right. The lower erector spinae are slightly affected. Gluteus medius partial R. and L.
Wassermann—negative with both alcoholic and cholesterinized antigen.
No symptoms of impotentia coeundi.
38. Looker, This Man Roosevelt 154–155.
39. Ibid. 140.
40. Earle Looker, “Is Franklin D. Roosevelt Fit to Be President?” Liberty 7–8, July 25, 1931.
41. The New York Times, November 22, 24, 1931.
42. Farley, Behind the Ballots 93.
43. Roosevelt’s announcement was made in a handwritten letter to Fred W. McLean, secretary of the Democratic State Committee of North Dakota, authorizing McLean to enter FDR’s name in the upcoming North Dakota primary. “I willingly give my consent, with full appreciation of the honor that has been done me.” The letter was dated January 22, 1932, but not released until the twenty-third. 1 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 623–624, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
44. In 1932, U.S. territories and possessions enjoyed thirty-eight votes at the Democratic National Convention, the same number as Michigan. The territorial vote was divided among Alaska, the Canal Zone, District of Columbia, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, each of which had six, and the Virgin Islands, which had two. Thanks to the labors of Farley and Howe, Roosevelt won all the territorial vote save for the Philippines, which voted for Smith.
45. Farley, Behind the Ballots 94.
46. The New York Times, February 8, 1932.
47. Ibid., January 24, 1932. There were 1,154 delegates to the 1932 Democratic Convention, 54 more than in 1928, the increase (reflecting the 1930 census) coming principally in California (+18), New York (+4), Ohio (+4), and Texas (+6). With the two-thirds rule in place, it required 770 to nominate.
48. Robert Jackson memorandum of meeting with Al Smith, January 26, 1932. James A. Farley Papers, Library of Congress.
49. When the Minnesota credentials fight went to the floor of the convention, the Roosevelt delegation was seated 658¼ to 492¾, a clear indication of FDR’s strength. The vote for Roosevelt was very close to Farley’s January 23 prediction.
50. The New York Times, March 4, 1932.
51. Wheeler spoke the argot of embattled plainsmen. “Murray was a good man,” he told radio listeners in North Dakota, “but he was being used by a corrupt gang in the East, which for want of better name might be called the ‘Wall Street Crowd.’ ” Quoted in Keith L. Bryant, Jr., Alfalfa Bill Murray 229 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968).
52. FDR defeated Murray 52,634 to 32,036, with almost 85,000 votes cast. That contrasts to the 11,000 votes cast in the 1928 Democratic primary. Contemporary reports from North Dakota suggest at least 70,000 Republicans crossed over—apparently identifying Hoover with the Depression and wishing to vote for change. Bismarck Tribune, Valley City Times-Record, March 17, 1932. Also see The New York Times, March 16, 17, 1932.
53. Against the advice of party elders, including Sam Rayburn, Judge G. H. Howard of Atlanta filed as a proxy candidate for Speaker of the House John Garner. Roosevelt carried all 159 counties and defeated Howard roughly 60,000 to 8,000.
54. “It would have been absolutely impossible to have gotten an instructed delegation if Mr. James A. Farley had not come to Davenport,” Iowa Democrat John T. Sullivan wrote FDR. “As soon as Mr. Farley appeared, the opposition melted away.”
55. Farley, Behind the Ballots 99.
56. William Crawford to Howe, January 29, 1932, Howe Papers, FDRL.
57. Albert C. Ritchie, “Give Us Democracy,” North American Review (October 1930). Also see The New York Times, January 8, 1932.
58. The New York Times, June 28, 1932.
59. Sam Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 56–57 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
60. Ibid. 58.
61. Ibid.
62. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 400 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
63. In the summer of 1932, Berle, together with economist Gardiner C. Means, published the groundbreaking study The Modern Corporation and Private Property. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968; reprint).
64. The New York Times, April 27, 1932.
65. Ernest K. Lindley, The Roosevelt Revolution—First Phase 7 (New York: Viking Press, 1933).
66. Moley, After Seven Years 5, 10–11.
67. For the text of the “forgotten man” speech, see 1932 Public Papers of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt 572–573 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1937). The term “forgotten man” was supplied by Moley and is taken from an 1883 essay by Yale economist William Graham Sumner. Sumner was referring to the middle class. The Forgotten Man and Other Essays 465–498 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1918).
Probusiness Democrats were aghast at FDR’s rhetoric. “I will take off my coat and fight to the end against any candidate who persists in any demagogic appeal to the masses of the working people of this country to destroy themselves by setting class against class and rich against poor,” rasped Al Smith, who had become the party’s principal spokesman for an alliance with big business. The New York Times, April 14, 1932.
68. The New York Times, April 19, 1932; 1932 Public Papers 577–583.
69. Ibid. 588–591.
70. Quoted in Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph 290. Garner was a reluctant candidate at best. On the eve of the convention he confided to his manager, Sam Rayburn, that he did not want a deadlocked convention. “I want to live long enough to see a Democrat in the White House. So we must make certain we don’t have a deadlock in Chicago. Sam, you and I both know that I am not going to be nominated for President. But a lot of these people who are pushing me are loyal friends, and … I couldn’t very well say no.” D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography 137–138 (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987).
71. H. L. Mencken, Making a President: A Footnote to the Saga of Democracy 117 (New York: Knopf, 1932).
72. Don Hayner and Tom McNamee, The Stadium 19 (Chicago: Performance Media, 1993).
73. Farley, Behind the Ballots 114.
74. Flynn, You’re the Boss 89.
75. The two-thirds rule was adopted at the Democratic party’s first convention, which was held in Baltimore in 1832. “A nomination made by two-thirds of the whole body would show a more general concurrence of sentiment in favor of a particular individual, would carry with it a greater moral weight and be more favorably received than one made by a smaller number,” wrote Senator William R. King of Alabama, a member of the committee that drafted the rule. Frank R. Kent, The Democratic Party: A History 116–119 (New York: Century, 1928).
76. Farley, Behind the Ballots 117.
77. Williams’s telegram was to his former Senate colleague James Reed of Missouri. Reed released it to The New York Times, June 26, 1932.
78. FDR to Farley, June 27, 1932. Farley, Behind the Ballots 119.
79. Alben W. Barkley, That Reminds Me 141 (New York: Doubleday, 1954).
80. Farley said afterward that the contesting Louisiana delegation, headed by former governor Jared Y. Sanders, had agreed to support Roosevelt if they were seated, but the Roosevelt camp believed Long’s claim to the seats to be superior. Farley, Behind the Ballots 124.
81. T. Harry Williams, Huey Long: A Biography 580 (New York: Knopf, 1969). Ed Flynn said, “Never in all my experience have I listened to a finer or more logical argument than [Long] presented for the seating of his delegation. You’re the Boss 96. For the text of Long’s presentation see Official Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic Convention 61–64 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1932).
82. Farley Convention Diary, Farley Papers, Library of Congress.
83. Iowa and North Carolina, which had jumped the traces to vote against Long, returned to the Roosevelt stable. Considering that Boston mayor James Michael Curley headed the Roosevelt Puerto Rico delegation, its status was surely questionable.
84. The Wheeler quotation is from Neal, Happy Days Are Here Again 179; Farley, Behind the Ballots 105.
85. Flynn, You’re the Boss 99. On the first ballot Walsh rendered three important rulings that assisted Roosevelt: he dismissed a request from Smith’s supporters that the Iowa delegation be polled; rejected Ritchie’s challenge to the unit rule in the District of Columbia; and denied a request that the Minnesota delegation be polled, holding that they had been instructed by the state convention. Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 289–292, 297–300.
86. Barkley had a remarkable capacity to ridicule: “Dr. [Nicholas Murray] Butler condemns [the Republican plank] because it is dry; Senator Borah because it is wet, and the American people condemn it because it is neither.” (Ironically, Barkley had been one of the chief sponsors of the Eighteenth Amendment.) For the text of Barkley’s keynote see the Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 17–39.
87. “The Great Prohibition Poll’s Final Report,” Literary Digest, April 30, 1932.
88. New York Herald Tribune, June 7, 1932.
89. The New York Times, June 10, 1932. Of the 934 votes for repeal, 499½ came from Roosevelt delegates. For the roll-call vote, see Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 188–189. Also see Peel and Donnelly, The 1932 Campaign 100.
90. Flynn, You’re the Boss 90, 93.
91. Arthur Mullen, Western Democrat 268 (New York: Wilfred Funk, 1940).
92. Flynn, You’re the Boss 100.
93. The New York Times, July 1, 1932.
94. William Allen White, column, The New York Times, July 1, 1932.
95. Farley, Behind the Ballots 138.
96. Ibid. 140.
97. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 70–71.
98. Ibid. 142.
99. Mullen, Western Democrat 275–276.
100. Farley, Behind the Ballots 143.
101. Flynn, You’re the Boss 101.
102. Flynn reports that Long shook his fist at Pat Harrison, but Farley credits Harrison with a yeoman effort to hold Mississippi for FDR. No one doubts that Long shook his fist, but it is more likely that the face into which it was shaken belonged to Conner. Flynn, You’re the Boss 101; compare Farley, Behind the Ballots 143.
103. Flynn, You’re the Boss 101.
104. George E. Allen, Presidents Who Have Known Me 55–56 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950).
105. Farley, Behind the Ballots 144–145.
106. Hull, 1 Memoirs 153–154.
107. Brice Clagett, Memorandum, Personal and Confidential, February 22, 1933. Mr. Clagett, McAdoo’s law partner and son-in-law, was staying with McAdoo in his penthouse suite at Sherman House and was privy to the McAdoo-Roper discussion.
108. Daniel Roper, Fifty Years in Public Life 259–260 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941).
109. Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 165–166 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
110. Thomas M. Storke, California Editor 321–325 (Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1958).
111. Farley, Behind the Ballots 151.
112. Moley, After Seven Years 30.
113. Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 325–327.
114. Ibid. 329.
115. Ibid. 332.
116. Baltimore Evening Sun, July 5, 1932. The journalist Elmer Davis, writing in Harper’s, believed the Democrats had nominated “the man who would probably make the weakest President of the dozen aspirants.” Veteran Washington correspondent Charles Willis Thompson quipped, “The Democrats have nominated nobody quite like him since Franklin Pierce.” Davis, “The Collapse of Politics,” 165 Harper’s 388; Thompson, “Wanted: Political Courage,” ibid. 726–727 (1932).
117. FDR was the first American candidate to utilize the airplane, but not the first on the world stage. In April 1932, in his runoff presidential campaign against Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, Adolf Hitler barnstormed Germany in a Junkers trimotor plane, very similar to the one in which FDR flew to Chicago. Hitler’s campaign (“Hitler über Deutschland”) was reported extensively in the American press, and it is inconceivable that FDR was unaware of it. (See The New York Times, April 3, 7, 1932.) Hitler lost to Hindenburg, 13.4 million–19.4 million, but following parliamentary elections in November was asked by Hindenburg to form a government (January 30, 1933). Joachim C. Fest, Hitler 320 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
118. Thomas Petzinger, Jr., Hard Landing 8 (New York: Random House, 1995).
119. Interview with Goodrich Murphy, cited in Neal, Happy Days 296.
120. Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 372–383.
FOURTEEN | Nothing to Fear
The epigraph is from Roosevelt’s inaugural address, March 4, 1933. 2 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 11–16, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
1. Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 122 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
2. Quoted in Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly, The 1932 Campaign: An Analysis 107 (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1935).
3. Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 596–597 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1932).
4. James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 176–177 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1938). Also see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph 337 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956).
5. The New York Times, July 6, 1932. For details of the trip, see Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 57–63 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).
6. The New York Times, July 12, 1932.
7. Robert F. Cross interview with Curtis Roosevelt, October 15, 1994, in Cross, Sailor in the White House 64.
8. The New York Times, July 13, 16, 17, 18, 1932.
9. Farley took it upon himself to repair relations with Tammany. Immediately following the convention, the new party chairman ventured into the wigwam on Seventeenth Street to “smoke the pipe of peace with the Tammany leaders,” as he put it. The occasion was the annual Fourth of July celebration, and Farley, uninvited, made the most of the meeting. “They were friendly enough, and I got the impression that it helped considerably to have me extend the olive branch first. A news writer in describing the incident said the good will of the Tammany Sachems was won over when I remarked, ‘Aren’t we all Democrats?’ It was a great line and I certainly would have used it if it had occurred to me.” Farley, Behind the Ballots 157.
10. Ibid. 158.
11. As Louis Howe put it, “It was determined that the state organizations themselves, not only theoretically but in reality, were to be entirely responsible for the campaign in their respective territories.” Louis McHenry Howe, North American Newspaper Alliance article, December 1932, quoted in Peel and Donnelly, 1932 Campaign 113–116.
12. Hull to Farley, July 14, 1932; Farley to Hull, July 15, 1932. Democratic National Committee manuscripts, 1932. FDRL.
13. Howe, North American Newspaper Alliance article.
14. Farley, Behind the Ballots 159–160, 194.
15. For the text of Hoover’s campaign speeches, see 2 State Papers and Other Public Writings of Herbert Hoover 289–487, William Starr Myers, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934).
16. Flynn, You’re the Boss 120.
17. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 80 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
18. The 1932 election expenses are based on figures filed by the two parties with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, as required by the Corrupt Practices Act of 1925 (43 Stat. 1070). For a detailed analysis, see Louise Overacker, “Campaign Funds in a Depression Year,” American Political Science Review 769–783 (October 1933). Also see Louise Overacker, Money in Elections (New York: Macmillan, 1932).
19. Peel and Donnelly, 1932 Campaign 116.
20. Aggregate expenses for both parties in 1932 totaled $5,146,027. With 39,816,522 votes cast, the cost per vote was 12.9 cents.
21. In 1924, Congress passed the Adjusted Compensation Act (43 Stat. 121) to pay former servicemen for the time spent away from home in World War I. Each veteran would receive a life insurance policy in 1925, which could be cashed after twenty years for $500 plus interest. These were the bonuses at issue. The story of the Bonus Army is told most effectively by Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen in their carefully researched and eminently readable The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York: Walker and Company, 2004).
22. Fleta Campbell Springer, “Glassford and the Siege of Washington,” 145 Harper’s 641–655 (1932). Also see John Dos Passos, “The Veterans Come Home to Roost,” 71 The New Republic 177 (1932); Donald J. Lisio, The President and Protest: Hoover, Conspiracy, and the Bonus Riot(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974). When food ran out, Glassford brought nearly a thousand dollars’ worth with his own money. “Why some of those boys soldiered for me; they’re my boys.” Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 260 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956).
23. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order 262.
24. The text of Hurley’s order to MacArthur, reprinted in The New York Times, July 29, 1932, reads as follows:
TO: General Douglas MacArthur, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army.
The President has just informed me that the civil government of the District of Columbia has reported to him that it is unable to maintain law and order in the District.
You will have United States troops proceed immediately to the scene of disorder. Cooperate fully with the District of Columbia police force which is now in charge. Surround the affected area and clear it without delay.
Turn over all prisoners to the civil authorities.
In your orders insist that any women and children who may be in the affected area be accorded every consideration and kindness. Use all humanity consistent with the due execution of this order.
Patrick J. Hurley
Secretary of War
25. Martin Blumenson, Patton: The Man Behind the Legend 133–135 (New York: William Morrow, 1985).
26. The New York Times, July 29, 1932.
27. Washington Daily News, July 29, 1932.
28. Rexford G. Tugwell, The Brains Trust 357–359 (New York: Viking Press, 1968).
29. Ibid. 427–434. “I’ve known Doug for years,” FDR told Tugwell. “You’ve never heard him talk, but I have. He has the most pretentious style of anyone I know. He talks in a voice that might come from the oracle’s cave. He never doubts and never argues or suggests; he makes pronouncements. What he thinks is final. Besides, he’s intelligent, a brilliant soldier like his father before him. He got to be a brigadier general in France. I thought he was the youngest until I read that Glassford was. There could be times that Doug would exactly fit. We’ve just had a preview.”
30. Farley, Behind the Ballots 160–161.
31. Ibid. 65, 155.
32. Henry L. Stimson, MS diary, June 18, 1931, Yale University. When the campaign began, Stimson worried that Hoover and his advisers had underestimated Roosevelt. That, plus the economy, “gives us an uphill fight. Also, there is no split in the Democratic party as there was in 1896, and there is no Mark Hanna in the Republican party.” Ibid., July 5, 1932.
33. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 60 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).
34. Stimson, MS diary, September 6, 1932. The White House continued to pressure Stimson, but he refused to comply. “I think that to attack a presidential candidate who is a cripple and who has a pleasant appearance, particularly when the attack comes from a close advisor of the President, is about the most dangerous thing that the President and his foolish advisors can settle on, and I hate to be the goat.” Ibid., September 22, 1932.
35. In 1917, Stimson, at the age of forty-nine, volunteered for active duty and was assigned as first a major, then a lieutenant colonel, to the 305th Field Artillery Battalion of the 77th Division. Promoted to colonel, he commanded the 31st Artillery Regiment at war’s end. Stimson’s battalion was the first American unit to fire at the enemy in France, and he was the first secretary of war to serve on active duty afterward. (At FDR’s request, Patrick J. Hurley returned to the Army as a major general in World War II.) Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 91–100 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947).
36. Herbert Hoover, 3 Memoirs 233 (New York: Macmillan, 1952).
37. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years 362 (New York: Random House, 1979), and many others. See FDR’s remarkable speech to the Republicans for Roosevelt League at the Metropolitan Opera House, November 3, 1932, in which FDR managed to find many good words for Calvin Coolidge, “a great figure in our national life and a great Republican.” For text, see 1932 Public Papers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Forty-eighth Governor of the State of New York 662–665 (Albany, N.Y.: J. B. Lyon, 1939).
38. The Horseman of Destruction, said Roosevelt, was “the embodiment of governmental policies so unsound, so inimical to true progress that it left behind in its trail economic paralysis, industrial chaos, poverty and suffering.” The Horseman of Delay reflected the Republicans’ do-nothing attitude. “When they say ‘don’t change horses while crossing the stream,’ what they mean is ‘don’t run the risk of crossing the stream at all.’ ” The Horseman of Deceit intended “to cover the trail of the Horsemen of Destruction and Delay.” “Bringing up the rear is the Horseman of Despair. He tells you economic conditions must work themselves out. He tries to close the door of hope in your face.” For full text, see 1 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 831–842.
39. For a firsthand description of Hoover’s hostile reception in Detroit, see Thomas L. Stokes, Chip off My Shoulder 304–305 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940).
40. Clapper’s forty-minute interview with Hoover was on February 27, 1931. Olive E. Clapper, Washington Tapestry 3–4 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946).
41. Hoover, 3 Memoirs 195.
42. The New York Times, November 1, 1932. For complete text, see 2 State Papers of Herbert Hoover 408–428. The quotation is at page 418.
43. The New York Times, November 6, 1932; New York Herald Tribune, November 6, 1932. For the complete text of Hoover’s speech, see 2 State Papers 449–466.
44. E. W. Starling, Starling of the White House 300 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946).
45. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 87.
46. Socialist candidate Norman Thomas received 883,990 votes and the Communist William Z. Foster 102,221. A sprinkling of ten other candidates, including Prohibitionist William David Upshaw and the Liberty Party’s William Hope Harvey, received a total of 128,758. Roosevelt’s overall percentage was 57.42 to Hoover’s 39.64. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections 289, 304–305 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
47. The New York Times, November 9, 1932.
48. Lela Stiles, The Man Behind Roosevelt: The Story of Louis McHenry Howe 216 (Cleveland: World, 1954); Farley, Behind the Ballots 186.
49. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 74–75 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
50. Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years 506–507 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
51. Rexford Tugwell, “Notes from a New Deal Diary,” December 24, 1932, FDRL.
52. Edmund Wilson, “Hull House in 1933: III,” The New Republic 320 (February 1, 1933).
53. 113 Literary Digest 6 (November 12, 1932).
54. Avis Carlson, “Deflating the Schools,” 167 Harper’s 705–715 (1933).
55. 113 Literary Digest 10 (May 7, 1932).
56. The New York Times, January 22, 1933; The Denver Post, February 12, 1933; A. William Hoglund, “Wisconsin Dairy Farmers on Strike,” 35 Agricultural History 24–34 (1961). Also see Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West: 1900–1939 435–448 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951).
57. Hoover to FDR, February 17, 1933, in W. S. Myers and W. H. Newton, The Hoover Administration: A Documented Narrative 338–341 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).
58. Hoover to D. A. Reed, February 20, 1933, ibid. 351.
59. FDR to Hoover, March 1, 1933, ibid. 344–345.
60. Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 292 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
61. Stimson, MS diary, January 9, 1933. Also see Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service 292–293.
62. Tugwell, MS diary, January 17 [?], 1933, FDRL.
63. Raymond Moley, After Seven Years 95 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
64. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 371 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Hull was initially reluctant to take the post because he could not afford the expected social expenses. FDR relieved him of the social burden by appointing an old (and wealthy) friend, William Phillips, as undersecretary. Phillips later served as Roosevelt’s ambassador to Italy.
65. Moley, After Seven Years 121.
66. In addition to successfully running American Car and Foundry, the world’s largest producer of railroad rolling stock, Woodin was a skilled musician and composer whose published works included The Covered Wagon Suite, The Oriental Suite, and “The Franklin Delano Roosevelt March,” written for the inauguration.
67. Morgan, FDR 372, citing Alfred B. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 374 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
68. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 76. Also see Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 357–358 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). “My zest for life is rather gone for the time being,” ER wrote to Lorena Hickok. “I get like this sometimes. It makes me feel like a dead weight and my mind goes round and round like a squirrel in a cage. I want to run and I can’t, and I despise myself.” ER to Lorena Hickok, in Joseph P. Lash, Love, Eleanor 159 (New York: Doubleday, 1982).
69. Nourmahal, the flagship of the New York Yacht Club, was built in Germany for Astor in 1928. It was described by The New York Times as “an ocean liner in miniature … the biggest and fastest ocean-going motor yacht ever built.” It had a cruising range of 19,000 miles and a top speed of sixteen knots. In 1934, FDR would return to Nourmahal to watch the America’s Cup race from her decks. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 275–278 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
70. Vincent Astor, a nominal Republican, contributed $25,000 to FDR’s campaign in 1932, making him one of the ten largest contributors. The verse is quoted in James Roosevelt, Affectionately, F.D.R. 278.
71. FDR to SDR, February 6, 1933, 3 The Roosevelt Letters 100–101, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1952).
72. FDR was quick to express his gratitude to Mrs. Cross. From his train returning to New York he wired, “How much greater and sadder a tragedy was averted by your unselfish courage and quick thinking of course no one can estimate. It now appears that by Divine Providence the lives of all the victims of the assassin’s disturbed aim will be spared.” The New York Times, February 20, 1933. Roosevelt spoke too soon. Both Mayor Cermak and Mrs. Joseph H. Gill, the wife of the president of Florida Light and Power Company, the woman shot in the abdomen, perished from infection.
73. Roosevelt gave the statement to the press immediately afterward. The New York Times, February 17, 1933. Jackson Memorial Hospital is 2.6 miles from Bay Front Park.
74. Some have speculated that Zangara had intended to kill Cermak all along. That is not supported by the evidence. Zangara had never been in Chicago and had no ties with the Mob. Asked at his trial if he knew Mayor Cermak, Zangara replied, “No, not at all. I just went there to kill the president. The capitalists killed my life. I suffer, always suffer. I make it 50-50—someone else must suffer.”
Q: Do you want to live?
A: No. Put me in the electric chair.
Q: Are you sorry only because you tried to kill Mr. Roosevelt?
A: No. I am sorry because I failed.
The courtroom examination was reported in The New York Times, March 10, 11, 21, 1933. Zangara’s life is treated in some detail by Kenneth S. Davis in FDR: The New York Years 432–434.
75. Moley, After Seven Years 139.
76. Thomas W. Lamont to FDR, February 27, 1933, FDRL. Lamont had rented Roosevelt’s East Sixty-fifth Street town house for the seven years FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy and remained on intimate terms with the president-elect.
77. Raymond Moley, The First New Deal 96–124 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966).
78. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 36 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
79. The original Trading with the Enemy Act was enacted October 6, 1917, chap. 106, 40 Stat. 411, and has been recodified more than a dozen times, most recently on March 10, 1939, chap. 75, 46 Stat. 84.
80. Hoover was concerned about the fate of Walter H. Newton, a longtime Republican congressman from Minnesota who had resigned his House seat in 1929 to become the president’s administrative assistant. Newton had no outside source of income, and in his final days Hoover had nominated him to a federal judgeship but the Senate had blocked his confirmation. FDR happily agreed to take care of Newton and two weeks later appointed him to the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal 200–201 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973). Also see ER, This I Remember 77, and Grace Tully, FDR: My Boss 68.
81. Ed Hill transcript, FDRL.
82. See the correspondence between Charles E. Cropley, clerk of the court, and FDR, February 20, 25, 1933, and Chief Justice Hughes’s reply of February 28, 1933. “I am glad to have the suggestion that you repeat the oath in full instead of saying simply ‘I do,’ ” wrote Hughes. “I think the repetition is the more dignified and appropriate course.” 3 Roosevelt Letters 102–105.
83. The text of the presidential oath, reproduced above, is found in Article II, section 1, of the Constitution.
84. Roosevelt, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 11–16.
85. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
86. Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady 104–105 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980).
87. In the confusion following the inauguration FDR’s family Bible was misplaced, and there was some difficulty finding one for Justice Cardozo. Eventually Chief Usher Ike Hoover located one in the locker of Charles S. Baum, a White House policeman, and it was used to administer the cabinet oaths. The New York Times, March 5, 7, 1933. It required less than thirty minutes for the Senate to unanimously confirm all of Roosevelt’s appointees. No hearings were held.
88. Michael Teague, Mrs. L: Conversations with Alice Roosevelt Longworth 171, 161 (New York: Doubleday, 1981).
FIFTEEN | One Hundred Days
The epigraph is a remark FDR made at dinner in the White House, March 12, 1933, prior to sending his message to Congress requesting that the Volstead Act (48 Stat. 305) be amended to permit the sale of beer and light wine. Ernest K. Lindley, The Roosevelt Revolution 91 (New York: Viking, 1933).
1. Inaugural address, March 4, 1933. 2 Public Papers and Address of Franklin D. Roosevelt 12, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
2. Prior to adoption of the Twentieth (Lame Duck) Amendment in 1933, the new Congress did not convene until late in the year following its election (variably set by statute). The Twentieth Amendment set January 4 as the date for Congress to meet, but it was not yet in effect. The Senate, of course, is a continuing body and is always in session, which explains the confirmation of FDR’s cabinet appointees on March 4.
3. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
4. For the texts of Roosevelt’s proclamations declaring a bank holiday (No. 2039) and the recall of Congress (No. 2038), see 2 Public Papers and Addresses 24–26, 17.
5. Hiram Johnson to his sons, March 12, 1933, Johnson Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
6. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 278 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
7. Address before the Governors’ Conference at the White House, March 6, 1933. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 18–21.
8. Pledge of Support to the President by the Governors’ Conference, March 6, 1933. Ibid. 21–24.
9. The caucus resolution gave Majority Leader Joseph Robinson authority to convene the caucus “for the purpose of considering any measure recommended by the President and that all Democratic senators shall be bound by vote of the majority of the conference.” The New York Times,March 7, 1933. The prior caucus rule had required a two-thirds vote. In the House of Representatives, it continued to require a two-thirds vote to bind the Democratic caucus.
10. In addition to Huey Long, Senators George McGill of Kansas and Edward Costigan of Colorado voted against. Ibid.
11. Raymond Moley, After Seven Years 151 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
12. Ibid. 152. The bills were copies of the national banknote series of 1929 and printed from the same plates. They carried the phrase “National Currency— secured by United States bonds deposited with the Treasurer of the United States of America or by like deposit of other securities.” The New York Times, March 14, 1933.
13. The drafting was largely the work of Walter Wyatt, general counsel of the Federal Reserve Board. Moley, After Seven Years 152.
14. FDR held 337 press conferences during his first term. He scheduled his conferences for 10:00 A.M. Wednesday, and—to give the morning papers a break—4:00 P.M. on Friday. Attendance was limited to the White House press corps. Editors and visiting journalists saw the president separately. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal 224n (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).
15. First Press Conference, March 8, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 30–38.
16. The New York Times, March 9, 1933.
17. Graham J. White, FDR and the Press 7; Richard Lee Strout, in Katie Louchheim, ed., The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak 13 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). In addition to writing for The Christian Science Monitor, Strout wrote the weekly “TRB” column in The New Republic. Also see Theodore G. Joslin, “President Meets the Press,” Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.), March 4, 1934, reprinted in 2 Public Papers and Addresses 40–45.
18. Liva Baker, The Justice from Beacon Hill 641 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus 414 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945). Holmes served as a captain of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, fought at Balls Bluff, Fair Oaks, Malvern Hill, and Antietam, and was wounded three times, twice so seriously that he was given up for dead.
19. Time, March 20, 1933.
20. Holmes to FDR, March 16, 1933, FDRL.
21. Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of the Constitution 517–518 (New York: Henry Holt, 1996). Also see Charles Warren, 1 The Supreme Court in United States History 758–760 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1926).
22. Worcester v. Georgia, 6 Peters (31 U.S.) 515 (1832). Horace Greeley’s gratuitous attribution first appears in volume 1 of his The American Conflict 106 (Hartford, Conn.: O. D. Case, 1864).
23. “Recommendation to the Congress for Legislation to Control Resumption of Banking,” March 9, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 45–47.
24. The New York Times, March 10, 1933.
25. Ibid.
26. The seven senators to vote against the Emergency Banking Act were William E. Borah (Idaho); Robert Carey (Wyoming); Porter Dale (Vermont); Robert La Follette (Wisconsin); Gerald Nye (North Dakota); Edward Costigan (Colorado); and Henrik Shipstead (Minnesota).
27. Moley, After Seven Years 154. “I shall never forget the look of joy on the faces of [California senators] Hiram Johnson and William McAdoo when I stepped out of Woodin’s office to give them the news,” wrote Moley.
28. The comment was made by FDR to J.F.T. O’Connor, a California lawyer, when he appointed O’Connor comptroller of the currency in May 1933. O’Connor, diary, May 29, 1933.
29. Lindley, Roosevelt Revolution 87–89.
30. The text of FDR’s message is in 2 Public Papers and Addresses 49–51.
31. Enacted March 20, 1933, 48 Stat. 8.
32. Roosevelt acknowledged his debt to McDuffie by appointing him to the U.S. District Court in Alabama the following year.
33. The New York Times, March 11, 1933.
34. “The First Fireside Chat,” March 12, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 61–66. The initial draft was prepared by Charles Michelson of the Democratic National Committee and was vetted by Hoover’s undersecretary of the Treasury, Arthur Ballantine. FDR took the vetted draft and rewrote it Sunday afternoon, dictating to Grace Tully and putting it into language easily comprehensible to the average citizen. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal 12–13 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
35. Will Rogers, Sanity Is Where You Find It 167, Donald Day, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).
36. Moley, After Seven Years 155. Moley gives credit to Treasury secretary Woodin, whose “imagination and sturdiness and common sense” carried the day.
37. The Wall Street Journal, March 13, 1933; Stimson to FDR, March 14, 1933; Hearst to FDR, n.d. FDRL. The Baker quote is in The New York Times, March 19, 1933.
38. Lindley, Roosevelt Revolution 91.
39. “I recommend to the Congress the passage of legislation for the immediate modification of the Volstead Act, in order to legalize the manufacture and sale of beer and other beverages of such alcoholic content as is permissible under the Constitution; and to provide under such manufacture and sale, by substantial taxes, a proper and much needed revenue for the government.
“I deem action at this time to be of the highest importance.” 2 Public Papers and Addresses 66–67.
40. Third Press Conference, March 15, 1933, ibid. 67–73.
41. The New York Times, March 12, 1933. McDuffie’s decision to demand a roll call was crucial to the passage of the economy act. In caucus (where the proceedings were secret) a majority of Democrats deserted FDR, but when threatened with having to take a public stand against the president most returned to the fold. Ibid. The quotation is from McDuffie’s ally, Congressman Clifton Woodrum of Virginia. Congressional Record 214, 73d Cong., 1st Sess.
42. FDR, “New Measures to Rescue Agriculture,” March 16, 1933. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 74.
43. “I seek an end to the threatened loss of homes and productive capacity now faced by hundreds of thousands of American farm families.” “A Message Asking for Legislation to Save Farm Mortgages from Foreclosure,” April 3, 1933. Ibid. 100–101.
44. Russell Lord, The Wallaces of Iowa 330 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947).
45. 48 Stat. 31. The Emergency Farm Mortgage Act was Title II of the Agricultural Adjustment Act (48 Stat. 31, 41).
46. FDR’s message to Congress on the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, and the Public Works Administration was March 21, 1933. The securities regulation message was March 29; TVA, April 10; home mortgages, April 13; emergency railroad legislation, May 4, 1933. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 80–83, 93, 122–128, 135, 153–154.
47. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 336.
48. Proceedings of the 1932 Democratic National Convention 372–383 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1932).
49. Moley, After Seven Years 174.
50. Press Conference, March 15, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 70.
51. FDR, message to Congress, March 21, 1933, ibid. 81.
52. Senate Education and Labor Committee, House Labor Committee, Unemployment Relief: Joint Hearings 46, 69, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933).
53. Press Conference, March 22, 1933, 1 Press Conference Transcripts 64–66, FDRL.
54. Green to FDR, September 18, 1933, FDRL.
55. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Education of a General 276–280 (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
56. Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933, Public Law 15, 73d Congress, May 12, 1933.
57. “The half-billion dollars for direct relief of States won’t last a month if Harry L. Hopkins, the new relief administrator, maintains the pace he set yesterday in disbursing more than $5,000,000 during his first two hours in office,” said The Washington Post.Quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History 44 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
58. Ibid. 48. Hopkins’s salary as administrator was $8,000 annually. In New York he earned $15,000.
59. Federal expenditures in FY 1932–33 amounted to $4.6 billion, receipts totaled $1.9 billion, leaving a deficit of $2.7 billion. Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 711 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
60. Charles Wyzanski to his parents, April 29, 1933. Wyzanski MSS., reproduced in Freidel, Launching the New Deal 431. On loan from the Department of Labor to the Justice Department, Wyzanski successfully defended the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act before the Supreme Court in 1937. NLRB v. Jones Laughlin 301 U.S. 1 (1937); Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937). He was appointed to the U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by FDR in 1941.
61. The public works program was Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Public Law 77, 73rd Congress.
62. The 1932 Democratic platform stated, “We advocate protection of the investing public by requiring to be filed with the Government, and carried in advertisements, of all offerings of foreign and domestic stocks and bonds, true information as to bonuses, commissions, principal invested, and interests of the sellers.”
63. Message to Congress, “Recommendation for Federal Supervision of Investment Securities in Interstate Commerce,” March 29, 1932, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 93–94. The White House public statement concerning the legislation is ibid. 94.
64. Securities Act of 1933, 48 Stat. 74, Public Law 22, 73rd Congress. For FDR’s statement when he signed the act, as well as figures pertaining to the act’s effectiveness, see 2 Public Papers and Addresses 213–215. The most useful description of the law’s passage remains James M. Landis, “The Legislative History of the Securities Act of 1933,” 28 George Washington Law Review 33 ff. (October 1959).
65. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 320–321.
66. Hoover, 1 The State Papers of Herbert Hoover 526–527, William Starr Myers, ed. (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1934).
67. The date of FDR’s visit to Muscle Shoals was January 21, 1933. In addition to Norris, the delegation included Senators Clarence C. Dill, Cordell Hull, Kenneth McKellar, Hugo Black, and John H. Bankhead; Congressmen John Rankin, Luther Lister Hill, and John J. McSwain; plus Frank P. McNitch of the Federal Power Commission, Frank P. Walsh of the New York Power Authority, and E. F. Scattergood of the Los Angeles power system.
68. The New York Times, January 22, 1933.
69. Message to Congress, “A Suggestion for Legislation to Create the Tennessee Valley Authority,” April 10, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 122–123.
70. Rankin’s comment was to the House Military Affairs Committee, quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 324–325.
71. Congressional Record 2178–2179, 73rd Cong., 1st Sess.; The New York Times, April 26, 1933.
72. 48 Stat. 58; Public Law 17, 73rd Congress.
73. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 148–149 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
74. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 136n.
75. “A Message Asking for Legislation to Save Small Home Mortgages from Foreclosure,” April 13, 1933, ibid. 135–136.
76. Home Owners Loan Corporation Act, 48 Stat. 128; Public Law 43, 73rd Congress. The $20,000 ceiling in 1933 would be the rough equivalent of $280,000 in 2006.
77. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 233–237n.
78. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 298.
79. Moley, After Seven Years 369–370.
80. William Lindsay White, Bernard Baruch 82 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950).
81. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century 302–303 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980).
82. Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow,” New York Herald Tribune, April 18, 1933.
83. Those in attendance included Secretaries Hull and Woodin, Budget Director Lewis Douglas, Moley, James Warburg, Charles Tausig, Herbert Feis, William Bullitt, and Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
84. Warburg diary, April 18, 1933, quoted in Freidel, Launching the New Deal 333.
85. Moley, After Seven Years 159.
86. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 200.
87. Moley, After Seven Years.
88. Thirteenth Press Conference, April 19, 1933, Complete Presidential Press Conferences 153 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972). FDR’s reference to Lippmann appears in the original official transcript. It was deleted when Judge Rosenman republished the transcript in Roosevelt’s Public Papers. Cf. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 137–141.
89. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 202; Leffingwell to FDR, October 2, 1933, FDRL.
90. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 112–113 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
91. “It was as comfortable as a camp can be,” Eleanor told her press conference afterward. “Remarkably clean and orderly, grand-looking boys, a fine spirit. There was no kind of disturbance, nothing but the most courteous behavior.” Quoted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt46 (New York: Viking, 1999).
92. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 15.
93. For a firsthand account of FDR’s surprised response to the Black bill, see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 192–195 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
94. “A Recommendation to the Congress to Enact the National Industrial Recovery Act to Put People to Work,” May 17, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 202–206.
95. 48 Stat. 195, Public Law 67, 73rd Congress.
96. Using a conversion factor of 13.89, that would amount to roughly $35,000 currently.
97. Press Conference, March 8, 1933, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 37.
98. Quoted in Ray Tucker, “Ickes—and No Fooling,” Collier’s, September 30, 1933. Jonathan Alter’s lively The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006) appeared too late to be helpful, but see especially pages 207–318.
SIXTEEN | New Deal Ascendant
The epigraph is from Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power 229 (New York: New American Library, 1960).
1. J. B. West with Mary Lynn Kotz, Upstairs at the White House 18, 23 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973).
2. FDR’s daily schedule is discussed by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal 511–515 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 201–205 (New York: Random House, 1979); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal 267–288 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); and Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 284 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). I am indebted to each.
3. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 65–66. Gloster, a champion trotter, was raised by FDR’s father, sold to Leland Stanford, and killed in a train wreck on the West Coast. See chapter 1.
4. Time, March 20, 1933.
5. Eleanor lunched daily in the Private Dining Room, adjacent to the State Dining Room, on the first floor. Chief Usher West reports these were formal lunches for at least twelve and that ER often wrote the place cards herself. West, Upstairs at the White House19. For Stimson’s luncheons with FDR, see Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 300–301 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). For Flynn’s visits, see Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 161–168 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
6. Admiral McIntire was an ear, nose, and throat specialist. His main concern was FDR’s sinus problems and head colds. See Ross McIntire, White House Physician (New York: Putnam, 1946).
7. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
8. Hemingway’s comments are in a letter to his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, from the Bahamas, August 2, 1937. “Martha Gellhorn, the girl who fixed it up for Joris Ivens and I to go there [Hemingway married Ms. Gellhorn in 1940] ate three sandwiches in the Newark airport before we flew to Washington. We thought she was crazy at the time but she said the food was always uneatable and everybody ate before they went there for dinner.” Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 470, Carlos Baker, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981).
9. Ickes’s comments were written after the annual dinner the Roosevelts gave for the cabinet on December 18, 1934. “Wine was served for the first time since prohibition went into effect. Mrs. Roosevelt had announced she would serve one glass each of two domestic wines and she kept her word. The sherry was passable but the champagne was undrinkable.… I am bound to say that probably on only one other occasion have I ever tasted worse champagne, and it does seem to me that if decent champagne can’t be made in the United States, it ought to be permissible, even for the White House, to serve imported champagne.” 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 248–249 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).
10. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 93 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
11. Henrietta Nesbitt, White House Diary 19–20 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
12. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999).
13. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 115 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).
14. Nesbitt, White House Diary 66.
15. James Roosevelt with Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View 213 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976). ER chided James for his criticism of Mrs. Nesbitt. If the president did not like the food or the menus, it was her responsibility since she approved them, wrote Eleanor. ER to James Roosevelt, July 30, 1959, quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 501 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
16. Lillian Rogers Parks and Frances S. Leighton, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 69–70 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). The observation is by Ms. Parks.
17. Nesbitt, White House Diary 185.
18. Parks, The Roosevelts 30–31.
19. Ibid. 170.
20. “Mary was devoted heart and soul to the Boss and warred with the rest of the White House management to see to it that he got what he wanted,” wrote Grace Tully. “From the time of her arrival the fare in the family kitchen, at least, took a decided turn for the better.” F.D.R.: My Boss117–118.
21. Ibid.
22. West, Upstairs at the White House 78.
23. Ickes, 1 Secret Diary 461.
24. John Garner interview, U.S. News & World Report, March 8, 1957.
25. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 117 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
26. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 513, 580–581.
27. Amberjack II, built in 1931 by George Lawley and Son of Neponset, Massachusetts, was owned by Paul Drummond Rust, Jr., a college friend of James. Seaworthy and easy to handle, the two-masted vessel had finished third the year before in Fastnet, the grueling 3,000-mile transatlantic race to England, though it was the smallest vessel competing. If not luxurious, it was well appointed and had a 40-horsepower gasoline auxiliary engine. Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House: The Seafaring Life of FDR 9 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).
28. Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror, June 24, 1933.
29. Edmund W. Starling and Thomas Sugrue, Starling of the White House 308–311 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946).
30. Cross, Sailor in the White House 13.
31. The New York Times, June 30, 1933.
32. Charles Hurd, When the New Deal Was Young and Gay 165–170 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1965).
33. Arthur Krock interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
34. Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 205 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
35. Davis, FDR: New Deal Years 339. In 1922, Walsh served as director-general of the Papal Relief Mission to the USSR and also as the Vatican’s representative to the Soviet government.
36. For the State Department’s attitude, see Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace 17–22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). Morgenthau’s role is discussed extensively in John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries 54 ff. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
37. When a newsman asked FDR who was going to conduct the negotiations with Litvinov, the president pointed to himself and said, “This man here.” Undersecretary of State William Phillips tried to persuade FDR to say publicly that the State Department was not being cut out, but Roosevelt refused. Martin Weil, A Pretty Good Club: The Founding Fathers of the U.S. Foreign Service 87–88 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), quoting Caroline Phillips’s journal, October 27, 1933.
38. Cf., United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324 (1937); United States v. Pink, 315 U.S. 203 (1942), emphasizing the sovereign power of the U.S. government to conduct foreign relations. “We take judicial notice of the fact that coincident with the assignment, the President recognized the Soviet Government, and normal diplomatic relations were established,” said Justice George Sutherland for a unanimous Supreme Court in Belmont. “The effect of this was to validate, so far as this country is concerned, all acts of the Soviet Government here involved.… [As for the taking clause] our constitution, laws and policies have no extraterritorial operation, unless in respect of our own citizens.” Justice Sutherland, it should be noted, was the intellectual leader of the conservative bloc on the Supreme Court in the 1930s.
For the text of the Litvinov Assignment, see 2 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 484–486, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1938).
39. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal 207.
40. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 178 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
41. Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth 208 (New York: Doubleday, 1935).
42. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 178.
43. On January 7, 1935, in Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388, the Court, speaking through Chief Justice Hughes, struck down the “hot oil” provisions (Section 9) of the NIRA (Cardozo dissenting). Four and a half months later, in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935), a unanimous Court completed the process and held all code provisions in the NIRA unconstitutional.
44. 295 U.S. at 501.
45. Press conference remarks, May 31, 1935, 4 Public Papers and Addresses 205.
46. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 252–253. Marion Dickerman, a houseguest in the White House when the decision was announced, reports that she dreaded going down to dinner that evening. But FDR showed “no sign of dismay or even minor perturbation. The Supreme Court was not so much as mentioned!” When Marion went to Roosevelt’s bedroom to say good night, “He was sitting up in bed with his old sweater on, working on his stamps. To all appearances he was perfectly happy and at peace with the world.” Kenneth S. Davis, Invincible Summer 134–135 (New York: Atheneum, 1974). The NRA was terminated by Executive Order 7252, December 21, 1935. 4 Public Papers and Addresses 503.
47. Executive Order 6420B, Creation of Civil Works Administration, 2 Public Papers and Addresses 456–457. Ickes proved surprisingly cooperative. “This would put a serious crimp in the balance of the public works fund,” he confided to his diary, “but we all thought it ought to be done.” November 6, 1933. 1 Secret Diary of Harold Ickes 116.
48. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 175.
49. The final total was $933 million, of which $740 million went for wages. 2 Public Papers and Addresses 457–458.
50. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 220.
51. Quoted in Harry Hopkins, Spending to Save 114 (New York: Norton, 1936).
52. Lieutenant Colonel John C. H. Lee, “The Federal Civil Works Administration: A Study Covering Its Organization and Operation,” Hopkins Papers, FDRL.
53. For FDR’s message requesting the SEC, February 9, 1934, see 3 Public Papers and Addresses 90–91. The act was signed into law on June 6, 1934. 73rd Congress, Public Law 291; 48 Stat. 881. The FCC message was sent to the Hill on February 26, 1934, and the act was signed June 19, 1934. 73rd Congress, Public Law 416; 48 Stat. 1064. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 107–108.
54. The Railroad Retirement Act was signed into law June 30, 1934. It was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court May 6, 1935, Justice Roberts speaking for a sharply divided (5–4) Court. Alton Railroad Co. v. Railroad Retirement Board, 295 U.S. 330 (1935).
55. FDR signed the Gold Reserve Act on January 30, 1934. 48 Stat. 337. The following day he issued Executive Order 2072, fixing the gold content of the dollar at “155⁄21 grains nine-tenths fine,” which was 59.06 percent of its former value. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 64–76.
56. FDR’s letter to Rainey, June 18, 1934, is in the personal collection of Conrad Black and is quoted at page 322 of his Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
57. When Roosevelt finished his address he winked at James Farley, one of the invited guests at the White House: “Jim, didn’t you think it was a good campaign document?” Farley agreed wholeheartedly, “and we made much use of it.” James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 47 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
58. “None of them have been consulted by the President,” wrote Kent. “Most of them have been completely ignored. Yet until two years ago, they were the most conspicuous and respected leaders of the party.” Frank Kent, “Which Way Will the Elephant Jump?,” American Magazine(December 1935); Kent, Without Grease 8–10 (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1936).
59. Quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 484.
60. “To put it in a Biblical way,” FDR continued, “it has been said that there are two great Commandments—one is to love God, and the other to love your neighbor. A gentleman with a rather ribald sense of humor suggested that the two particular tenets of this new organization say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor, and he also raised the question as to whether the other name for their God was not ‘property.’ ” Press Conference 137, August 24, 1934. 4 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 18 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
61. FDR to Bullitt, 3 Personal Letters 417.
62. For the impact of Long and Coughlin, see especially Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982).
63. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 24 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
64. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal 103–104.
65. Quoted ibid. 105.
66. Garner to FDR, October 1, 1934, FDRL.
67. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 47–48.
68. Ten members of the House belonged to minor parties, as did two senators (Shipstead and La Follette).
69. The New York Times, November 7, 11, 1934; Time, November 19, 1934, quoted in Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 507.
70. Lois Gordon and Alan Gordon, eds., American Chronicle: Year by Year Through the Twentieth Century 315, 324 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
71. Leuchtenburg, Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal 93.
72. Gordon and Gordon, American Chronicle 324–332. It Happened One Night also won an Oscar for best picture.
73. FDR, “Message to Congress Reviewing the Broad Objectives and Accomplishments of the Administration,” June 8, 1934. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 287–292.
74. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 282–283.
75. “A Greater Future Economic Security for the American People,” Message to Congress, January 17, 1935, 4 Public Papers and Addresses 43–56.
76. Ibid. 296.
77. Ibid. 294.
78. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 266.
79. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 308–309.
80. Ibid. 311.
81. 119 Literary Digest (June 29, 1935), quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 131.
82. 4 Public Papers and Addresses 324–326.
83. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 301.
84. In 1936, combined federal-state payments to the indigent elderly varied from $3.92 monthly in Mississippi to $31.36 in California. Aid for dependent children ranged from $8.10 in Arkansas to $61.07 in Massachusetts. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 272. (To convert 1936 dollars, multiply by 13.)
85. 3 Public Papers and Addresses 291.
86. Annual Message to Congress, January 4, 1935, 4 ibid. 20–22.
87. Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. Joint Resolution 11, 74th Congress.
88. Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 346–347.
89. Donald Richberg, My Hero 241 (New York: Putnam, 1954).
90. Executive Order 7034, May 6, 1935, 4 Public Papers and Addresses 163–168.
91. Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 62–63 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990). Also see Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 75–76.
92. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 252–253.
93. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 128.
94. Ibid. 127.
95. Alfred Kazin, On Native Ground 378–379 (New York: Doubleday, 1942).
96. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 68. Also see Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal 355.
97. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 253.
98. The Nation, February 13, 1935.
99. The Davies comparison is reported in Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 357.
100. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 84.
101. Executive Order 7037, 4 Public Papers and Addresses 172–174. In May 1936 the REA was given a statutory basis when Congress adopted the Norris-Rankin Act. Public Law 605, 74th Congress; 49 Stat. 1363.
102. For a still useful general survey, see Morris Cooke, “Early Days of Rural Electrification,” 42 American Political Science Review 431–444 (1948). Cooke, whom FDR had placed on the board of the New York Power Authority in 1931, was the first head of the Rural Electrification Administration.
103. Walter Lippmann, Interpretations: 1933–1935 154, Allan Nevins, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1936).
104. Roper to FDR, May 22, 1935, FDRL.
105. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935).
106. Public Law 198, 74th Congress; 49 Stat. 449. For FDR’s statement upon signing the bill, see 4 Public Papers and Addresses 294–295.
107. Ibid. 470–478. Governor George Earle of Pennsylvania later regaled FDR with the story of four wealthy Philadelphians sipping their whiskey in the posh Rittenhouse Club and damning the president and the New Deal with considerable gusto. At that point a member turned on the club radio and out came Roosevelt’s voice ridiculing “gentlemen in well-warmed and well-stocked clubs.”
“My God,” exclaimed one of the men. “Do you suppose that sonofabitch could have overheard us?” James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 235 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).
SEVENTEEN | Hubris
The epigraph is from FDR’s Fireside Chat on Reorganization of the Judiciary, March 9, 1937. 6 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 122–133, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Random House, 1941).
1. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 58 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
2. Ibid. 59.
3. Raymond Moley, After Seven Years 343 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
4. Harold L. Ickes, 1 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 465 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).
5. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 70, 143, 283 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965). Also see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval 571 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960); James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 266–267 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).
6. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 381–382 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
7. Thomas L. Stokes, Chip off My Shoulder 404 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940). The “Second Louisiana Purchase” phrase was coined by journalist Westbrook Pegler following the government’s quashing of indictments against a number of Long’s lieutenants for income tax evasion.
8. Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe 447 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962).
9. 5 Public Papers and Addresses 8–18.
10. Roosevelt spoke to the dinner in Washington on January 8, 1936, but his remarks were broadcast to three thousand similar dinners throughout the nation. Ibid. 38–44.
11. The New York Times, January 26, 1936.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 293 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938).
15. The New York Times, January 29, 1936.
16. The visitor was Fannie Hurst. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 376.
17. Blanche Wiesen Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 353 (New York: Viking, 1999).
18. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 145 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
19. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 448.
20. New York Times, April 23, 1936.
21. Byrd to FDR, November 16, 1940, September 9, 1944, FDRL.
22. Rollins, Roosevelt and Howe 453. For a loving portrait of Howe during his illness, see James Farley, Behind the Ballots 296–303. “The only tribute I can pay him,” wrote Farley, “is to say that, as long as I live, I shall never ask for a better friend than Louis Howe.”
23. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 99 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
24. Quoted in Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 533–534.
25. 1 Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 648–649.
26. The 1936 Republican platform proclaimed, “America is in peril. The welfare of American men and women and the future of our youth are at stake. We dedicate ourselves to the preservation of their political liberty, their individual opportunity and their character as free citizens, which today for the first time is threatened by the Government itself.” Landon, by contrast, was generally sympathetic to the New Deal. “From the very first, I advocated granting of unusual powers to the President because of the national emergency.” He also found little to object to in New Deal economics. “I do not think there is anything new or revolutionary about the redistribution of wealth theory. Every wise statesman in every period of history has been concerned with the equitable distribution of property in his country.” Landon to Raymond Clapper, quoted in Olive Ewing Clapper, Washington Tapestry 119 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946).
27. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 529.
28. Ibid. 560.
29. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 57.
30. In 1912, House Speaker Champ Clark led the voting for twenty-eight ballots and commanded a majority for eight but ultimately lost the nomination to Woodrow Wilson.
31. James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime 95 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
32. Alben Barkley, That Reminds Me 152 (New York: Doubleday, 1954).
33. Raymond Clapper, Watching the World 86–87 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1944); The New York Times, June 28, 1936.
34. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 583.
35. Ibid. 584.
36. “Acceptance of the Renomination for the Presidency,” June 27, 1936, 5 Public Papers and Addresses 230–236.
37. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 585.
38. Charles W. Hurd, “Roosevelt Starts Cruise as Skipper,” The New York Times, July 15, 1936.
39. Robert F. Cross, Sailor in the White House 97 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2003).
40. The New York Times, July 25, 1936.
41. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 284 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1959).
42. Lord Tweedsmuir was the celebrated novelist John Buchan. In his chatty opening remarks, Roosevelt playfully demurred being addressed as a foreign ruler. “I say this because, when I have been in Canada, I have never heard a Canadian refer to an American as a ‘foreigner.’ He is just an ‘American.’ And, the same way across the border in the United States, Canadians are not ‘foreigners,’ they are ‘Canadians.’ ” FDR interlaced his speech with several paragraphs of flawless French, paying homage to the valor and heroism of the Quebecois. (Roosevelt was the only president, Mr. Jefferson and J. Q. Adams included, who spoke French fluently.) 5 Public Papers and Addresses 276–279.
43. Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign speeches are in ibid. 285–581.
44. Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 384–385 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
45. Farley, Behind the Ballots 305–306.
46. Ibid.
47. Quoted in Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 603.
48. Ibid. 627. Union party publicists originally touted Lemke as “Liberty Bell” Lemke. Democrats whooped with delight. “Both are cracked,” said a party spokesman.
49. The New York Times, September 26, 1936.
50. Ibid., November 1, 1936.
51. Campaign Address, October 31, 1936. 5 Public Papers and Addresses 566–573.
52. Farley, Behind the Ballots 324–325. Farley was correct about New Hampshire, which FDR carried with a razor-thin margin of 3,818 votes, 49.7 percent to Landon’s 48.0 percent. But Kansas went for Roosevelt 54–46 percent; Connecticut 55–40; and Michigan 56–39. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 290 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
53. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 137.
54. Other minor-party candidates included Earl Browder (Communist) 79,211; David Leigh Colvin (Prohibition) 37,668; and John W. Aiken (Socialist Labor) 12,790. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 304.
55. Quoted in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years 647 (New York: Random House, 1979).
56. Monroe received 231 of 235 electoral votes in 1820. One elector each in Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee did not vote, and one Democratic elector in New Hampshire voted for John Quincy Adams rather than the party’s nominee.
57. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 66. Farley spoke with FDR a dozen times on election night. There was never any doubt about the outcome, but it was not until 3:36 A.M. that Roosevelt pulled ahead in New Hampshire.
58. Quoted in Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 642. The week before the election, FDR wrote Senator Hiram Johnson of California, “I am frankly a little worried about George Norris’s chances in Nebraska. It would be a tragedy if he did not come back.” 3 The Roosevelt Letters 189, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1952). The 1936 vote count in Nebraska gave Norris 258,700; Robert G. Simmons, his Republican opponent, 223,276; and Democrat Terry Carpenter, 108,391.
59. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 187–190 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
60. In 1932 African-American precincts in Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh went down the line for Hoover. FDR carried Chicago handily but won only 23 percent of the black vote. In Cincinnati’s heavily black Ward 16, Roosevelt got less than 29 percent. In 1936, every black ward in each of the cities went Democratic; in Cincinnati’s Ward 16, FDR took 65 percent, and Pittsburgh’s black Third Ward went for Roosevelt 10 to 1. According to a July 1938 Fortune poll, 84.7 percent of African Americans considered themselves pro-Roosevelt. Ernest Collins, “Cincinnati Negroes and Presidential Politics,” 41 Journal of Negro History 132–133 (1956). Also see Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt 185–187.
61. 6 Public Papers and Addresses 1–6 (emphasis added).
62. At the direction of the Secret Service, the tribune from which the president was to review the parade had been enclosed with bullet-proof glass. When FDR learned that, he ordered the glass removed. Life, February 1, 1937.
63. Republicans held the governorships in only six states in 1937: California, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, South Dakota, and Vermont. Three states were held by independents: Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin. The remaining governors were Democrats. FDR’s speechwriters had prepared a draft of the inaugural address critical of the Court, but Roosevelt chose not to use it. “I’m not quite ready yet,” he told Sam Rosenman. Working with Roosevelt 141–144.
64. In Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, 295 U.S. 602 (1935) a unanimous Court, speaking through Justice George Sutherland, held that the president’s blanket removal authority (see Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52 [1926]) did not extend to members of independent regulatory commissions, in this case the Federal Trade Commission.
65. The New York minimum-wage law was overturned in Morehead v. New York ex rel Tipaldo, 298 U.S. 587 (1936). Justice Butler, for the Court, held that the freedom of an individual to contract for wages in return for work “is part of the liberty protected by the due process clause [of the Fourteenth Amendment]” (at page 610).
66. The decisions in Schechter, Radford, and Humphrey’s Executor were unanimous. That in Panama Refining was 8–1.
67. In Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398 (1934), the Court (5–4) upheld the 1933 Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act, authorizing state courts to delay foreclosure proceedings. Said Chief Justice Hughes for the Court, “while emergency does not create power, emergency may furnish the occasion for the exercise of power” (at page 426).
In Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934), the Court (5–4) upheld that state’s Milk Control Act. Justice Roberts (for the Court) said, “a state is free to adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare, and to enforce that policy by legislation adapted to its purpose” (at page 537).
68. Gold Clause Cases, 294 U.S. 240 (1935). Chief Justice Hughes for the Court (5–4).
69. Ashwander v. TVA, 297 U.S. 288 (1936). Hughes for the Court (8–1). Ashwander is noteworthy for the concurring opinion of Justice Brandeis laying out the rules for constitutional adjudication.
70. United States v. Curtiss-Wright, 299 U.S. 304 (1936). The decision (7–1) was authored by Justice Sutherland, the intellectual powerhouse of the Court’s conservatives. As he described the president’s powers: “He makes treaties with the advice and consent of the Senate; but he alone negotiates. Into the field of negotiation the Senate cannot intrude; and Congress itself is powerless to invade it. As [Chief Justice John] Marshall said in his great argument of March 7, 1800 to the House of Representatives, ‘The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations’ ” (Sutherland’s emphasis). Marshall was a representative from Virginia at the time and spokesman for the Adams Federalists in the House.
71. The rule that the Bill of Rights applied only to the national government, not to the states, was first articulated by John Marshall in Barron v. Baltimore, 7 Peters (32 U.S.) 243 (1833), and reaffirmed after adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in Hurtado v. California, 110 U.S. 516 (1884). That was the law when the Court (5–4) changed course in Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931), and overturned Minnesota’s statute, which permitted a trial court judge to enjoin publication of a newspaper he found “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” or “malicious, scandalous, and defamatory.” Said Chief Justice Hughes for the Court, “It is no longer open to doubt that the liberty of the press … is within the liberty safeguarded by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from invasion by State action” (at page 706).
72. In Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45 (1932), the Court (7–2), speaking through Justice Sutherland, held that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required fairness in criminal trials and that the right to counsel was an integral part of the process, particularly in capital cases. This too was a groundbreaking decision, expanded in Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, in 1963 to include all criminal cases.
73. Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935). “For this long-continued, unvarying, and wholesale exclusion of negroes from jury service we find no justification consistent with the constitutional mandate [of the due process clause],” said Hughes for the Court.
74. During the Red Scare after World War I, California enacted legislation prohibiting the public use or display of a red flag. Yetta Stromberg was convicted for violating the statute at a youth camp in 1929, and the Supreme Court (7–2) reversed. Chief Justice Hughes, for the Court, held the flag to be a symbol of political protest protected by the First Amendment and applicable to the states under the due process clause of the Fourteenth. Stromberg is doubly important for its extension of the concept of speech to include symbolic statements as well as those made orally and in writing. Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 (1931).
75. DeJonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353 (1937). Dirk DeJonge had been convicted of violating Oregon’s criminal syndicalism law, another relic of the Red Scare.
76. Professor G. Edward White of the University of Virginia provides an insightful antidote to traditional historiography in The Constitution and the New Deal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), especially in his chapter “The Canonization and Demonization of Judges.” To characterize Justices Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler as reactionary is “grossly inaccurate,” wrote White. “They repeatedly upheld police powers legislation against due process and Contract Clause challenges. They regularly sustained the taxing and spending powers of the state and federal governments. They voted to sustain several New Deal statutes regulating economic activity. They consistently upheld the powers of administrative agencies against constitutional challenges. And they demonstrated considerable solicitude for civil rights and civil liberties.… In short, a comprehensive treatment of the constitutional decisions of each of the Four Horsemen could produce a fair amount of supportive evidence for labeling them ‘progressives’ or ‘liberals’ ” (at page 295).
77. In the summer of 1933 Roosevelt had instructed Cummings to undertake planning for a general reorganization of the federal judiciary, but the Supreme Court was not included in that effort. Much of Cummings’s planning pertained to the political affiliation of federal judges at the district and appellate levels. “You will note that of 266 judges listed,” Cummings wrote Roosevelt on November 8, 1933, “only 28% are Democrats.” Quoted in Marian C. McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War146. Also see Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 331 (New York: Viking Press, 1946). Cf. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn 84–85 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
78. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 140–156.
79. Shortly after Cummings assumed office, Justice Brandeis and Justice Stone (a former attorney general) informed Roosevelt of their concern over the competence of the government’s lawyers in the cases coming before the Court. Frankfurter to Stone, July 12, 1933, in Peter H. Irons, The New Deal Lawyers 11 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982).
80. Schlesinger, Politics of Upheaval 261.
81. The 1936 Democratic platform stated, “We have sought and will continue to seek to meet these problems through legislation within the Constitution.
“If these problems cannot be effectively solved by legislation within the Constitution, we shall seek such clarifying amendment as will assure to the legislatures of the several States and to the Congress of the United States … the power to enact those laws which the State and Federal legislatures … shall find necessary, in order adequately to regulate commerce, protect public health and safety and safeguard economic security.” Oliver A. Quayle, Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, 1936 196 (Philadelphia: Democratic National Committee, 1936).
82. Ickes, 2 Secret Diary 65.
83. Age would eventually take its toll, advised Ashurst. Prophetically, the Arizona senator wrote FDR, “It will fall to your lot to nominate more Justices of the Supreme Court than any President since General Washington.” Ashurst to FDR, February 19, 1936, quoted in Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 392 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
84. Ickes, 1 Secret Diary 705. Justice McReynolds, for his part, reciprocated the feeling. “I’ll never resign as long as that crippled son-of-a-bitch is in the White House.” At least the remark was attributed to McReynolds by Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen in their inflammatory Nine Old Men at the Crossroads 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1936).
85. In March 1868, while just such a case was pending, Congress repealed the Court’s authority to hear appeals under the Habeas Corpus Act. A unanimous (8–0) Court subsequently dismissed the appeal for lack of jurisdiction. Ex parte McCardle, 74 U.S. 506 (1869).
86. Alexander Holtzoff, memorandum, in Cummings to FDR, January 16, 1936, reprinted in McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War 167–168. Also see Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn 99.
87. Quoted in Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 296.
88. Annual Report of the Attorney General, 1913 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913).
89. William E. Leuchtenburg, in his authoritative reconstruction of the origins of FDR’s Court-packing plan, reports that on December 16, 1936, Edward S. Corwin, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, wrote Cummings to suggest that legislation be considered that would permit the president to appoint a number of younger justices whenever a majority of the justices were seventy years old or more. This was a week or two before Cummings discovered the McReynolds memorandum. Corwin was considered by many to be the nation’s premier scholar of constitutional law, and his suggestion, which apparently originated with Professor Arthur Holcombe of Harvard, signaled to Cummings that he was on the right track. Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn116–119.
90. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 154. Senator Borah, seeing the three together, is alleged to have said, “That reminds me of the Roman Emperor who looked around his dinner table and began to laugh when he thought how many of those heads would be rolling on the morrow.” Time,March 1, 1937.
91. “The Chief Justice had an external severity that contrasted with the President’s external urbanity,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson. “But Hughes was one of the kindest of men, and no person who saw him preside over the Supreme Court will ever have any other standard of perfection. He was firm and prompt, dignified and kindly.… He never used his position on the bench to embarrass counsel or to heckle them, and if counsel were frightened or timid or incompetent, he often went out of his way to make sure their position was fully brought out. He was a model of dignity.” Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 67, John Q. Barrett, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). For Justice Roberts’s similar assessment of Hughes, see Merlo J. Pusey, 2 Charles Evans Hughes 675–677 (New York: Macmillan, 1951).
92. Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days 64 (New York: Doubleday, 1938).
93. Quoted in Pusey, 2 Charles Evans Hughes 753. Also see McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War 324.
94. According to Sam Rosenman, who drafted FDR’s message to Congress, “It was hard to understand how he expected to make people believe that he was suddenly interested primarily in delayed justice rather than in ending a tortured interpretation of the Constitution; but the cleverness, the too much cleverness, appealed to him.” Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 147.
95. FDR, “Message to Congress on Reorganization of the Judiciary,” February 5, 1937, 6 Public Papers 53.
96. “Wouldn’t you have thought that the President would have told his own party leaders what he intended to do?” Bankhead asked North Carolina congressman Lindsay Warren. “He didn’t because he knew that hell would break loose.” Warren Memorandum, February 7, 1937, quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 234.
97. The New York Times, February 6, 1937.
98. Leuchtenburg, Supreme Court Reborn 127.
99. Quoted in Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 298.
100. Quoted in McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War 298.
101. Ibid. 319.
102. Professor McKenna provides a useful sampling of press coverage, ibid. 305–311.
103. For texts, see 6 Public Papers 35–267.
104. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 74.
105. Burton K. Wheeler, Yankee from the West 327–329 (New York: Doubleday, 1962).
106. Ibid. 332.
107. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheaton (17 U.S.) 316 (1819). For a discussion of the case and Marshall’s defense, see Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation 440–454 (New York: Henry Holt, 1996).
108. The full text of the Hughes letter to Wheeler is in the Hughes Papers at the Library of Congress. It also appears as Appendix C of the Adverse Report of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Bill S. 1392, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937).
109. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), reversing Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, 298 U.S. 587 (1936).
110. The Washington Supreme Court had upheld the statute. A tie vote by the Court would have sustained that holding. For Justice Roberts’s shift, see Charles A. Leonard, A Search for a Judicial Philosophy: Mr. Justice Roberts and the Constitutional Revolution of 1937 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1971).
111. Hughes rejected the idea that “freedom of contract” was constitutionally sacrosanct. “What is this freedom?” he asked. The Constitution protects liberty, but subject to reasonable regulation in the interest of the community. “The community may direct its law-making power to correct the abuse which springs from [employers’] selfish disregard of the public interest.… Our conclusion is that the case of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital [261 U.S. 525 (1923)] should be, and it is, overruled.” Hughes’s opinion in Parrishwas fully consistent with his dissent in Tipaldo, in which he fired a broadside at the doctrine of freedom of contract.
112. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937). This was the most important of five companion cases relating to the Wagner Act that the Court decided on April 12, 1937. “We are asked to shut our eyes to the plainest facts of national life and to deal with the question of direct and indirect effects in an intellectual vacuum,” said Hughes. “When industries organize themselves on a national scale, making their relation to interstate commerce the dominant factor in their activities, how can it be maintained that their industrial labor relations constitute a forbidden field into which Congress may not enter when it is necessary to protect interstate commerce from the paralyzing consequences of industrial war?” (at page 41).
113. Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheaton (22 U.S.) 1 (1824). “Commerce,” said Marshall, “is undoubtedly traffic, but it is something more: it is intercourse. It describes the commercial intercourse between nations, and parts of nations, in all its branches, and is regulated by prescribing rules for carrying on that intercourse.… Commerce among the States cannot stop at the boundary line of each State, but may be introduced into the interior.”
114. 301 U.S. 1, 41.
115. Steward Machine Co. v. Davis, 301 U.S. 548 (1937), Cardozo for the Court.
116. Quoted in Wheeler, Yankee from the West 334.
117. Alfred Steinberg, Sam Rayburn: A Biography 144–145 (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975).
118. McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War 505 ff.
119. Quoted in Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 222–223 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
120. The vote was taken on the question to recommit the bill to the Judiciary Committee, effectively killing it.
121. Justice Van Devanter was replaced by Hugo Black in August 1937. George Sutherland was replaced by Stanley Reed in January 1938. Cardozo resigned in July 1938 and was replaced by Felix Frankfurter. William O. Douglas replaced Brandeis in 1939. Frank Murphy succeeded Pierce Butler in 1940. James Byrnes replaced McReynolds in 1941. As FDR predicted, McReynolds was the last of the so-called Four Horsemen to step down. Robert Jackson replaced Stone when Stone succeeded Hughes as chief justice in 1941. When Byrnes left the Court in 1942 to become director of war mobilization, he was replaced by Wiley Rutledge.
EIGHTEEN | Low Tide
The epigraph is from James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots 375 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1938).
1. Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR 106 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983). For Harrison generally, see Martha H. Swain’s excellent biography, Pat Harrison: The New Deal Years 33–167 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978).
2. James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 91 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948); Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 223–224 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
3. FDR to Senator Alben Barkley, July 15, 1937, 6 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 306–308, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
4. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 92; David McCullough, Truman 228 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). “To say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” said Truman afterward.
5. Quoted in Swain, Pat Harrison 159–160. Also see Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days 282–283 (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938).
6. Quoted in Timmons, Garner of Texas 224.
7. Kevin J. McMahon, Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race 95 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
8. Dingell to FDR, June 26, 1937, quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 253 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
9. “Washington Notes,” 91 The New Republic 313 (1937). In length of service, Hatton Sumners was the fourth-ranking member of the House, having been elected in 1912.
10. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 95–96.
11. Ibid. 96.
12. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 313 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Dies for all Chevrolet products were at Fisher Body Plant 2 in Cleveland, but a week after the strike began in Flint, the factory in Cleveland was also shut down by workers.
13. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 321–322 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
14. Quoted in Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933–1941 541 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970).
15. Timmons, Garner of Texas 216.
16. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 323.
17. Ibid. 324.
18. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 303.
19. In NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corporation, 306 U.S. 240 (1939), the Supreme Court ruled the sit-down strike “a high-handed proceeding without a shadow of a legal right.”
20. 9 Complete Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 467 (New York: Da Capo, 1972).
21. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography 327 (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times, 1977).
22. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 429 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
23. Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 407 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
24. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt 224.
25. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 429.
26. “The Morgenthau Diaries,” 120 Collier’s 82 (September 27, 1947). Also see John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928–1938 387–388 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
27. Harold L. Ickes, 2 Secret Diary 240 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954).
28. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 101.
29. Blum, Morgenthau Diaries 415.
30. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 336 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).
31. Time, May 16, 1938.
32. Blum, Morgenthau Diaries 421.
33. David Robertson, Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes 284 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994).
34. Congressional Record 311 (January 11, 1938).
35. For the grisly details of the lynching of Claude Neal in Marianna, October 26, 1934, see Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 108. Professor Weiss quotes at length from the extensive NAACP investigation.
36. Blanche Wiesen Cook provides a useful summary of the Wagner bill in 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 178 (New York: Viking, 1999).
37. Gallup Poll, January 31, 1937, in George H. Gallup, 1 The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 48 (New York: Random House, 1972).
38. Walter White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White 169–170 (New York: Viking, 1948).
39. “You’ll have to give me about twenty-four hours,” Roosevelt said, “because I will have to check up and see what I did last year. I have forgotten.” 4 Complete Press Conferences 155–156.
40. “Care to comment on the anti-lynching bill?” FDR was asked. “No.” he replied. April 24, 1935, 5 ibid. 243.
41. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 516–517 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
42. Cook, 2 Eleanor Roosevelt 247.
43. 11 Complete Press Conferences 88.
44. Quoted in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 245.
45. It was the Supreme Court, in Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), that overturned the white primary. The Justice Department did not file a brief as amicus curiae or give any encouragement to the appellants. The poll tax was abolished by adoption of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964.
46. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 256.
47. Nancy Weiss, interview with Pauli Murray, ibid.
48. Chicago Defender, January 30, 1943, ibid. 260.
49. Afro-American, April 15, 1939.
50. Remarks of Marian Anderson, January 6, 1943, quoted in Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln 264. The segregation of the era prevented Ms. Anderson from registering at a Washington hotel. She and her mother were accommodated by Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, who hosted them at her Massachusetts Avenue town house. Olive Ewing Clapper, Washington Tapestry 210–212 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1946).
51. Ickes, 1 Secret Diaries 285. Cf. Farley, Behind the Ballots 353–355.
52. Quoted in Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 361.
53. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 349 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
54. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 264 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1959).
55. ER to FDR, November 22, 1936, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 487.
56. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 284.
57. “Possibly I should have been sufficiently mature and considerate enough of Father’s position to have withdrawn from the insurance business entirely,” wrote James. “But I was young, ambitious, and spoiled so I went right ahead in pursuit of what seemed to me the easiest solution.” Ibid. 218.
58. William O. Douglas, Go East, Young Man 302 (New York: Random House, 1974). Cf. James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 245–246 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
59. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 310–311.
60. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 464 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Also see Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 495.
61. Morgenthau Diary, December 6, 8, 1938. FDRL.
62. Elliott Roosevelt interview, cited in Peter Collier with David Horowitz, The Roosevelts: An American Saga 371 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
63. Lillian Rogers Parks, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 142 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981).
64. Quoted in Morgan, FDR 459.
65. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, A Rendezvous with Destiny: The Roosevelts of the White House 39 (New York: Putnam, 1975).
66. Joseph P. Lash interview with Anna Halstead, quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 490. “When I called [FDR] from Chicago and told him Elliott was going to marry right away, he was very annoyed, but his annoyance was at Elliott’s doing it so quickly.”
67. The New York Times, October 7, 8, 1936.
68. Ibid.
69. Elliott Roosevelt, Rendezvous with Destiny 37 ff.
70. Quoted in Collier, The Roosevelts 362.
71. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 489.
72. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 305.
73. For The New York Times’ front-page coverage, see August 18 and August 19, 1937.
74. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 492. Also see The New York Times, August 21, 1937.
75. The act provided for a gradual two-year phase-in and allowed numerous exemptions. See Paul Douglas and Joseph Hackman, “The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,” 53 Political Science Quarterly 491–515 (1938).
76. Michael Barone, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan 117 (New York: Free Press, 1990).
77. Hill received 90,601 votes to Heflin’s 50,189. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 909 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
78. For the full text, see Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 120–121.
79. Ibid. 121.
80. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 239–240.
81. Professor James T. Patterson provides a useful table of the support senators gave the New Deal in the Appendix (pages 348–349) of his Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). Gillette’s voting record indicates he supported the New Deal three quarters of the time. That was better than twenty-three of his Democratic colleagues.
82. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 249.
83. The Indianapolis Star, June 6, 1938.
84. 7 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 391–400, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
85. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 125.
86. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 432–439, at 438.
87. The unofficial results of the August 9 Kentucky primary showed Barkley with 274,131; Chandler 184,266. Mrs. Chandler, with down-home directness, said she hoped her husband would quit politics. “You know, you can’t make any money in politics, especially when you’re a psychopathic case of honesty such as Happy is.” Louisville Courier-Journal, August 9, 1938, quoted in Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 267n.
88. Quoted in Thomas L. Stokes, Chip off My Shoulder 536 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940). Stokes, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, broke the Kentucky story in a series of eight articles that won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize.
89. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism 348–349. Glass voted against the New Deal 81 percent of the time.
90. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story.
91. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 463–471.
92. Augusta Chronicle, August 12, 1938.
93. Ibid., August 16, 1938.
94. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 912.
95. V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation 139 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950).
96. Smith received 186,519 votes (55.4%) to Johnston’s 150,437 (44.7%). Six years later Johnston defeated Smith 138,440 to 88,045. Ibid. 915.
97. Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 348.
98. Address at Denton, Maryland, September 5, 1938. FDR also spoke at Morgantown, Berlin, Sharptown, Salisbury, and Annapolis. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 512–520, at 515. Some of the most incisive coverage of the Maryland primary is provided by Caroline H. Keith in “For Hell and a Brown Mule”: The Biography of Senator Millard E. Tydings 329–361 (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1991).
99. FDR to James H. Fay, September 23, 1938, FDRL. O’Connor was succeeded as chairman of the Rules Committee by Adolph J. Sabath of Illinois, the dean of the House and a staunch New Dealer. Under Sabath the Rules Committee was no longer the roadblock it had been, but on the other hand the House itself was no longer under firm New Deal control.
100. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 148.
101. Timmons, Garner of Texas 239 (Garner’s emphasis).
102. Raymond Clapper, “Return of the Two-Party System,” 49 Current History 14 (December 1938).
NINETEEN | On the Brink
The epigraph is from the address FDR gave at Chapel Hill, December 5, 1938, upon receipt of an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina. 7 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 613–621, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
1. 8 Ibid. 1–12.
2. Thomas L. Stokes, Chip off My Shoulder 505 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1940).
3. Combatant casualties in the Spanish Civil War are from Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816–1980 229 (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982).
4. Quoted in Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History 421–422 (New York: Doubleday, 1983).
5. On May 9, 1938, FDR told Harold Ickes that to lift the embargo and allow arms to be shipped to the Spanish government “would mean the loss of every Catholic vote next fall and the Democratic members of Congress … didn’t want it done.” The cat was out of the bag, wrote Ickes, “and it is the mangiest, scabbiest cat ever.” 2 Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 389–390 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954).
6. Address at Chautauqua, New York, August 14, 1936, 5 Public Papers and Addresses 289.
7. A Gallup Poll in late 1937 found that 57 percent of American respondents favored China while only 1 percent backed Japan. Hadley Cantril, Public Opinion 1935–1946 1081–1082 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1951).
8. 6 Public Papers and Addresses 406–411.
9. The Wall Street Journal, October 8, 1937.
10. Time, October 18, 1937.
11. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 167 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
12. 10 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 232–252 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
13. The Times (London), October 7, 1937.
14. FDR to Peabody, October 16, 1937, 3 The Roosevelt Letters 220, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1952).
15. Manny T. Koginos, The Panay Incident: Prelude to War 26–31 (Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Studies, 1967).
16. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 154–155 (New York: Random House, 1993); The New York Times, December 13–26, 1937.
17. Ickes, 2 Secret Diaries 274. Also see John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928–1938 485–492 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
18. The Christian Science Monitor, December 13, 1937.
19. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932–1945 154 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
20. Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 229 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
21. “Memorandum to the Secretary of State,” December 13, 1937, 6 Public Papers and Addresses 541–542.
22. Ibid. 542n. In addition to the shipping and personnel losses, the U.S. bill included $74.27 to reimburse the Post Office Department for lost stamps. Koginos, Panay Incident 73.
23. United States Congress, 75th Cong., 1st Sess., Congressional Directory 33 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1937).
24. George Gallup, 1 The Gallup Polls: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 71 (New York: Random House, 1972).
25. Radio Address by Louis Ludlow, November 29, 1937, Legislative Division, National Archives.
26. Cordell Hull, 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 563–564 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
27. FDR to Bankhead, January 6, 1938, 7 Public Papers and Addresses 36–37.
28. In a public telegram to FDR on December 20, 1937, Landon congratulated the president for the uncompromising stand he had taken opposing the amendment. “Many members of Congress from both parties,” he said, “seem to have forgotten the basic principle of American politics and wish to create the impression on foreign governments that they do not trust your administration of foreign affairs.” Quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, December 21, 1937.
Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, called the amendment “an idea that could be harbored only by persons utterly ignorant of the realities of international life and death,” Chicago Daily News, December 18, 1937. Stimson, whose letter occupied three quarters of the editorial page in the Times, and who was also given extensive front-page coverage, said of the proposal that “No more effective engine for the disruption of national unity on the threshold of a national crisis could ingeniously have been devised.” The New York Times, December 22, 1937.
29. U.S. Congress, Congressional Record 276–283 (January 10, 1938).
30. Ibid. In addition to the official 188–209 tally, 10 members were paired, 2 voted present, 23 abstained, and there were 3 vacancies. Bertrand Snell of New York, the Republican leader, voted against the resolution.
31. Article 88 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, one of the “suburb treaties” negotiated simultaneously with the Treaty of Versailles, proclaimed Austria’s independence to be inalienable and made the League of Nations its guarantor.
32. On March 10, 1938, Premier Camille Chautemps and his cabinet resigned, and it was not until the thirteenth of March that a new government under Léon Blum was installed.
33. In his testimony at Nuremberg on August 9, 1946, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein said the chief worry of the military at the time of the Anschluss was whether Italy would intervene because “Italy always sided with Austria and the Hapsburgs.” Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 345n (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959).
34. “The hard fact is that nothing could have arrested what actually has happened unless this country and other countries had been prepared to use force,” Chamberlain told Parliament on March 14, 1938. Ibid. 353.
35. Ibid. 350.
36. 11 Complete Presidential Press Conferences 223–226.
37. FDR to John Cudahy (U.S. minister to the Irish Free State), March 9, 1938, 3 Roosevelt Letters 232.
38. Quoted in Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 449 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Also see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 408–409.
39. Chamberlain’s remarks were made September 27, 1938, and reported in all major newspapers the following day.
40. Quoted in Joachim C. Fest, Hitler 567, 572 (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1974); Black, FDR 476. Mussolini was the only one of the four at Munich who spoke all four languages. As a result he played a role in the negotiations that was not always appreciated. Note that the Czech government was not represented. That was at Hitler’s insistence, to which Britain and France agreed.
41. Ickes, 2 Secret Diaries 469. FDR feared that Chamberlain was so eager to appease Hitler that “in the interest of world peace” he might cede Trinidad to Germany and convince France to yield Martinique. If that happened, Roosevelt told Ickes, he would send the U.S. fleet to take both islands. Ibid. 484.
42. The ranking is that of Army chief of staff Malin Craig, in U.S. Department of State, Peace and War: United States Foreign Policy, 1931–1941 55 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943).
43. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 419, quoting Robert A. Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II 55 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969).
44. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 491–494. Secretary Hull, with FDR’s approval, spoke to the National Press Club on March 17, 1938, stressing the need for rearmament. For Welles, see Cordell Hull, 1 Memoirs 576–577 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
45. Radio Address to the Herald Tribune Forum, October 26, 1938. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 563–566.
46. Gallup Poll, October 14, 1938. 1 The Gallup Polls 121.
47. The New York Times, November 11, 1938.
48. Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich 430–434. To preserve their international credit ratings, the insurance companies paid the claims, but the German government confiscated the money and returned most of it to the insurers.
49. Press Conference, November 15, 1938, 7 Public Papers and Addresses 596–598.
50. Ibid.
51. Herbert Hoover, 1 Public Papers of the President … Messages, Speeches, and Statements 36–40 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974). Proclamation 1872, “Limiting the Immigration of Aliens into the United States on the Basis of National Origin.”
52. Arthur Morse, While Six Million Died 288 (New York: Random House, 1968).
53. Cantril, Public Opinion 1081.
54. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 491.
55. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 414.
56. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 348–349 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
57. Press conference, November 18, 1938, 7 Public Papers and Addresses 603–604. Despite widespread public disapproval, Roosevelt assisted some 150,000 refugees to enter the United States between the Anschluss and Pearl Harbor. “I only wish I could do more,” he wrote investment banker Robert Lehman in New York. Harry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–1945 24 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970).
58. Among those present were Morgenthau; Hopkins; Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson; Solicitor General Robert Jackson; Army chief of staff General Malin Craig; Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps; and Brigadier General George C. Marshall, deputy chief of staff.
59. John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 48–49 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
60. Quoted in David Reynolds, From Munich to Pearl Harbor 48 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001).
61. “Supplemental Appropriations for National Defense,” Message to Congress, January 12, 1939, 8 Public Papers and Addresses 70–74.
62. 7 Public Papers and Addresses 613–621.
63. Hopkins memorandum, FDRL, quoted in Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 114 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
64. A useful summary of FDR’s role is provided in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, 1 The Challenge to Isolation: The World Crisis of 1937–1940 and American Foreign Policy 45–49 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
65. 13 Complete Presidential Press Conferences 91.
66. Transcript, Conference with the Senate Military Affairs Committee, January 31, 1939, Item 1565, 8 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, Donald B. Schewe, ed. (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1979). The transcript indicates FDR’s statement was met with applause from the senators.
67. Ibid.
68. Gallup Polls, September 29, 1939, 1 Gallup Polls 182–183. Also see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 409 (New York: Random House, 1993).
69. “They have crucified my husband,” said Mrs. Craig, speaking of the rivalry between Woodring and Johnson. Quoted in Forrest C. Pogue, 1 George C. Marshall: Education of a General 318 (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
70. Ibid. 325–330.
71. The amendment was narrowly adopted 159–157 after many administration supporters had left the chamber for the night. One of the Democrats voting for the amendment was Franklin and Eleanor’s close friend Caroline O’Day of New York. FDR immediately rebuked her:
Dear Caroline:
I think it may interest you to tell you in great confidence that two of our Embassies abroad tell us this afternoon that the action of the House last night has caused dismay in democratic peaceful circles. The anti-war nations believe that a definite stimulus has been given Hitler by the vote of the House, and that if war breaks out in Europe … an important part of the responsibility will rest with last night’s action.
FDR to Caroline O’Day, Item 1907, 10 Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs.
72. FDR to George VI, September 17, 1938, Item 1282a, 7 Ibid. Roosevelt addressed the letter “My dear King George” and concluded it “Faithfully yours.” George VI posted his acceptance October 8, addressing FDR in longhand “My dear President Roosevelt” and concluding, also in longhand, “Believe me, yours very sincerely, George R.I.” Ibid, Item 1333.
73. John W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign 389 (London: Macmillan, 1958). Also see Will Swift, The Roosevelts and the Royals: Franklin and Eleanor, The King and Queen of England, and the Friendship That Changed History 135–137 (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
74. For the text of the German-Soviet Pact and of the secret additional protocol signed in Moscow, August 23, 1939, see U.S. Department of State, 7 Documents on German Foreign Policy 245–247 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957).
75. The initial assault wave, supported by Stuka dive-bombers, was followed by sixteen reserve divisions and two SS divisions. Ultimately 1.3 million men would take part in the invasion. To meet the assault, Poland deployed thirty infantry divisions, eleven cavalry brigades, one mountain brigade, and only two armored brigades. Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, then chief of staff of Southern Army Group (Rundstedt commanding) and one of the most reflective German officers, notes that the Poles massed their forces at or near the frontier, determined to defend every foot of Polish soil. That facilitated a German breakthrough. Manstein argued that the Poles would have been better served to withdraw, mass their forces, and stall for time, particularly since the German west wall, facing France, was held only by a light screening force and no armor whatever. Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories 34–63 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958).
76. Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper 1, 58–60 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940).
TWENTY | Stab in the Back
The epigraph is from FDR’s commencement speech at the University of Virginia, June 10, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 259–264, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
1. 14 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 130–132 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
2. The record of Roosevelt’s remarks to the cabinet was made by acting Navy secretary Charles Edison, who then forwarded it to FDR. “My only reason for sending it is that somebody ought to make a record of how you felt after getting the phone call [from Bullitt] and this may serve as notes for—that somebody—.” Edison to FDR, September 2, 1939. 2 FDR: His Personal Letters, 1928–1945 915–916, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950). Edison’s emphasis.
3. Quoted in Donald Cameron Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939 579 (New York: Pantheon, 1989). Clement Attlee, the Labour leader, was ill in hospital.
4. Walter Crookshank, diary, quoted in Watt, ibid.
5. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 460–464. Roosevelt’s statement, made over Hull’s objections, provided a deliberate contrast to Woodrow Wilson’s 1914 admonition that Americans must be “neutral in fact as well as in name; impartial in thought as well as action.” Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 547–551 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1928). For Hull’s objections, see 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 676 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
6. Presidential Proclamation 2365, September 13, 1939, 8 Public Papers and Addresses 510. After an informal head count, Ed Halsey, secretary of the Senate, advised the White House that at least sixty senators would support repeal and twenty-five oppose, a remarkably accurate assessment. Steve Early to FDR, September 7, 1939, 2 FDR: Personal Letters 918–919.
7. FDR to Moore, September 11, 1939, ibid. 919.
8. The New York Times, September 15, 1939.
9. 5 Vital Speeches 751–752.
10. Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 496 (New York: Random House, 1993).
11. Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper 73 ff. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940).
12. Harding set a presidential record, addressing joint sessions of Congress six times in two years. His final message, on February 7, 1923, pertained to Britain’s war debt to the United States. Neither Coolidge nor Hoover addressed Congress, and their annual messages were read by the reading clerks. Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives, “Joint Meetings, Sessions, Inaugurations, 60th to 79th Congress.”
13. Message to Congress, September 21, 1939. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 512–522.
14. Memo of General Watson to FDR, September 21, 1939, reporting Borah’s approval but also the senator’s determination “to make some kind of fight.” William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, 1 The Challenge to Isolation 224n (Cambridge, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970) (reprint).
15. 4 Public Opinion Quarterly 102 (1940); Davis, Into the Storm 499.
16. For the committee vote, see The New York Times, September 29, 1939. Democrat Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri voted against; Republican Wallace White of Maine in favor. Otherwise it was a straight party-line vote.
17. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 500.
18. The New York Times, October 27, 1939.
19. FDR to Lord Tweedsmuir, October 5, 1939, 2 FDR: Personal Letters 934.
20. 2 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 712–713 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954).
21. Daniel Levy and Susan Brink, A Change of Heart 13 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
22. 6 Vital Speeches 57–59.
23. Radio address to the New York Herald Tribune Forum, October 26, 1939. 8 Public Papers and Addresses 554–557.
24. Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas 265 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
25. Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 154 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
26. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 740–741n (New York: Harper & Row, 1989); Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 107–108 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
27. FDR’s conversation with Tobin was reported by Frances Perkins, who had accompanied the Teamster president to the Oval Study. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 126 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
28. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 308–309 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Also see Paul H. Appleby, “Roosevelt’s Third Term Decision,” 46 American Political Science Review 754–765 (1952).
29. Morgenthau diary, January 24, 1940, FDRL.
30. Quoted in Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 519–520 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
31. For the President: Personal and Secret: The Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt 398, Orville H. Bullitt, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
32. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 95.
33. “James, it is my sincere feeling that a Roman Catholic could not be elected President of the United States at this time or for many years to come,” said Mundelein. “I hope, therefore, that you will do nothing to involve the Catholics of this country in another debacle such as we experienced in 1928.” James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 174–177 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
34. Hull, 1 Memoirs 856.
35. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 414 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956).
36. Hull, 1 Memoirs 856.
37. Quoted in Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won 63 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
38. Senator Borah’s “phony war” remark was made in a Washington press conference on December 18, 1939, and reported in The New York Times the following day. Professor Henry Graff, interview with ER, Graff papers, FDRL.
39. Eleanor Roosevelt, Autobiography 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961).
40. When Allied forces landed in France in 1944, there were nearly 500,000 German troops in Norway. When the war ended, there were more than 300,000. Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won 66.
41. Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm 667 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).
42. The remark was recorded by Harold Ickes in his manuscript diary entry of May 12, 1940. When the diaries were published after the war, Ickes deleted “even if he was drunk half of his time.” 3 Secret Diaries 176.
43. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 42 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
44. Churchill to FDR, May 15, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence 94–95, Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jones, eds. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
45. “Appropriations for National Defense,” May 16, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 198–205.
46. “Additional Appropriations for National Defense,” May 31, 1940, ibid. 250–253.
47. Ibid. 207; U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 718 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
48. FDR to Churchill, May 16, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill 95–96.
49. Churchill to FDR, May 18, 1940, ibid. 96–97.
50. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 328–329 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
51. One of the best accounts of the German breakthrough and the evacuation at Dunkirk is provided by Churchill in Their Finest Hour 74–118. Also see B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 79–80 (London: Cassell, 1970); Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won 80–81.
52. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 141–143.
53. FDR to Morgenthau, June 6, 1940. Quoted in John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938–1941 155 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
54. Quoted in Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 85.
55. Address at the University of Virginia, June 10, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 259–264. Drafts of the speech at the Roosevelt Library show FDR’s handwritten inserts stiffening the message. The “stab in the back” reference was ad-libbed by Roosevelt and does not appear in the copy from which he spoke.
56. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 302–303 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
57. Churchill to FDR, June 11, 1940, Roosevelt and Churchill 98–99.
58. On June 17, and again on June 18, Woodring challenged presidential authority when he refused to approve the sale of B-17 bombers to Great Britain. On the morning of the nineteenth Roosevelt requested his resignation. FDR offered Woodring a consolation prize of governor of Puerto Rico—a considerable step-down—which Woodring refused. FDR to Harry Woodring, June 19, June 25, 1940, 2 FDR: His Personal Letters 1041–1044.
59. FDR to Knox, December 29, 1939, ibid. 975–977. Also see Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 242–243 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949). After his dismissal Woodring told the Topeka Capital he had been the victim of “a small clique of international financiers who want the United States to declare war and get into the European mess with everything we have.… They don’t like me because I am against stripping our own defenses for the sake of trying to stop Hitler 3,000 miles away.” Reprinted in The New York Times, June 21, 1940.
60. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 163 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948).
61. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 323–325 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). FDR had promised the post of undersecretary of the Navy to Thomas Corcoran, but Knox rejected him as too political. Robert C. Albion and Robert H. Connery, Forrestal and the Navy 1–9 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962).
62. For the text of the Stimson and Knox speeches, see The New York Times, June 19, 1940. The fact that both Knox and Stimson should advocate conscription in their commencement addresses was scarcely coincidental. On May 22, 1940, the two, joined by William Donovan; former budget director Lewis Douglas; Judge Robert Patterson; Julius Ochs Adler of The New York Times; Grenville Clark, who had clerked with FDR at Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn; Langdon Marvin, Roosevelt’s old law partner; and some ninety other distinguished alumni met at the Harvard Club in New York and agreed to beat the drum for reinstitution of the draft, universal service, and immediate expansion of the regular Army and the National Guard. J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, The First Peacetime Draft 14–26 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986).
63. The New York Times, June 25, 1940.
64. The statement was made by Ruth McCormick Simms, one of Dewey’s principal aides at the convention. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 19 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
65. Ibid. 20.
66. Taft’s remarks were in a speech he delivered in St. Louis, May 20, 1940. Taft also said that America’s participation in war was “more likely to destroy American democracy than to destroy German dictatorship.” James Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft 217 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).
67. David Halberstam, The Powers That Be 60 (New York: Knopf, 1975); Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 310–311.
68. New York Sun, January 16, 1940, reported in Peters, Five Days 25. In 1920, Willkie, as a young lawyer in Akron, Ohio, introduced James Cox (FDR’s running mate) at a Democratic rally. He supported Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic convention, served as an assistant floor manager for Newton D. Baker at the 1932 convention, and voted for Herbert Lehman against Thomas Dewey in the 1938 New York gubernatorial race. Ibid. 30–32.
69. “Fair Trial,” The New Republic 370 (March 18, 1940). Also see “Political Power: The Tennessee Valley Authority,” The Atlantic Monthly, August 1937; “Brace Up, America!” The Atlantic Monthly, 163 (June 1939): 549–561; “Idle Money—Idle Men,” The Saturday Evening Post, 211 (June 17, 1939); “The Faith That Is America,” Reader’s Digest, 36 (December 1939): 1–4; “With Malice Toward None,” The Saturday Evening Post, 212 (December 30, 1939); “We, the People,” Fortune, 21 (April 1940): 64–65; “New Deal Power,” The New York Times Magazine,October 31, 1937, p. 6; “Five Minutes to Midnight,” The Saturday Evening Post, 212 (June 22, 1940).
70. Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 57 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
71. Quoted in Peters, Five Days 41.
72. Neal, Dark Horse 99. Ickes’s characterization was made in a speech to a Democratic rally in Saint Louis on October 18, 1940. T. H. Watkins, The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874–1952 694 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
73. Joseph W. Martin and Robert J. Donovan, My First Fifty Years in Politics 101–108 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960). After the convention Willkie named Martin chairman of the Republican National Committee.
74. Time, July 1, 1940. The Republican plank stated, “We favor the extension of aid to all people fighting for liberty or whose liberty is threatened as long as such aid is not in violation of international law or inconsistent with the requirements of our national defense.” Peters, Five Days 91.
75. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 223. FDR said that he liked McNary and he “deserved the nomination.”
TWENTY-ONE | Four More Years
The epigraph is from FDR’s campaign speech at Boston, October 30, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 514–524, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
1. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 421–422 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956). Walsh’s rider to the appropriations bill left FDR no choice but to sign.
2. Mark S. Watson, The United States Army in World War II: Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Operations 312 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).
3. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny 341 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
4. Chicago Daily News, July 16, 1940.
5. Roosevelt phoned Farley Monday morning, July 15, and elliptically suggested that Farley withdraw. Jim Farley’s Story 271–272 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948).
6. Ibid. 274–275.
7. Quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 619 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). Ed Flynn, who had superseded Farley as FDR’s principal political adviser, wrote that the Democratic leaders considered Hopkins an amateur. “While they had nothing against him personally, they felt that he, representing the President, directly lowered their prestige.” Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 156 (New York: Viking Press, 1947).
8. Roosevelt wrote the statement in pencil and transmitted it to James Byrnes, who convinced Walsh and Wheeler to go along. 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1048, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).
9. Harold L. Ickes, 3 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 245 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955).
10. The text of Ickes’s telegram is ibid. 249–250.
11. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 131–132 (New York: Viking, 1946) (FDR’s emphasis supplied by Miss Perkins).
12. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 214 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
13. Ibid. 215.
14. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 620.
15. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 283.
16. July 16, 1940, 9 Personal Papers and Addresses 292. Roosevelt’s disavowal was strikingly similar to the statement of “Uncle Ted” to the Republican convention in 1900 announcing he was not a candidate for the vice presidency (which of course he was):
In view of the revival of the talk of myself as a Vice-Presidential candidate, I have this to say. It is impossible too deeply to express how touched I am by the attitude of those delegates, who have wished me to take the nomination.… I understand the high honor and dignity of the office, an office so high and so honorable that it is well worthy of the ambition of any man in the United States. But while appreciating all this to the full, I nevertheless feel most deeply that the field of my best usefulness to the public and to the party is in New York State; and that, if the party should see fit to renominate me for Governor, I can in that position help the National ticket as in no other way. I very earnestly hope and ask that every friend of mine in this Convention respect my wish and my judgment in this matter.
Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 764 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979).
17. Chicago Daily News, July 17, 1940.
18. “It was a job right up my alley,” Garry told Time. “I figured out a lot of my own angles.… I’m just an ordinary lug who loves the game of politics.” Garry’s day job involved keeping 3,800 miles of sewers in working order. “First thing when you get up in the morning you come in and see me. You don’t know it but that’s me you’re visiting.” Time, July 29, 1940. Also see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 597 (New York: Random House, 1993).
19. For Hull’s description of FDR’s overtures, see 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 860–861 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
20. Charles Peters, Five Days in Philadelphia 145 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
21. “He’s not a mystic, he’s a philosopher,” FDR told a skeptical Farley. “He’ll help people think.” Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 294. Also see Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 213 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
22. Quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 179 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
23. Time, July 29, 1940; Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 216.
24. Quoted in Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 623.
25. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 133 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994). For the full text of ER’s address, see the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention, 1940 238–239 (Washington, D.C.: Democratic National Committee, 1940).
26. New York Daily News, July 19, 1940; Lash, Eleanor and Franklin 623.
27. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 215.
28. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story 302.
29. The New York Times, July 19, 1940. Time reported that of Wallace’s 627 votes, not more than 50 were personal votes for the secretary. Time, July 29, 1940.
30. Quoted in Peters, Five Days 150.
31. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 265.
32. Hadley Cantril, “America Faces War: A Study in Public Opinion,” 4 Public Opinion Quarterly 387–407 (September 1940).
33. As a member of the Senate, Wadsworth had been co-author of the 1920 National Defense Act.
34. Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson 480 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960).
35. The New York Times, August 6, 1940.
36. Ibid., June 20, 1940.
37. “A conscript army is needed only if we are going to send an expeditionary force to conquer Europe or Asia,” said Fosdick. “The well-justified suspicion will not down, that behind this hectic haste to force conscription on us is the policy of belligerent interventionists.” Radio address, August 7, 1940. Quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, 2 The Challenge of Isolation 682 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1970; reprint).
38. Time, August 12, 1940, quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 308n (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
39. Quoted in ibid. Senator Wheeler’s remarks were in a radio address on August 15, 1940.
40. Quoted in Davis, FDR: Into the Storm 564.
41. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 346 (New York: Harper & Brothers).
42. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope 60 (New York: Viking Press, 1966).
43. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 226 (New York: Random House, 1972).
44. July 29, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses 313–314. Congress passed the requested legislation on August 27, 1940, and FDR initiated the Guard call-up on August 31 (Executive Order 8530). Guard members were limited to twelve months’ active duty and could be deployed only in the Western Hemisphere.
45. 666th Press Conference, August 2, 1940, ibid. 321.
46. Ellsworth Barnard, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom 204–205 (Marquette: Northern Michigan University Press, 1966).
47. Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 139 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
48. Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall 172 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).
49. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Statistical History of the United States 736 (Stamford, Conn.: Fairfield Publishers, 1965).
50. WSC to FDR, June 11, 1940; June 13, 1940; June 15, 1940. Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence 98–100, 104–106 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
51. WSC to FDR, June 15, 1940, ibid. 105–106. After reading Churchill’s message, Henry Morgenthau told FDR that “unless we do something to give the English additional destroyers, it seems to me it is absolutely hopeless to expect them to keep going.” Ibid. 106.
52. George VI to FDR, June 26, 1940, quoted in John W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign 511 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1958). For a useful summary of David Windsor (Edward VIII)’s flirtation with Nazism, see Joseph E. Persico, Roosevelt’s Secret War 70–76 (New York: Random House, 2001).
53. Langer and Gleason, 2 Challenge to Isolation 745.
54. Section 3 of the act of June 15, 1917 (40 Stat. 217, 222) provides, “During a war in which the United States is a neutral nation, it shall be unlawful to send out of the jurisdiction of the United States any vessel, built, armed, or equipped as a vessel of war, or converted from a private vessel into a vessel of war, with any intent or under any agreement or contract, written or oral, that such vessel shall be delivered to a belligerent nation, or to an agent, officer, or citizen of such nation, or with reasonable cause to believe that the said vessel shall or will be employed in the service of any such belligerent nation after its departure from the jurisdiction of the United States.”
55. “I told Ben very frankly, as Tom Corcoran already had, that in view of [the attorney general’s opinion prohibiting the delivery of torpedo boats to Great Britain] the President could not now reverse himself. He couldn’t get away with it in public opinion.” Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 271.
56. FDR to Knox, July 22, 1940, 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1048–1049. For an extract of Cohen’s memorandum, see Philip Goodhart, Fifty Ships That Saved the World 152 (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
57. Francis P. Miller Papers, record of Century Group meeting July 11, 1940, University of Virginia. The acquisition of American bases in the British possessions in exchange for the cancellation of war debts had long been advocated by the isolationist press, particularly the Chicago Tribune. See Langer and Gleason, 2 Challenge to Isolation 746.
58. Quoted in Robert Shogan, Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and Changed the Role of the American Presidency 153 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995).
59. WSC to FDR, July 31, 1940, quoted in Churchill, Their Finest Hour 401–402 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949) (Churchill’s emphasis).
60. John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 177 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965); Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 283.
61. Stimson diary (MS), August 2, 1940.
62. Ibid. Stimson, who did not know Farley, formed a high opinion of the postmaster general. “I was particularly pleased with the attitude throughout this whole day’s debate of Jim Farley, who sat next to me. His suggestions were fair-minded and entirely non-political.” Also see 288 Morgenthau Diaries 158 (MS). Morgenthau was not present, but Daniel Bell, who represented Treasury, provided a memo of the session.
63. FDR’s memo of the cabinet meeting and his call to White is in 2 F.D.R. His Personal Letters 1050–1051.
64. WSC to Lothian, August 3, 1940, quoted in Churchill, Their Finest Hour 402–403.
65. The New York Times, August 5, 1940.
66. Ibid., August 11, 1940. The other signatories were Charles C. Burlingham, Thomas D. Thacher, and George Rublee.
67. Acheson to Philip Goodhart, quoted in Goodhart, Fifty Ships 162. The text of Acheson’s letter is reprinted in Appendix A of Goodhart.
68. Stimson diary (MS), August 12, 1940.
69. Ibid., August 15, 1940.
70. Matthew 26:63, quoted in Peters, Five Days 165–166.
71. The New York Times, August 18, 1940.
72. 39 Ops. Atty. Gen. 484 (1940). The text of Jackson’s Opinion is most easily accessible in 9 Public Papers and Addresses 394–405 (August 27, 1940).
73. The text of the Hull-Lothian agreement, actually, an exchange of letters between the two, September 2, 1940, is ibid. 392–394.
74. Goodhart, Fifty Ships 192–193. For a list of the vessels provided, see Arnold Hague, Destroyers for Britain: A History of Fifty Town Class Ships Transferred from the United States to Great Britain in 1940 passim (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1990).
75. 677th Press Conference, September 3, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 375–390.
76. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 408–409.
77. The New York Times, September 4, 1940.
78. Under the rule expounded by Justice Sutherland, speaking for a unanimous Court in Frothingham v. Mellon, 262 U.S. 447 (1923), an individual lacks standing to sue the federal government over a constitutional issue unless he or she has been seriously injured by the governmental action complained of. An individual taxpayer’s injury is “so remote, fluctuating and uncertain, that no basis is afforded for an appeal to the preventive powers of a court of equity.” Sutherland said that if every taxpayer could bring suit, every government policy would be challenged in the courts and the Supreme Court would become the ultimate arbiter of all government policy: “an authority which plainly we do not possess.” (Cf. Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968)).
79. The Gallup Poll 239, 242. September 3, 1940, reflecting interviews conducted August 24–29; September 20, 1940, reflecting interviews September 5–10, 1940.
80. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt 320.
81. Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox 442.
82. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 117. Secretary Perkins reported receiving hundreds of telegrams afterward, more than half from Republican women, complaining about Willkie’s remark.
83. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 533 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
84. The rumors of Welles’s behavior eventually filtered back to the Oval Office, and on January 3, 1941, FDR ordered J. Edgar Hoover to conduct “a full and thorough investigation.” The FBI deployed its top agents, and on January 29, 1941, Hoover reported to Roosevelt that the accusations were true. No further action was taken until August 1943, when Hull used the incident to force Welles’s resignation. Hoover memorandum, January 30, 1941, Sumner Welles Federal Bureau of Investigation O.C. File, quoted in Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles 237 (New York: Enigma Books, 1995). Gellman treats the Hull-Welles relationship with great insight and perception.
85. Joseph Barnes, Willkie: The Events He Was Part of, the Ideas He Fought For 156 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952).
86. Quoted in Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
87. Ibid. 50.
88. FDR’s comment was to Lowell Mellett, a presidential aide, and was recorded on the primitive recording system David Sarnoff had installed in the Oval Office for Roosevelt. FDR Tapes, FDRL.
89. Quoted in Neal, Dark Horse 144. The film State of the Union, starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, is a takeoff on the Willkie campaign, and Hepburn, the candidate’s estranged wife, travels with him on the campaign trail.
90. Ibid. 43.
91. Peters, Five Days 175.
92. 1940 The Gallup Poll 244–245.
93. Quoted in Morgan, FDR 540.
94. Ibid.
95. Quoted in Freidel, A Rendezvous with Destiny 354.
96. Burns, The Lion and the Fox 443.
97. Barnes, Willkie 226.
98. Burns, The Lion and the Fox 445.
99. 1940 The Gallup Poll 247.
100. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 352.
101. 9 Public Papers and Addresses 481.
102. Address at Philadelphia, October 23, 1940. Ibid. 485–495.
103. Burns, The Lion and the Fox 447.
104. 9 Public Papers and Addresses 488.
105. Address at Madison Square Garden, October 28, 1940. Ibid. 490–510.
106. Address at Boston, Massachusetts, October 30, 1940. Ibid. 514–524.
107. Quoted in Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 355.
108. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 242.
109. Ibid. 249.
110. Address at Cleveland, Ohio, October 2, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses 544–553.
111. Gallup Poll, November 4, 1940. The Gallup Poll 249–250.
112. In 1908 voting turnout was 65.4 percent. Note that American turnout figures are based on the entire voting-age population. In Europe, Canada, and Australia turnout figures are given as a proportion of the registered voters. That explains why turnout figures in those countries are inevitably higher. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States 1071–1072 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975).
113. One of the best analyses of the 1940 election remains Samuel Lubell’s classic The Future of American Politics 51–57 (New York: Harper & Row, 1952).
114. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 118.
TWENTY-TWO | Arsenal of Democracy
The epigraph is from FDR’s fireside chat, December 29, 1940. 9 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 633–644, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1941).
1. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom 22 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
2. WSC to FDR, November 6, 1940, quoted in Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence 119–120, Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley, and Manfred Jonas, eds. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).
3. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 465 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
4. WSC to FDR, November 6, 1940, quoted in Roosevelt and Churchill 119.
5. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life 679–681 (New York: Henry Holt, 1991); Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 632.
6. Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography 631n (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
7. 16 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 324 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972); 1 The Memoirs of Cordell Hull 871–873 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
8. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, Undeclared War 229 (New York: Harper & Row, 1952). Also see John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 201–203 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
9. Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 222 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
10. Ibid. 224.
11. Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 558 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 467.
12. The full text of Churchill’s December 8 message together with earlier drafts is in 1 Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence 89–109, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). Also see Churchill, Their Finest Hour 558–567. An abbreviated version appears in Roosevelt and Churchill 122–126.
13. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 567.
14. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 224.
15. Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 605 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003).
16. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 225.
17. Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 208.
18. A useful summary of FDR’s actions is provided by Warren F. Kimball in The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939–1941 119–125 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
19. Press Conference, December 17, 1940. 16 Complete Presidential Press Conferences 350–355.
20. Churchill, Their Finest Hour 569.
21. FDR, “Fireside Chat,” December 29, 1940, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 633–644.
22. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 607.
23. 9 Public Papers and Addresses 633–644 (emphasis added).
24. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 262 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952); also see Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 227.
25. Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Relationship 79 (New York: Random House, 2003).
26. Langer and Gleason, The Undeclared War 249; The Gallup Poll 262 (interviewing dates January 11–16, 1941).
27. 1 Churchill and Roosevelt 120.
28. Annual Message, January 6, 1941, 9 Public Papers and Addresses 663–672.
29. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 231.
30. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 262–263.
31. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 233–234.
32. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 325 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1959).
33. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 2–3.
34. 1 Churchill and Roosevelt 131. On January 28, 1941, Churchill wrote FDR, “I received Willkie yesterday and was deeply moved by the verse of Longfellow’s which you quoted. I shall have it framed as a souvenir of these tremendous days as a mark of our friendly relations.” Ibid. 134.
35. Kimball, Most Unsordid Act 77–104; Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 472–473; Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie 187 (New York: Doubleday, 1984).
36. A January 27, 1941, Gallup Poll indicated FDR enjoyed a 71 percent approval rating. On Lend-Lease, respondents were 68 percent in favor on January 22; 69 percent in favor on February 10; 56 percent in favor on February 28; and 76 percent in favor on March 10. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 262–268 (New York: Random House, 1972).
37. Neal, Dark Horse 203–206. Also see The New York Times, February 12, 1941.
38. Annual Address to the White House Correspondents Association, March 15, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 63.
39. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 123–139 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
40. 10 Public Papers and Addresses 96–98.
41. FDR to WSC, April 11, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 166.
42. 738th Press Conference, April 25, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 133–135. An April 23 Gallup Poll indicated that only 41 percent of Americans favored convoying British ships, while 50 percent were opposed. The Gallup Poll 275.
43. Gallup Polls, April 7, 18, 23, 28, 1941. Ibid. 273–276.
44. Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 254. “The President said that public opinion was not yet ready for the United States to convoy ships,” Morgenthau wrote after an April 2 conversation with FDR. Ibid. 251.
45. Quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny 370 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
46. George VI to FDR, June 3, 1941, FDRL. “I often think of those talks we had at Hyde Park,” wrote the King. “After so many years of anxiety, when what we wanted to happen seemed so far from realisation, it is wonderful to feel that at last our two great countries are getting together for the future betterment of the world.… My prime minister, Mr. Churchill, is indefatigable at his work. He is a great man, and has at last come into his own as leader of his country in this fateful time in her history. I have every confidence in him.”
King George, who wrote in beautiful script, asked to write to FDR directly. “So many communications between Heads of State have to go through ‘official channels.’ ” The King signed himself “Believe me Yours very sincerely George R.I. [Rex Imperator].”
47. Harold L. Ickes, 3 The Secret Diaries of Harold L. Ickes 523 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955). After cabinet Stimson lamented, “because the President shows evidence of waiting for the accidental shot of some irresponsible captain on either side to be the occasion of his going to war.” Stimson diary (MS), May 23, 1941.
48. For a list of British ships lost in the American patrol zone, see WSC to FDR, May 23, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 195.
49. WSC to FDR, May 3, 1941, ibid. 181–182.
50. FDR to WSC, May 10, 1941, ibid. 184–185.
51. Berle diaries (MS), May 26, 1941, FDRL.
52. “Fireside Chat Announcing Unlimited National Emergency,” May 27, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 181–194. The text of the president’s proclamation (No. 2487) is in ibid. 194–195.
53. FDR to WSC, May 27, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 196–197. “Pray accept my heartfelt thanks,” Churchill replied. “It was very kind of you to let me know beforehand of the great advance you found it possible to make.” WSC to FDR, May 28, 1941, ibid. 198–199.
54. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 298.
55. Gallup Poll, June 15, 1941 (polling dates June 9–14), The Gallup Poll 284. The opposition to war still ran strong. A similar Gallup Poll published on June 20 reported 56 percent of Americans still favored a national referendum before troops were sent overseas. Ibid. 285.
56. New York Herald Tribune, May 29, 1941.
57. Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait 256–258 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
58. Amsterdam News, June 27, 1941.
59. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 242 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
60. Ibid. 245.
61. Last Will and Testament of Franklin D. Roosevelt, November 12, 1941, FDRL.
62. James Roosevelt, My Parents: A Differing View 108 (Chicago: Playboy Press, 1976).
63. Williamson Murray and Allan B. Millett, A War to Be Won 120–123 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
64. 6 Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 6427–6431, Robert Rhodes James, ed. (London: Chelsea House, 1974).
65. 3 Documents on American Foreign Relations 364–365 (New York: World Peace Foundation, 1942).
66. Press Conference 750, June 24, 1941, 17 Complete Presidential Press Conferences 408–411.
67. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 640.
68. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 537–543.
69. Quoted in Burns, Soldier of Freedom 115.
70. Gallup Poll, July 14, 1941, The Gallup Poll 288.
71. FDR to Lend-Lease Administrator, Lend-Lease to Russia, November 7, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 481. Also see Warren F. Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman 37 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).
72. Burns, Soldier of Freedom 105.
73. Morgenthau diaries (MS), February 17, 1941, FDRL.
74. Churchill, Grand Alliance 429.
75. Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 61–67 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969).
76. Michael F. Reilly, as told to William J. Slocum, in Reilly of the White House 120 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947).
77. Ibid. 120.
78. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It 25 (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1946).
79. Geoffrey C. Ward, Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley 141 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
80. Churchill, Grand Alliance 663.
81. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 363.
82. Ibid. 241.
83. Churchill, Grand Alliance 432.
84. Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 653.
85. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It 33.
86. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 496; Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill 1173. Also see Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 285 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
87. War cabinet minutes, August 19, 1941, quoted in Joseph P. Lash, Roosevelt and Churchill, 1931–1941 402 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976).
88. Wilson, First Summit 210–211. For text, see 1 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941 822–823 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1948). Also see Maurice Matloff and Edwin M. Snell, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1941–1942 53–62 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1953). For the joint message to Stalin, see 10 Public Papers and Addresses 317–319.
89. For the text of the Atlantic Charter, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941 367–369. Also see 10 Public Papers and Addresses 314–317.
90. Churchill, Grand Alliance 444.
91. FDR, Message to Congress, July 21, 1941, “Extension of Selective Service,” 10 Public Papers and Addresses 272–277.
92. Gallup Poll, August 6, 1941, The Gallup Poll 291–292.
93. D. B. Hardeman and Donald C. Bacon, Rayburn: A Biography 262–270 (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1987). For the House roll call, see The New York Times, August 13, 1941. The Senate roll calls are in ibid., August 8, August 15, 1941.
94. “Fireside Chat,” September 11, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 384–392.
95. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 497–498.
96. The advice of the Catholic prelates is in an August 25, 1941, letter from Sumner Welles to FDR. Also see Myron C. Taylor to FDR, August 30, 1941, FDRL.
97. FDR to Pius XII, September 3, 1941, in Wartime Correspondence Between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII 61–62, Myron C. Taylor, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1947).
98. Pius XII to FDR, September 20, 1941, ibid. 63–64.
99. Paragraph 24, Divini redemptoris, Encyclical of Pope Pius XI on Atheistic Communism.
100. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 793–797.
101. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 270–273.
102. Reilly and Slocum, Reilly of the White House 83–85.
103. Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt 5–9 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
TWENTY-THREE | Day of Infamy
The epigraph is from FDR’s address to a Joint Session of Congress, December 8, 1941, requesting a declaration of war against Japan. 10 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 514–515, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
1. Marshall, memorandum to the President, April 24, 1941, in U.S. Congress, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 15 Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack 1635 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946). In Marshall’s words, “[E]nemy carriers, naval escorts and transports will begin to come under attack at a distance of approximately 750 miles. This attack will increase in intensity until when within 200 miles of the objective, the enemy forces will be subject to attack by all types of bombardment closely supported by our most modern pursuit [planes].”
2. Grant to Adam Badeau, August 1, August 25, 1879, quoted in Badeau, Grant in Peace: From Appomattox to Mount McGregor 517–519 (Hartford, Conn.: Scranton, 1887). Grant’s reference to twelve years pertains to the overthrow of Japanese feudalism and the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
3. Ibid. 319–321. Also see Jean Edward Smith, Grant 612–615 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
4. David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 500–501 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. TR received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. For the text of the Treaty of Portsmouth, August 23, 1905, see 2 Major Peace Treaties in Modern History, 1648–1967 1149–1155, Fred L. Israel, ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 1967).
6. The Japanese protest note of May 9, 1913, pertaining to California’s land statute was summarily rejected by President Wilson, precipitating a brief war scare (see chapter 6). In 1920 California enacted additional legislation denying Japanese the right to lease agricultural land. More than a dozen states followed California’s example. The statutes were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Terrance v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923).
Wilson’s action at Versailles is more shameful. When on April 11, 1919, the Japanese delegation sought to amend the preamble to the League of Nations Covenant to include a reference to racial equality, a majority of delegations voted in favor. Wilson, who was presiding, ruled the amendment out of order because of the strong opposition it faced. His dubious holding was not appealed by the Japanese. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919 316–321. Also see David Hunter Miller, 2 Drafting of the Covenant 387–393 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928).
Section 26 of the Immigration Act of 1924, 43 U.S. Statutes at Large 153–169, which excluded “aliens not eligible for citizenship” from admission to the United States, was aimed exclusively at the Japanese, since all other Orientals had been excluded by prior legislation. The provision was enacted over the vigorous objection of Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.
7. Samuel Flagg Bemis, the late dean of American diplomatic historians, wrote that the Root-Takahira agreement “suggests President [Theodore] Roosevelt was preparing to give Japan a free hand in Manchuria as he had done already in Korea. He had already come to feel that the Philippines were the ‘Achilles heel’ of the United States, and that the United States could not fight Japan over Manchuria.” Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States 495–496 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963). Elihu Root was TR’s secretary of state; Kogoro Takahira was Japan’s ambassador in Washington. For the exchange of notes that constitute the agreement, November 30, 1908, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1908 511–512 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1912). Also see Thomas A. Bailey, “The Root-Takahira Agreement,” 9 Pacific Historical Review 19–35 (1940).
8. Quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy: A History 540 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
9. Louise Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism 214–215 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). I have converted yen to dollars at 3.5 to 1.
10. Raymond Moley, Seven Years After 95 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939).
11. Quoted in Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 501.
12. Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor 76–87 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950).
13. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 504.
14. Quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 308 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
15. Fred L. Israel, ed., The War Diary of Breckinridge Long 140 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966).
16. William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 20–21 (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). The text of the president’s order is in Foreign Relations of the United States 1940, 2 Japan 222 ff. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946).
17. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 506.
18. Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka made it explicit that the pact was aimed at the United States. “It is the United States that is encouraging the Chungking Government,” he told his cabinet colleagues. “Should a solid coalition come to exist between Japan, Germany, and Italy, it will become the most effective expedient to restrain the United States.” Tokyo War Crimes Documents, No. 1259. For the text of the Tripartite Pact, see 3 Documents on American Foreign Relations 304–305 (New York: World Peace Foundation, 1942).
19. WSC to FDR, October 4, 1940, 1 Roosevelt & Churchill: The Complete Correspondence 74–75, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
20. Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations 117 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1950).
21. John Morton Blum, 2 From the Morgenthau Diaries 374–375 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). Roosevelt named Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina to replace McReynolds.
22. Grew to Secretary of State, May 13, 1941, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941 4 The Far East 187–188 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956).
23. Cordell Hull, 1 Memoirs 723–725 (New York: Macmillan, 1948). Also see Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and America’s Entry into World War II 49–50 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
24. Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan 350–351 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Rendezvous with Destiny 380–381 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990).
25. Roosevelt and Nomura corresponded occasionally during the interwar period, the latter always congratulating FDR on his electoral victories and the president always responding. On April 6, 1937, Roosevelt wrote, “As I have often told you, I hope the day will come when I can visit Japan. I have much interest in the great accomplishments of the Japanese people and I should much like to see many of my Japanese friends again.” FDRL.
For Secretary Hull’s aide-mémoire of the Roosevelt-Nomura meeting, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1941, 2 Japan 387–389 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955).
26. Hull, 2 Memoirs 987.
27. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 507.
28. Hosoya Chihiro, “The Japanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact,” in J. W. Morley, ed., The Fateful Choice: Japan’s Advance into Southeast Asia, 1939–1941 97 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
29. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 627 and the Tokyo War Crimes Documents cited therein.
30. Otto Preston Chaney, Jr., Zhukov 57 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
31. Japanese intelligence estimates counted thirty Russian divisions in the Far East versus the Kwantung Army’s twelve, and 2,800 planes versus Japan’s 800. Heinrichs, Threshold of War 120.
32. Harold L. Ickes, 3 The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes 567 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955).
33. “Konoye Memoirs,” in 20 Pearl Harbor Attack 4018–4019. Also see “Tojo Memorandum,” in Tokyo War Crimes Documents 36254–36258.
34. Blum, 2 Morgenthau Diaries 377. Stimson called FDR’s statement “the same old rot.” Handwritten notation on Robert Patterson’s memorandum of the cabinet meeting, cited in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940–1945 109–110 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
35. 5 Pearl Harbor Attack 2382–2384. Also see Herbert Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 231–232.
36. Memo, Chief of Staff to Secretary of War, May 20, 1941, cited in Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Operations 347.
37. Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 588.
38. Blum, 2 Morgenthau Diaries 378–379. Also see Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 588.
39. FDR, Extemporaneous remarks to the Volunteer Participation Committee of the Office of Civilian Defense, July 24, 1941. 10 Public Papers and Addresses 277–281.
40. Executive Order 8832, July 21, 1941, ibid. 281–283.
41. Mark S. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations 434–438; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 188–189 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978); Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War314–315 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1987); Frazier Hunt, The Untold Story of Douglas MacArthur 208 (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954); Forrest C. Pogue, 2 George C. Marshall 181, 466 (New York: Viking, 1965).
42. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 300 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
43. Quoted in Scott D. Sagan, “The Origins of the Pacific War,” in The Origin and Prevention of Major Wars 336, Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb, eds. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
44. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department 26 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969). Robert L. Beisner’s well-researched Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) deals primarily with the postwar period. His brief treatment of Acheson as assistant secretary of state under FDR (especially pages 14–15) is consistent with my presentation.
45. Hadley Cantril, “Gallup and Fortune Polls,” 5 Public Opinion Quarterly 687 (Winter 1941); Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 302.
46. Sagan, “Origins of the Pacific War” 336.
47. Quoted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 248. Also see Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937–1941 95–101, 126–133, 151–156 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985).
48. Robert J. C. Butow, Tojo and the Coming of the War 245 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1961).
49. Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 266–267; Heinrichs, Threshold of War 184–185; Butow, Tojo 259; Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept 261 (New York: Penguin, 1981).
50. Joseph C. Grew, 2 Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–1945 1324–1325 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).
51. Joseph C. Grew, Ten Years in Japan 423–428 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944).
52. Ambassador Grew’s memorandum of his conversation with Prime Minister Konoye is reprinted in Grew, 2 Turbulent Era 1326–1329.
53. Ibid. 1327. Grew believed the potential intervention of the Emperor added great weight to Konoye’s proposal. It was the device used in 1945 to accomplish Japan’s surrender and was always the government’s ace in the hole in dealing with the military.
54. Ibid. 1333.
55. Waldo H. Heinrichs, American Ambassador: Joseph C. Grew and the Development of United States Diplomatic Tradition 347 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).
56. Heinrichs, Threshold of War 186. In particular, see Grew’s September 29, 1941, cable from Tokyo. Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 645–650.
57. Conversation between Stimson and Morgenthau, September 18, 1941, in 442 Morgenthau Diaries (MS) 45 ff. For Ickes view, see 3 Secret Diary 610–611.
58. Memo to Hull, August 28, 1941, 20 Pearl Harbor Attack 4406 ff.
59. Hull, 2 Memoirs 1024.
60. Ibid. 1024–1025.
61. Numerous scholars have speculated about the missed opportunity. One of the best analyses is by F. C. Jones in his authoritative account of Japanese expansionism: Japan’s New Order in East Asia: Its Rise and Fall 182–183 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954). Also see Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 274–277.
62. On August 14, 1941, just one month before the attempt on Konoye’s life, Baron Hiranuma, the minister for home affairs and an ardent advocate of peace with the United States, was severely injured in an assassination attempt. Grew, 2 Turbulent Era 1332.
63. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 729.
64. FDR to George VI; FDR to Churchill; both letters dated October 15, 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1223–1224, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).
65. 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1402. Also see Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision 132–133 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1962).
66. 16 Pearl Harbor Attack 2214 ff.; Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor 146–147.
67. War Department to Short and MacArthur, October 20, 1941, quoted in Watson, Chief of Staff 496.
68. Grew, Ten Years in Japan 470. Grew’s long cable of November 3, 1941, is paraphrased in Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 701–704, and reprinted in full in 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1045–1057.
69. Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 852, quoting “Tojo Memorandum,” in Tokyo War Crimes Documents. Also see Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 293.
70. Togo to Nomura, November 4, 1941, quoted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 296.
71. Memo, Chief of Naval Operations and Chief of Staff for the President, November 5, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1061–1062.
72. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University.
73. Hull, 2 Memoirs 1058.
74. Stimson diary (MS), November 7, 1941, quoted in Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 397.
75. Heinrichs, Threshold of War 200. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 865–867; Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom 155.
76. The text of the Japanese proposal (“Plan B”) is reprinted in Feis, Road to Pearl Harbor 309. Also see Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 755–756.
77. Togo to Nomura, November 4, 1941, 12 Pearl Harbor Attack 92–93. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 856.
78. In his Memoirs Hull wrote that acceptance of the Japanese offer would have meant “condonement by the United States of Japan’s past aggressions … betrayal of China and Russia, and acceptance of the role of silent partner aiding and abetting Japan in her effort to create a Japanese hegemony over the western Pacific and eastern Asia … [The proposals] were of so preposterous a character that no responsible American official could ever have dreamed of accepting them.” 2 Memoirs 1069–1070.
For a skeptical assessment of Hull’s ex post facto judgment, see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 880. The Japanese offer was only an interim, stopgap arrangement to provide further time to negotiate a long-term settlement.
79. 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1109. FDR’s note is also reprinted in Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 872, and Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 398. Langer and Gleason date the note earlier than do others.
80. Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 739 ff.
81. Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 649–650.
82. Gerow to Hull, November 21, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1103–1107.
83. Togo to Nomura, November 22, 1941, 12 Pearl Harbor Attack 163–165.
84. The classic revisionist argument is Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, especially 517–569 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948). Also see Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, And I Was There: Pearl Harbor and Midway, Breaking the Secrets198–207 (New York: William Morrow, 1985); William Henry Chamberlain, America’s Second Crusade 167–168 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950).
85. Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 307–308; Robert H. Ferrell, American Diplomacy 572–573; Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept 369; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the United States 737 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964); Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 400; Gordon W. Prange, Donald M. Goldstein, and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History 177–193 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).
86. For Hull’s account, see Hull, 2 Memoirs 1081–1082 and the memorandum he dictated pertaining thereto at 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1176–1177. Colonel Stimson’s account is in his diary entry of November 26, 1941. The most sustained critique of the accounts provided by Hull and Stimson is not in the works of radical and revisionist historians but in Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 885 ff.—a work sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations.
87. Ibid. 893.
88. WSC to FDR, November 26, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 277–278.
89. Ickes, 3 Secret Diary 655. For Morgenthau’s opposition to negotiating with Japan, see Blum, 2 Morgenthau Diaries 389–391.
90. On November 24, 1941, Admiral Stark warned Navy commanders in the Pacific, “There are very doubtful chances of a favorable outcome of negotiations with Japan. This situation coupled with statements of [Japanese] government and movement of their naval and military forces indicate in our opinion that a surprise aggressive movement in any direction, including an attack on the Philippines or Guam, is a possibility.… Utmost secrecy is necessary in order not to complicate an already tense situation or precipitate Japanese action.” Stark to CinC Asiatic Fleet and CinC Pacific Fleet, November 24, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1405.
91. Stimson diary (MS), November 25, 1941.
92. Ibid.
93. The text of Hull’s “Ten Point Offer” is in Foreign Relations of the United States, 2 Japan 766–770. Also see Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 896–897.
94. Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 400.
95. Stimson diary (MS), November 27, 1941; 11 Pearl Harbor Attack 5422 ff. When Hull met with his advisers on November 27, his hard-line stance was roundly applauded. Stanley Hornbeck, Hull’s senior Far East specialist, urged that the president tell the Army and Navy what to do rather than asking them. In a widely quoted memorandum of that date Hornbeck maintained that Japan would advance into Thailand or Yunnan but would avoid conflict with the United States. He bet 5 to 1 there would not be war by December 15; 3 to 1 there would be no war by January 15; and even money there would be no war by March 1. Such was the advice Hull received from his senior specialist. The Hornbeck memorandum is at 20 Pearl Harbor Attack 4487.
96. Most scholars are incredulous that Hull acted, apparently with FDR’s approval, without informing the War Department and the Navy beforehand. “It was both bad strategy and careless administrative procedure for the civilian leaders of the Government to make the momentous decisions of November 26, 1941, without formal consultation with the responsible military leaders. The argument that by this date no practical difference could have been anticipated does not alter the seriousness of this breach of fundamental rules for achieving sound decisions of national security policy.” Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War 900.
97. CNO to CinC Pac and CinC AF, November 27, 1941, 14 Pearl Harbor Attack 1406.
98. Marshall to CG American forces in the Far East, ibid.
99. Julius W. Pratt, 2 Cordell Hull 515 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964).
100. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 515.
101. Shigenori Togo, testimony, Tokyo War Crimes Documents, Document 2927.
102. Nobutake Ike, Japan’s Decision for War: Records of the 1941 Policy Conferences 265, 283 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967).
103. SRN 115376, CinC Combined Fleet to Combined Fleet, December 2, 1941, 1500 hrs., Record Group 457, NSA, National Archives.
104. Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy 158 (Tokyo: Shincho Sha, 1966).
105. Gordon W. Prange, interview with Capt. Watanabe, February 12, 1949, cited in Prange, At Dawn We Slept 13.
106. Yamamoto to Admiral Koshiro Oikawa, January 7, 1941, quoted in ibid. 16–17.
107. For the attack at Taranto, see Don Newton and A. Cecil Hampshire, Taranto (London: W. Kimber, 1959).
108. The average depth at Pearl Harbor was forty feet. “We did not give aerial torpedoes a great deal of consideration for that reason,” said Admiral Kimmel. 33 Pearl Harbor Attack 1318. Ironically, the Japanese in their training sessions had been unable to penetrate protective torpedo nets, and their pilots were instructed to confine the Pearl Harbor attack to bombing only if they found the American fleet protected by netting. Prange, At Dawn We Slept 321.
109. Ibid. 332–333.
110. Ibid. 387, 373.
111. Yamamoto to Hori, November 11, 1941, ibid. 340. Hori, commanding the submarine fleet, put to sea the next day.
112. Ibid. 472.
113. Ibid. 488.
114. Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations 511.
115. Gordon W. Prange with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History 460 (New York: Penguin, 1991). Kimmel’s remarks were made to Edward M. Morgan, chief counsel for the congressional Pearl Harbor investigation.
116. Pearl Harbor Report 150–151. General Lucius D. Clay, then in Washington directing the nation’s emergency airport construction program (La Guardia, O’Hare, Los Angeles, National) said much the same. Attending a football game at Griffith Stadium on Sunday, December 7, with Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones, Clay was asked by Secretary Jones about the attack. “I immediately proved my great military expertise because I said, ‘The Japs would attack Guam or the Philippines, but Pearl Harbor is impregnable. I just can’t believe they would attack Pearl Harbor.’ ” Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 96 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
117. According to the diary kept by Konoye, Yamamoto added, “I hope you will endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war.” 2 Report of General MacArthur: Japanese Operations in the Southeast Pacific Area 33 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).
118. Richard Ketcham, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941,” American Heritage 54 (November, 1989).
119. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 255 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949).
120. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 431 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
121. ER, interview with Professor Henry Graff, FDRL, quoted in Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Life 289 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
122. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 605 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
123. Ibid. 608–609.
124. Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 256. Hopkins’s sentence ran, “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounded determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.” (“The most platitudinous in the speech,” according to Hopkins’s biographer Robert Sherwood. Roosevelt and Hopkins 436.)
125. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 436–438.
126. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 381 (New York: Harper & Row, 1946).
127. Ickes, 3 Secret Diaries 662.
128. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project.
129. The congressional delegation was composed of Senate majority leader Alben Barkley and his Republican opposite, Charles McNary; Tom Connally of Texas, chairman of Foreign Relations; Warren Austin of Vermont, the ranking member of Military Affairs; and Hiram Johnson of California. From the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn, Minority Leader Joe Martin, and Majority Leader John McCormack, plus Sol Bloom of New York and Charles Eaton of New Jersey, the chairman and second-ranking member of Foreign Affairs.
130. Stimson diary (MS), December 7, 1941.
131. American Heritage 86, November 1989.
132. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority 206 (New York: Doubleday, 1948).
133. Quoted in Prange, At Dawn We Slept 559.
134. Alexander Kendrick, Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow 239–240 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). That night Murrow paced his hotel room. “It’s the biggest story of my life,” he told his wife, Janet, “and I can’t make up my mind whether it’s my duty to tell it, or to forget it.” (FDR had not said “off the record.”) In the end, Murrow decided Roosevelt had been using him as a sounding board, thinking out loud, in full confidence. Though technically not bound to confidentiality, Murrow felt that in conscience he could not report the details of his meeting with the president.
135. FDR to Congress, December 8, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 514–515.
TWENTY-FOUR | Commander in Chief
The epigraph is from Secretary Stimson’s diary entry of December 7, 1941, Stimson Papers, Yale University.
1. Quoted in Hiroyuki Agawa, The Reluctant Admiral: Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy 282 (Tokyo: Shincho Sha, 1966).
2. FDR, Fireside Address, December 9, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 522–530, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
3. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 527 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to Be Won 180–188 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
4. Quoted in John Keegan, The Second World War 240 (New York: Viking, 1989).
5. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 566.
6. FDR, Message to Congress, December 11, 1941, 10 Public Papers and Addresses 522.
7. WSC to King George VI, December 8, 1941, 3 Churchill War Papers, 1941 1585, Martin Gilbert, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993).
8. Roosevelt’s remarks are in two cables drafted but not sent on December 10, 1941. Their contents were conveyed to Churchill in a subsequent telephone conversation that day. For texts, see Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence 285–286, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Separately, Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, told Churchill, “He [Roosevelt] was not sure if your coming here might not be rather too strong medicine in the immediate future for some of his public opinion that he still feels he has to educate up to the complete conviction of the oneness of the struggle against both Germany and Japan.” Halifax to Churchill, December 9, 1941, Halifax Papers, Cambridge University.
9. WSC to FDR, December 10, 1941, 3 Churchill & Roosevelt 284.
10. FDR to WSC, December 10, 1941, ibid. 286–287.
11. David Bercuson and Holger Herwig, One Christmas in Washington 125 (New York: Overlook Press, 2005).
12. Doris Kearns Goodwin, interview with Alonzo Fields, cited in No Ordinary Time 302 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
13. Michael Reilly and William J. Slocum, Reilly of the White House 125 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947).
14. Lillian Rogers Parks, The Roosevelts: A Family in Turmoil 99 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981). In addition to her father, Elliott, ER’s brother Hall died of acute alcoholism on September 25, 1941.
15. Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance 608 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
16. Presidential Press Conference 794, December 23, 1941, 18 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 387–388 (New York: Da Capo, 1972).
17. Newsweek, January 5, 1942; Alistair Cooke’s comment was made to Curtis Roosevelt in October 1993. Quoted in Jon Meacham, Franklin and Winston 142–143 (New York: Random House, 2003).
18. 6 Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches 6536–6541, Robert Rhodes James, ed. (New York: Chelsea House, 1974).
19. The Washington Post, December 27, 1941.
20. In Ottawa on December 30, 1941, Churchill made his famous “some chicken, some neck” speech to the Canadian Parliament, mocking the words of French general Maxime Weygand, who in June 1940 had told his government that “In three weeks England will have her neck wrung like a chicken.” “Some chicken!” Churchill told his Canadian listeners. “Some neck!” 6 Speeches of Winston Churchill 6541–6547.
At the invitation of Edward Stettinius, Churchill spent five days at Stettinius’s Pompano Beach oceanfront estate. He enjoyed splashing naked in the surf, “half submerged in the water like a hippopotamus in a swamp,” in the words of his doctor, Lord Moran. The Struggle for Survival: The Diaries of Lord Moran 22 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
21. Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 472–473 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948); Forrest C. Pogue, 2 George C. Marshall 285–287 (New York: Viking, 1966).
22. For firsthand insight into the operation of the Munitions Assignment Board, see the comments of General Lucius D. Clay, the Army’s representative, in Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 134–139 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
23. The text is most easily accessible in Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The War President 371–372 (New York: Random House, 2000). Also see 11 Public Papers and Addresses 3–4.
24. For this comparison I am indebted to Isaiah Berlin, “Mr. Churchill,” Atlantic Monthly (September 1949).
25. FDR, Address on the State of the Union, January 6, 1942, 11 Public Papers and Addresses 32–42.
26. Stimson diary (MS), January 6, 1942. Yale University.
27. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 273–274.
28. Smith, Lucius D. Clay 119–126. The chart Clay prepared for the president is reproduced on page 125. A transcript of my interviews with General Clay, some one thousand pages, is on file at the Columbia Oral History Project at Columbia University. The tapes themselves are at the George C. Marshall Library at VMI in Lexington, Virginia, along with Clay’s papers.
In place of the original 45,000 tanks, Roosevelt accepted the Army’s suggestion for 46,523 tracked vehicles (tanks, armored personal carriers, and self-propelled artillery), “of which 24,700 shall be tanks.” The president’s goal of 60,000 airplanes was reduced by 25 percent.
29. Hoover to Biddle, February 1, 1942, quoted in Greg Robinson, By Order of the President 100 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). Also see Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt 721–722 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003). Stilwell’s remark was made on December 19, 1941, in Los Angeles. See Richard N. Current, Secretary Stimson: A Study in Statecraft 193 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1942). Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1941; January 23, 1942. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority 213 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1962).
30. De Witt to War Department, February 13, 1942, quoted in Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: Japanese Americans 109 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944).
31. Quoted in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 321.
32. Richard Lingeman, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? 337 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1970).
33. Peter Irons, Justice at War 39–40 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
34. The New York Times, January 25, 1942.
35. New York Herald Tribune, February 12, 1942.
36. Times-Herald (Washington, D.C.), February 16, 1942.
37. Stimson diary (MS), February 10, 1942, Yale University. “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated as part of a total evacuation, or by frankly trying to put them out on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system.”
38. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment 149–150 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
39. Said De Witt, “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil have become Americanized, the racial strain is undiluted.” De Witt to War Department, February 14, 1942, in Davis, F.D.R.: The War President 423n.
40. Quoted in Irons, Justice at War 61. Also see Robinson, By Order of the President 105; Bird, The Chairman 153.
41. Stimson diary (MS), February 11, 1942, Yale University.
42. Stetson Conn, “The Decision to Evacuate the Japanese from the Pacific Coast,” 143, in Kent Roberts Greenfield, ed., Command Decisions (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960).
43. Bird, The Chairman 154.
44. Biddle, In Brief Authority 219.
45. Frank S. Arnold, Michael C. Barth, and Gilah Langer, “Economic Losses of Ethnic Japanese as a Result of Exclusion and Detention, 1942–1946,” quoted in Robinson, By Order of the President 144.
46. Morgenthau diaries (MS), March 5, 1942, FDRL.
47. Quoted in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 322.
48. Biddle, In Brief Authority 219. The case contra is argued by Michelle Malkin, In Defense of Internment (Chicago: Regnery, 2004).
49. This narrative is based on General Arnold’s letter to Judge Rosenman describing the raid in 11 Public Papers and Addresses 214–216. For Admiral King’s version, see Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record 375–376 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1952). Above all, see Quentin Reynolds’s elegant The Amazing Mr. Doolittle 168–223 (New York: Arno Press, 1953).
50. Roosevelt liked the term so much that he named the presidential Catoctin Mountain retreat Shangri-la (Eisenhower re-christened it “Camp David” in honor of his grandson), and toward the end of the war a Navy carrier was also named Shangri-la.
51. Stimson diary (MS), April 18, 1942.
52. Edmund L. Castillo, Flat-tops: The Story of Aircraft Carriers 86 (New York: Random House, 1969); Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan 648 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
53. Murray and Millett, A War to Be Won 273–278.
54. For Molotov’s travel accoutrements, see Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 250–251 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). For Molotov’s secretaries, see Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 560. “I went in for a moment to talk to him [before going to bed]’ ” wrote Hopkins, “and he asked that one of the girls he brought over as secretaries be permitted to come [to his room] and that has been arranged.”
55. Geoffrey C. Ward, ed., Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley 159 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
56. Memorandum of conversation, May 30, 1942, recorded by Professor Samuel H. Cross, in Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 561–563.
57. FDR to Marshall and King, May 6, 1942, FDRL. Quoted in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 344.
58. Cross memorandum, in Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 563.
59. FDR to WSC, May 31, June 6, 1942, 1 Churchill and Roosevelt: Their Complete Correspondence 503–504, 508 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). “The Molotov visit went off well,” Hopkins wrote Churchill. “I liked him much better than I did in Moscow. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t under the influence of ‘Uncle Joe.’ At any rate, he and the President had very direct and straightforward conferences.” Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 580.
60. Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate 338 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950).
61. William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R. 67 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1958); Hastings Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay 256 (New York: Viking, 1960).
62. Stimson diary (MS), June 20, 1942, Yale University. General Marshall said, “We were largely trying to get the President to stand pat on what he had previously agreed to. The President shifted, particularly when Churchill got hold of him.… The President was always willing to do any sideshow and Churchill was always prodding him.” Forrest C. Pogue, 2 George C. Marshall 329 (New York: Viking, 1965).
63. WSC to FDR, June 20, 1942, quoted in Hinge of Fate 381–382.
64. WSC to FDR, July 8, 1942, Churchill & Roosevelt 520–521.
65. “It looks as if the President is going to jump the traces,” Stimson recorded in his diary on June 17, 1942. “He wants to take up the case of GYMNAST [the North African invasion] again, thinking that he can bring additional pressure to save Russia.”
66. Mark A. Stoler, The Politics of the Second Front: American Military Planning and Diplomacy in Coalition Warfare, 1941–1943 55 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1977).
67. Quoted in Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 425 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947).
68. FDR to Hopkins, Marshall, and King, July 16, 1942, in Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 603–605.
69. Forrest Pogue interview with General Marshall, November 15, 1956, quoted in Pogue, 2 Marshall 330.
70. Stimson diary (MS), September 17, 1942. Marshall said, “A failure [of a cross-channel attack], for which the public has been adequately prepared, could have been accepted. But failure in TORCH would bring only ridicule and loss of confidence.” 38th Mtg, CCS, August 28, 1942, quoted in Pogue, 2 Marshall 403.
71. WSC to FDR, July 31, 1942, quoted in Churchill, Hinge of Fate 450. Also see B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 312 (London: Cassell, 1970). Marshall chose Eisenhower ahead of 366 general officers who were more senior.
72. FDR to WSC, July 29, 1942, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 545–546.
73. WSC to FDR, August 13, 1942, ibid. 560–562.
74. WSC to FDR, August 18, 1942, ibid. 571–572.
75. Quoted in Liddell Hart, Second World War 314.
76. WSC to FDR, August 27, 1942, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 577–579.
77. Marshall’s draft (August 29, 1942) is in ibid. 571–582. FDR’s cable of August 30, 1942, ibid. 583–584.
78. FDR to WSC, September 4, 1942, ibid. 590–591.
79. WSC to FDR, September 5, 1942, ibid. 591–592.
80. Eisenhower’s remark is quoted in Arthur L. Funk, The Politics of Torch 100 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974).
81. Churchill’s rejoinder was September 6. 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 592.
82. FDR, Broadcast to the French People, November 7, 1942, 11 Public Papers and Addresses 451–452.
83. Roosevelt’s letters to the heads of state were delivered by the respective American ambassadors when the invasion commenced. Ibid. 458–459.
84. Franco’s reply, November 13, 1942, is in ibid. 459.
85. For details of the attempted German seizure of the fleet and the French response, see Rear Admiral Paul Auphan and Jacques Mordal, The French Navy in World War II 255–271 (Annapolis, Md.: United States Naval Institute, 1959).
86. The cross-Channel attack, Eisenhower told the War Department’s Major General Thomas T. Handy, “could not possibly be staged before August of 1944, because our original conception of the strength required was too low.” Quoted in Forrest Pogue, 3 George C. Marshall 31. For the text of the CCS decision, see Churchill, Hinge of Fate 692–693.
87. Under Pétain, “Work, Family, Country” replaced the republican motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” at Vichy. As one leading supporter of Pétain said in 1940, “Parliamentary democracy has lost the war. It must disappear and give place to a hierarchical authoritarian regime, national and social.” R. Aron, Histoire de Vichy, 1940–1944 130 (Paris: Fayard, 1954).
88. Charles de Gaulle, 2 War Memoirs 88–89 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956).
89. Transcript of Press Conference, January 24, 1943, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Conferences in Washington and Casablanca 727 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968).
90. Ibid. 635, 726–729, 833–837, 847–849; Churchill, Hinge of Fate 595–600; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 695–696. Churchill’s message to the war cabinet is in Premier Files, 3, 1972 Public Records Office, London.
91. Paul Kecskemeti, Strategic Surrender: The Politics of Victory and Defeat 122 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958). Cf., Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War II 48–50 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961).
92. Kenneth Pender, Adventure in Diplomacy: Our French Dilemma 152 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945). Pender was American vice consul in Marrakech and accompanied Churchill to the airport.
TWENTY-FIVE | D-Day
The epigraph is from FDR’s D-Day prayer delivered to the nation June 6, 1944. 13 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
1. FDR to ER, January 29, 1943, FDRL.
2. ER to FDR, January 28, 1943, FDRL.
3. Frankfurter to FDR, Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–1945 329 Max Freedman, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).
4. Quoted in B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second World War 388 (London: Cassell, 1970).
5. WSC to FDR, March 18, 1943, 2 Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence 158, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
6. FDR to WSC, March 20, 1943, ibid. 164–165.
7. David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 589 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Also see Letter, President to COMINCH, 18 March 1943, FDRL.
8. John Keegan, The Second World War 120 (New York: Viking, 1989).
9. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 590.
10. 7 Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963 6831, Robert Rhodes James, ed. (London: Chelsea House, 1974).
11. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 648–649.
12. Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 116 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
13. Ibid. 156–157.
14. Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate 795–796 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950); Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 729 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
15. Churchill, Hinge of Fate 797; Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills 483, Mary Soames, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
16. Churchill, Hinge of Fate 798.
17. WSC to Clementine Churchill, May 28, 1943, in Personal Letters of the Churchills 483.
18. James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime 155 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
19. 12 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 327, Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943).
20. FDR to WSC, July 25, 1943, 2 Churchill & Roosevelt 347.
21. Press Conference 912, July 30, 1943, 22 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 50 (New York: Da Capo, 1972).
22. WSC to FDR, July 31, 1943, ibid. 369.
23. Eleanor Roosevelt, “My Day,” August 16, 1943.
24. Geoffrey Ward, ed., Closest Companion 230–231 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995).
25. Forrest C. Pogue, 3 George C. Marshall 261–262 (New York: Viking, 1973); Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 758; Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring 85 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
26. Frances Perkins interview, Columbia Oral History Project, Columbia University. “PM’s sleeping habits have now become quite promiscuous,” wrote British Foreign Office Undersecretary Sir Alexander Cadogan. “He talks with President till 2 am and consequently spends a large part of day hurling himself violently in and out of bed, bathing at unsuitable moments and rushing up and down the corridors in his dressing gown.” Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938–1945 559, David Dilks, ed. (New York: Putnam, 1972).
27. Pogue, 3 George C. Marshall 249; Albert C. Wedemeyer, Wedemeyer Reports 245 (New York: Henry Holt, 1958).
28. Einstein felt singularly honored by the president and afterward composed a jingle:
In der Haupstadt stolzer Pracht
Wo das Schicksal wird gemacht
Kämpfet froh ein stolzer Mann
Der die Lösung schaffen kann.
Which, translated loosely, reads:
In the Capital’s proud glory
Where Destiny unfolds her story,
Fights a man with happy pride
Who solution can provide.
Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times 514 (New York: World, 1971).
29. MAUD Report, July 15, 1941, in Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945 394 ff. (New York: Macmillan, 1964).
30. Churchill, Hinge of Fate 814.
31. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb 377 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985). Before the war ended, appropriations for the Manhattan Project would exceed $2 billion, and it would employ more than 150,000 persons with plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, aside from the research facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.
32. A facsimile of FDR’s note to Bush is ibid. 388.
33. In the House, Stimson met with Rayburn, Majority Leader John McCormack, and minority leader Joe Martin; in the Senate, with Majority Leader Alban Barkley and Republicans Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Wallace White of Maine. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 614 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948). The view expressed by Rayburn was shared by all. “If I don’t know a secret,” said Rayburn, “I can’t let it leak out.” None of the legislators ever pressed Stimson for details. David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War 211 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988).
34. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich 225–229 (New York: Macmillan, 1970).
35. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 667.
36. FDR to WSC, October 11, 1941, 1 Churchill & Roosevelt 249–250.
37. Churchill, Hinge of Fate 380–381.
38. Ibid. Also see Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 593; Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 346 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
39. Quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945 417 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
40. For the text of the Quebec atomic agreement, see Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb 523.
41. Quoted in Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt 418.
42. 1 Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the USA and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War 157–161; vol. 2, 84–94 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1957).
43. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 677–680 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985).
44. Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs: FDR, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles 312–317 (New York: Enigma Books, 1995); Morgan, FDR 682–685; cf. Cordell Hull, 2 Memoirs 1230–1231 (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
45. Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember 63 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949). Mrs. Roosevelt deleted the names in her retelling.
46. FDR, Fireside Chat, July 28, 1943, 12 Public Papers and Addresses 333.
47. Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 395 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952).
48. FDR, Message to Congress, October 27, 1943, 12 Public Papers and Addresses 450–451.
49. FDR, June 22, 1944, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 180–182.
50. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 787.
51. Department of Veterans Affairs, History of G.I. Bill, www.gibill.va.gov/GI_Bill_Info/history.htm.
52. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 787.
53. The 58,000-ton Iowa, sister ship of New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Missouri, was 888 feet in length and had a beam of 108 feet. Iowa was armed with nine 16-inch guns, and its power plant was capable of producing 210,000 horsepower and a top speed of 33.5 knots. The ship’s complement included 142 officers, 2,394 enlisted men, and 98 Marines. It was commanded by Captain John L. McCrea, the president’s former naval aide.
54. FDR to ER, November 18, 1943, 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1469, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950).
55. Memo of Major General Thomas Handy, November 19, 1943, cited in Maurice Matloff, Strategic Planning for Coalition Warfare, 1943–1944 341–342 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959). The minutes of the Iowa conference are reproduced in Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Cairo and Teheran, 1943 253–261 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961).
56. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 256.
57. For a facsimile fold-out copy of FDR’s National Geographic sketch, see Jean Edward Smith, The Defense of Berlin 18–19 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).
58. Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It 133 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946).
59. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 285–287. Lieutenant Junior Grade William M. Rigdon, who kept the president’s log, chastely recorded that Ms. Summersby was a guest of Elliott and FDR, Jr. The following day FDR shared a picnic lunch with Ike and Kay Summersby and subsequently told his daughter, Anna, he believed they were sleeping together. Anna to John Boettiger, December 27, 1943, FDRL.
60. FDR to Lord Louis Mountbatten, November 8, 1943, 2 F.D.R.: His Personal Letters 1468.
61. Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring 328 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).
62. Ibid. 341.
63. Ibid.
64. Lord Moran, Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran 143 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
65. Churchill, Hinge of Fate 434.
66. W. Averell Harriman and Edie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941–1946 536 (New York: Random House, 1975).
67. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 344.
68. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History: 1929–1969 136 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
69. Michael F. Reilly and William J. Slocum, Reilly of the White House 179 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947).
70. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 483. “Bohlen Minutes,” Roosevelt-Stalin meeting, 3 P.M., November 28, 1943.
71. Bohlen, Witness to History 136.
72. Ibid. 139.
73. Ibid. 142.
74. Combined Chiefs of Staff Minutes, November 28, 1943, in FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 497.
75. Bohlen Supplementary Memorandum, November 28, 1943, ibid. 513.
76. In the years before the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), Richelieu aligned France with the numerous German dukes against Hapsburg hegemony. Tripartite Dinner Meeting, November 28, 1943, ibid. 511.
77. Tripartite Political Meeting, December 1, 1943, ibid. 600.
78. Ibid. 602–603.
79. Churchill, Closing the Ring 374.
80. Bohlen, Witness to History 143.
81. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 85 (New York: Viking, 1946.)
82. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 512; Churchill, Closing the Ring 362.
83. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 594. Also see Harriman, Special Envoy 279.
84. WSC to FDR, October 18, 1944, FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 884–885. For the full text of the cable, see 3 Churchill and Roosevelt 358–359.
85. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 594–595.
86. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 489.
87. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 681.
88. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 535–537; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 788–789; Lord Moran, Churchill 147.
89. Lord Moran, Churchill 147.
90. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 538.
91. Lord Moran, Churchill 147.
92. Bohlen, Witness to History 148.
93. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 539. Admiral William D. Leahy, I Was There 207 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950).
94. Leahy, I Was There 207.
95. Bohlen, Witness to History 148.
96. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 578.
97. Stimson diary (MS), December 5, 1943, Yale University.
98. Churchill, Closing the Ring 384–385.
99. Bohlen, Witness to History 149.
100. Lord Hastings Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay 340 (New York: Viking, 1960).
101. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 583. Also see Harriman, Special Envoy 276; Lord Moran, Churchill 154.
102. Churchill, Closing the Ring 387.
103. John Martin letter, December 2, 1943, quoted in Martin Gilbert, 7 Winston S. Churchill 586 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
104. Stalin spent the years 1894 to 1899 as a student at Tiflis Orthodox Theological Seminary. Anthony Eden, The Reckoning 427 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
105. Harriman, Special Envoy 277.
106. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 585.
107. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 84–85.
108. Sergo Beria, Beria, My Father 92–94 (London: Duckworth, 2001).
109. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 770.
110. David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945 42–43 (New York: Random House, 1986).
111. The texts of Pershing’s letter and Roosevelt’s reply are in Katherine Tupper Marshall, Together 156–157 (New York: Tupper and Love, 1946).
112. Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command 27 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954).
113. Leahy, I Was There 192.
114. Pogue, Supreme Command 32; Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins 803.
115. Pogue, 3 George C. Marshall 321 (New York: Viking, 1973).
116. Ibid. 321–322.
117. FRUS, Cairo and Teheran 819.
118. Churchill, Closing the Ring 620.
TWENTY-SIX | Last Post
The epigraph is from FDR’s campaign remarks in Bridgeport, Connecticut, November 4, 1944. 13 Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt 391 Samuel I. Rosenman, ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
1. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 137 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).
2. Lord Hastings Ismay, The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay 338 (New York: Viking, 1960).
3. Stimson diary (MS), December 17, 1943, Yale University.
4. Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 489 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
5. Goodwin, interview with Elliott Roosevelt, ibid.
6. Quoted in John R. Boettiger, Jr., A Love in Shadow 253 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978).
7. Bernard Asbell, Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt 176 (New York: Fromm, 1988).
8. 22 Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt 246–252 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972).
9. Roosevelt’s blood pressure was recorded as follows:
|
July 30, 1935 |
136/75 |
|
April 22, 1937 |
162/98 |
|
November 30, 1940 |
178/88 |
|
February 27, 1941 |
188/105 |
|
March 27, 1944 |
186/108 |
Dr. Howard G. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes on the Illness and Death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” 72 Annals of Internal Medicine 579–591 (1970).
10. Grace Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 273–274 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949); Jim Bishop, FDR’s Last Year 5 (New York: Morrow, 1974).
11. Tully, F.D.R.: My Boss 274; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom 448 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970).
12. Asbell, Mother and Daughter 177.
13. Ibid.
14. As the Navy’s wartime surgeon general, a post to which he was appointed in 1938, McIntire had command responsibility for 175,000 doctors, nurses, and other professionals, 52 hospitals, and 278 mobile medical units. Robert H. Ferrell, The Dying President: Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1944–1945 8 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
15. Asbell, Mother and Daughter 177.
16. Bishop, FDR’s Last Year 4.
17. FDR to Frederic Delano, chairman of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission, December 1, 1938, FDRL.
18. Bishop, FDR’s Last Year 4.
19. Doris Kearns Goodwin interview with Dr. Howard Bruenn, in Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 494.
20. Bishop, FDR’s Last Year 6.
21. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 494–495.
22. Bruenn, “Critical Notes” 580.
23. Goodwin interview with Dr. Bruenn, quoted in No Ordinary Time 495.
24. Ibid. 496.
25. Ibid.
26. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 581.
27. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 496. For Admiral McIntire’s highly selective account, see Vice Admiral Ross T. McIntire, White House Physician 183–184 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1946).
28. Admiral McIntire’s press conference remarks are quoted in ibid. 184. Also see The New York Times, April 5, 1944. In fairness to McIntire, the medical culture of the time generally observed a lack of candor in discussing serious diseases. As Dr. Hugh E. Evans writes, “Illness or its progress was not customarily discussed with patients.… Presidential health matters were assumed to be private, rarely reported frankly or with clinical detail.” The Hidden Campaign: FDR’s Health and the 1944 Election 61 (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002).
29. Bruenn, “Critical Notes” 583.
30. Goodwin, interview with Dr. Bruenn, quoted in No Ordinary Time 498.
31. Bruenn, “Critical Notes” 583–584.
32. FDR to HH, May 18, 1944, FDRL.
33. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 794.
34. The “fantastic nature” comment was that of Elbridge Durbrow of the State Department’s Division of European Affairs. The “earmarks” notation was by the American legation in Geneva. Durbrow Memorandum, August 13, 1942; Minister Leland Harrison to State, August 11, 1942. Both are quoted in David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews 43–44 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
35. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 43. Also see Kenneth S. Davis, F.D.R.: The War President 731 (New York: Random House, 2000).
36. Wise to FDR, December 2, 1942, FDRL.
37. In addition to Wise, the group included Maurice Wertheim of the American Jewish Committee; Henry Monsky of B’nai B’rith; Rabbi Israel Rosenberg (Union of Orthodox Rabbis); and Adolph Held (Jewish Labor Committee).
38. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 72, quoting Wise, et al., to FDR, December 8, 1942, FDRL.
39. Quoted in Davis, F.D.R.: War President 737.
40. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 73.
41. Department of State Bulletin, December 17, 1942; also in The New York Times, December 18, 1942.
42. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 794–795.
43. Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust 245–246 (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006). When the declaration was read in the House of Commons, the members rose and stood in silence for two minutes, a demonstration of sympathy unprecedented in Parliament’s history. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 75.
44. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 795.
45. Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error 435 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949).
46. Ted Morgan, FDR: A Biography 713 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); Rosen, Saving the Jews 290.
47. Cordell Hull, 2 Memoirs 1539 (New York: Macmillan, 1948). The New York Times, March 10, 1944. Hull incorrectly dates the meeting in 1943.
48. The episode is discussed at length in Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 178–192.
49. Rosen, Saving the Jews 289.
50. Morgenthau diaries (MS), January 15, 1944. Also see Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 186–187; Rosen, Saving the Jews 338–339.
51. Executive Order 9417, January 22, 1944, 13 Personal Papers and Addresses 48–50.
52. Emanuel Celler to FDR, January 25, 1944, FDRL.
53. Henry Morgenthau, “The Refugee Runaround,” Collier’s, November 1, 1947.
54. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 795–796.
55. FDR, Statement on Victims of Nazi Oppression, March 24, 1944, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 103–105.
56. Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment 472–476 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1942); Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum, eds., The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It?122–124 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); David S. Wyman, Abandonment of the Jews 410, note 78. After listing the primary sources he consulted, Wyman stated, “An exhaustive search made in 1983 by Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz showed that the bombing proposals almost certainly did not reach Roosevelt and most likely were not discussed at all by OPD [the Operations and Plans Division of the War Department].”Also see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies: A Devastating Account of How the Allies Responded to the News of Hitler’s Mass Murder 299–311 (New York: Henry Holt, 1981).
57. Bird, The Chairman 231–222.
58. General Frederick Anderson to War Department, quoted in Neufeld and Berenbaum, Bombing of Auschwitz 39.
59. Michael Beschloss in The Conquerors maintains that McCloy took the matter of bombing the concentration camps to FDR and that the president rejected it. Beschloss cites an interview the ninety-one-year-old McCloy gave to Henry Morgenthau III in 1986. But, as he notes, that is the sole piece of evidence that FDR was informed. Kai Bird, McCloy’s assiduous biographer, who was aware of the interview, states unequivocally that “there is no evidence Roosevelt was ever approached about the matter.” Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 64–67 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Cf., Kai Bird, The Chairman 212–223. Also see Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews 385–406.
60. Alan Dershowitz, “Afterword,” in Robert N. Rosen, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust 499–502.
61. Eisenhower’s view was consistent and absolute. “I shall need not only the cooperation of your forces, but still more the assistance of your officials and the moral support of the French people,” he told de Gaulle on December 30, 1943. “I can assure you that as far as I am concerned and regardless of whatever apparent attitudes are imposed upon me, I will recognize no French power in France other than your own in the practical sphere.” (Eisenhower served on Pershing’s Battle Monuments Commission in 1928–29 and resided near Pont-Mirabeau on the right bank of the Seine.) Charles de Gaulle, 3 The War Memoirs of Charles de Gaulle 241 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959). Also see Dwight D. Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe 272–273 (New York: Doubleday, 1948); David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War: 1943–1945 230–248 (New York: Random House, 1986); Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander 377–388 (New York: Doubleday, 1970).
62. WSC to FDR, May 26, 1944, 3 Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence 145, Warren F. Kimball, ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984).
63. Lord Halifax, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, told Anthony Eden on the eve of D-Day that Leahy had advised the president that only Pétain could help the Allies in the liberation of France. This Halifax learned from John McCloy. Simon Berthon, Allies at War 298 (London: HarperCollins, 2002). Also see Conrad Black, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom 963–964. Lord Black’s critique of Leahy leaves little unresolved.
64. FDR to Eisenhower, May 13, 1944, FDRL. Quoted in Forrest C. Pogue, The Supreme Command 148 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954).
65. de Gaulle, 3 War Memoirs 240.
66. Pogue, Supreme Command 148–149. Also see de Gaulle, 3 War Memoirs 254–256.
67. De Gaulle spoke with his customary elegance: “The supreme battle has been joined. For the sons of France, wherever they are, whatever they are, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means in their power.… The orders given by the French Government [de Gaulle’s provisional regime] and its leaders must be followed precisely.… From behind the cloud so heavy with our blood and our tears, the sun of our greatness is now reappearing.” de Gaulle, 3 War Memoirs 256.
68. Alexander Cadogan, The Cadogan Diaries, 1938–1945 634–635, David Dilks, ed. (New York: Putnam, 1972). Entry of June 5, 1944.
69. The assumption of political responsibility in France by de Gaulle and the FCNL is handled adroitly by G. E. Maguire in Anglo-American Policy Towards the Free French 132–139 (London: Macmillan, 1995).
70. On June 13, 1944, six days after D-Day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Marshall, King, and Arnold) advised Roosevelt that for military reasons alone it was essential to recognize de Gaulle. “The situation is serious and the effect on military operations unhappy at best, and may be dangerous in view of possible reactions of the French underground and resistance groups, who have generally expressed their allegiance to General de Gaulle.” JCS to FDR, June 13, 1944, FDRL.
71. de Gaulle, 3 War Memoirs 267–268.
72. Ibid. 269–270.
73. Claude Fohlen, “De Gaulle and Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in FDR and His Contemporaries 39, Cornelius A. van Minnen and John E. Sears, eds. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).
74. Quoted in Morgan, FDR: A Biography 724.
75. Maguire, Anglo-American Policy 143–146; 3 Churchill & Roosevelt 338–369. See especially WSC to FDR, October 14, 1944, at 355–356.
76. Quoted in Morgan, FDR: A Biography 725.
77. James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom 502 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); Steven Fraser, “1944,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., 2 Running for President: The Candidates and the Images 219–220 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
78. FDR to Robert E. Hannegan, July 11, 1944, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 197–199.
79. One New York delegate voted for James A. Farley. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 162 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
80. Ickes diary (MS), June 18, 1944, Library of Congress; Morgenthau diary, July 6, 1944, FDRL.
81. Edward J. Flynn, You’re the Boss 194 (New York: Viking, 1947).
82. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 525; James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, FDR 353 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
83. Flynn, You’re the Boss 195.
84. Ibid. 195–196.
85. John C. Culver and John Hyde, American Dreamer: The Life and Times of Henry A. Wallace 348 (New York: Norton, 2000).
86. James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime 222 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958).
87. Flynn, You’re the Boss 196–197.
88. David McCullough, Truman 312 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
89. Ibid. 320.
90. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, FDR 351.
91. Ibid. 351–352.
92. Sam Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 456 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956).
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid. 457.
95. Ibid. 458–459.
96. Quoted in William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880–1964 364 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).
97. Admiral William D. Leahy, I Was There 250–251 (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950); D. Clayton James, 2 The Years of MacArthur 530 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975); Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences 197 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
98. Leahy, I Was There 250–251.
99. Ibid. 251.
100. Manchester, American Caesar 368.
101. Leahy, I Was There 251.
102. Manchester, American Caesar 358.
103. 13 Public Papers and Addresses 212–213.
104. The New York Times, August 1, 1944.
105. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 459–460.
106. Ibid. 462. For the text of FDR’s Bremerton speech, see 13 Public Papers and Addresses 216–227.
107. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 586.
108. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 462.
109. Lord Moran, Churchill: From the Diaries of Lord Moran 190 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).
110. John Morton Blum, 3 From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of War, 1941–1945 371 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). Privy Councillor Lord Cherwell, the British government’s scientific adviser, also pointed out to Churchill that the destruction of German industry would save Britain from bankruptcy by eliminating a dangerous competitor.
111. Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War 568–582 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948).
112. Hull, 2 Memoirs 1613–1621.
113. Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service 581.
114. McIntire, White House Physician 204.
115. Moran, Diaries 192.
116. Harry H. Vaughan Oral History, Harry S. Truman Library, quoted in Ferrell, The Dying President 89.
117. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 478.
118. FDR, Teamsters Union Address, September 23, 1944, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 284–293.
119. Time, October 2, 1944.
120. 13 Public Papers and Addresses 290. On September 1, 1944, Admiral Leahy, on behalf of the Navy, officially confirmed to Speaker Rayburn and House Majority Leader John McCormack that “the president’s dog was not at any time left behind or sent for.” Leahy, I Was There 255.
121. Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Years of Destiny 193 (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
122. FDR, Foreign Policy Association Address, October 21, 1944, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 342–354.
123. FDR, Campaign Address at Fenway Park, November 4, 1944, ibid. 397–406.
124. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 587; Ferrell, Dying President 93.
125. Leahy, I Was There 278.
126. Fish, the ranking member of the House Rules Committee, was defeated by Augustus W. Bennett, 70,630–62,583. Nye, third most senior Republican in the Senate, lost to John Moses 95,102–69,530. Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections 501, 803 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1975).
127. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 587–588.
128. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 393 (New York: Viking Press, 1946).
129. 990th Press Conference, January 19, 1945, 25 Complete Presidential Press Conferences 45.
130. FDR, Fourth Inaugural Address, January 20, 1945, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 523–525. The quotation is from Emerson’s Essays, First Series, Friendship.
131. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt 517.
132. John Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 29 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
133. “I’d never seen Father drink in that manner,” James wrote. Roosevelt and Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 354–355.
134. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 588.
135. The New York Times, January 21, 1945.
136. Gunther, Roosevelt in Retrospect 28.
137. George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins 461 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976).
138. Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service 619. “Russia’s entry at as early a date as possible consistent with her ability to engage in offensive operations is necessary to provide maximum support [for] our main effort against Japan,” the Joint Chiefs advised Roosevelt on January 23. “The objective of Russia’s military effort against Japan should be defeat of the Japanese forces in Manchuria, air operations against Japan proper … and maximum interference with Japanese sea traffic between Japan and the mainland of Asia.”
139. “We foresaw that Roosevelt would have himself wheeled into the park surrounding the palace to take the air, and so we could no longer be satisfied with microphones hidden in the rooms that were assigned to him.” Sergo Beria, Beria: My Father 104 (London: Duckworth, 2001).
140. Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy 344 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953). Beria, Beria: My Father 106; Moran, Diaries 242.
141. Edward R. Stettinius, Roosevelt and the Russians: The Yalta Conference 72 (New York: Doubleday, 1949).
142. Leahy, I Was There 321.
143. Bohlen, Witness to History 172; also see Bohlen, The Transformation of American Foreign Policy 44 (New York: Norton, 1969).
144. W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin 389 (New York: Random House, 1973).
145. Anna to John Boettiger, February 6, 1945, FDRL.
146. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 589.
147. Without that agreement by the Soviets, wrote Bohlen, “There would hardly have been a United Nations.” Bohlen, Witness to History 193–195.
148. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy 405.
149. Ibid. 407.
150. For the text of the Declaration of Liberated Europe, see FRUS, The Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 977–978 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955).
151. Leahy, I Was There 315–316.
152. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 802–803.
153. For text, see FRUS, Conferences at Malta and Yalta 984. Also see Bohlen, Witness to History 196–196; Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy 400. Churchill added his signature to the agreement, though he took no part in its negotiation. “To us the problem was remote and secondary.”
154. Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny 591 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Forrest C. Pogue, 3 George C. Marshall 531–539 (New York: Viking, 1973). Cf. Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill, Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record 591–592 (New York: Norton, 1952).
155. Morgan, FDR 755.
156. WSC to Clementine Churchill, February 12, 1945, Winston and Clementine: The Personal Letters of the Churchills 515, Mary Soames, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
157. Ward, ed., Closest Companion 397; Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beale Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle 477 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
158. FDR, Address to Congress on Yalta, March 1, 1945, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 570–586.
159. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew 395. Rosenman, who helped draft the speech, was disappointed with Roosevelt’s delivery and felt the fire was gone. Working with Roosevelt 527–530.
160. 13 Public Papers and Addresses 586, 578.
161. Hassett, Off the Record with FDR 324–325. “I do not think we will ever see the President alive again,” Mrs. Jackson told her husband afterward. Robert H. Jackson, That Man: An Insider’s Portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt 154, John Q. Barrett, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
162. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 590.
163. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 596.
164. Tully, F.D.R., My Boss 356.
165. Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay: An American Life 215–216 (New York: Henry Holt, 1990).
166. Reilly, Reilly of the White House 226–227; Hassett, Off the Record 327.
167. Hassett, Off the Record 327–329. Also see Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941–1945 203 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
Dr. Bruenn was evidently candid with Hassett about the problem, but in publishing his diary Hassett omitted the details. Years later, Dr. Bruenn, talking to Dr. James Halsted, Anna Roosevelt’s third husband, referred to a particularly upsetting phone call from ER to the president “a week or two before his death and talking forty-five minutes urging help for Yugoslavia. This resulted in rise of blood pressure of 50 points. His veins stood out on his forehead. Obviously the necessity to deny her request and the long telephone conversation was a major strain.” Dr. Halsted took notes on the conversation, March 8, 1967, and gave a copy to Geoffrey Ward, who passed them to Frank Freidel. See Freidel, Rendezvous with Destiny 604, 662.
168. Bruenn, “Clinical Notes” 590.
169. Merriman Smith, Thank You, Mr. President: A White House Notebook 186 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946).
170. Goodwin, No Ordinary Time 600.
171. Elizabeth Shoumatoff, FDR’s Unfinished Portrait 100 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).
172. FDR, Undelivered Jefferson Day (April 13, 1945) Address, 13 Public Papers and Addresses 613–616.
173. Blum, 3 From the Morgenthau Diaries 416.
174. Shoumatoff, FDR’s Unfinished Portrait 115.
175. Ibid. 116. Also see Ward, Closest Companion 418.
176. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy 471.
177. Harriman and Abel, Special Envoy 442.
178. Quoted in Bernard Asbell, When F.D.R. Died 117 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1961).
179. Bill Livingstone, “The Day FDR Died,” Senior News (April 2006).