SIX
As a member of the Wilson administration, Roosevelt noted Wilson’s personal difficulties with the politicians, his remoteness and isolation from them. Taking state committeemen to luncheons to listen to and mollify their grievances was one of the chores Franklin undertook. He unbent, laughed with them, swapped yarns. FDR was good at this. He learned to be a politician.
—FRANCES PERKINS
THE WILSON ADMINISTRATION commenced on a high plane of moral rectitude. Mrs. Wilson canceled the inaugural ball as too frivolous for so solemn an occasion; the president, an avid golfer, declined membership in the Chevy Chase Country Club because it was too exclusive; and incoming Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan initiated the era of grape juice diplomacy by refusing to serve alcohol at state functions.1 Wilson had campaigned under the banner of the New Freedom, which promised “the emancipation of the generous energies of the people,” primarily through states’ rights, free competition, and tariff reform.2 But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce. Black Republican appointees in the South were discharged and replaced by whites, and within six months government workers in Washington who had worked side by side for years found themselves separated by race.3 “Public segregation of civil servants, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government,” lamented W. E. B. Du Bois, who, unlike most black leaders, had supported Wilson.4*
After sixteen years in the wilderness, the Democrats had returned to power—not old-school, high-caste, hard-money Cleveland Democrats but a coalition of agrarian populists, urban workers, middle-class progressives, and all ranks of southerners, who voted Democratic for the same reason most blacks voted Republican: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War.5 The southern tilt of the Democratic party was more pronounced than ever, and with the GOP hopelessly divided, it was the South that called the tune.6
To head the Navy, Wilson had chosen Josephus Daniels, the populist editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, who had managed his campaign publicity in the South. Partially to achieve regional balance, Daniels chose FDR as his assistant secretary, and the president submitted Franklin’s nomination to the Senate on March 12, 1913. He was confirmed unanimously five days later. No hearings were held. Roosevelt, who had been waiting anxiously, promptly took the oath of office. It was March 17, his eighth wedding anniversary, and he immediately wrote Eleanor, who was at home in New York with the children:
My own dear Babbie:
I didn’t know until I sat down at this desk that this is the 17th of happy memory. In fact with all the subdued excitement of getting confirmed and taking the oath of office, the delightful significance of it all is only beginning to dawn on me. My only regret is that you could not have been with me but I am thinking of you a great deal.7
The desk at which FDR wrote was the same mahogany behemoth Cousin Theodore had salvaged from a Navy storeroom sixteen years earlier. Festooned with hand-carved warships bulging from the side panels, it had originally been made for Gustavus Fox, the Navy’s assistant secretary during the Civil War. TR had been thirty-eight at the time he was appointed; Franklin was barely thirty-one—the youngest assistant secretary in the history of the Navy, twenty years junior to Secretary Daniels, half the age of most flag officers, and forty-five years younger than Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila Bay, the ranking officer on active duty.
Government was small in 1913, and the entire Navy Department was housed on two floors of the old State, War, and Navy Building, adjacent to the White House. An architectural monument in more ways than one (the stone walls were four feet thick), the opulent Second Empire style of the building epitomized the conspicuous consumption of America’s Gilded Age.8 Roosevelt’s office on the third floor was almost as large and ornate as the connecting corner office Secretary Daniels occupied. Both enjoyed large French doors opening onto a balcony that overlooked the South Lawn of the White House, which FDR could see easily when seated at his desk.9
“Dearest Mama,” Franklin wrote after he settled in. “I am baptized, confirmed, sworn in, vaccinated—and somewhat at sea! For over an hour I have been signing papers which had to be accepted on faith—but I hope luck will keep me out of jail.” Absentmindedly, he signed the handwritten note to his mother with his full official signature, “Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Sara noted the gaffe and did not miss a beat: “Try not to write your signature too small,” she joked. “So many public men have such awful signatures.”10
The Navy that Daniels and Roosevelt took charge of in 1913 had mastered the transition to modern weaponry but was hobbled by an administrative structure substantially unchanged since 1842. The fleet consisted of 259 ships, including 39 battleships and heavy cruisers, manned by 63,000 officers, sailors, and marines, with an annual budget of $144 million—roughly 20 percent of all federal expenditures.11 The British Admiralty ranked it third in the world (behind Great Britain and Germany), but the numbers concealed the antiquated design of most of the American vessels.12The fleet was also divided into three independent formations (Atlantic, Pacific, and Asiatic), each with a separate command structure. Promotion was strictly by seniority, advancement was slow, and there was no overall commander analogous to Britain’s First Sea Lord.
The barnacled logistical apparatus, originally patterned after the administrative boards of the Admiralty in the age of sail, had proved impervious to change. The department was organized into eight quasi-independent bureaus (Navigation, Ordnance, Equipment, Steam Engineering, Construction and Repair, Yards and Docks, Supplies and Accounts, Medicine and Surgery), each headed by a powerful chief who was legally responsible to Congress, not the secretary of the Navy or, for that matter, the president. The bureau chiefs, most of whom were admirals who had held their posts for years, conducted their business in splendid isolation from one another and with little regard for the department as a whole.13 They often duplicated one another’s work, competed furiously for appropriations, and steadfastly resisted any organizational change that would diminish their authority.
In 1903 Secretary of War Elihu Root brought the Army, which had a similar structure, reluctantly into the twentieth century. The power of independent branch chiefs such as the adjutant general and the chief of engineers was broken, a general staff system established, and the entire uniformed service brought under the command of a single military head, designated chief of staff to the secretary of war. As president, TR had attempted to reorganize the Navy along similar lines but had been defeated by congressional opposition precipitated by the bureau chiefs.14
Because of the autonomy of the bureaus, the Navy was considered the most difficult cabinet department to administer.15 FDR was a vocal critic of the freestanding bureaus—they worked at cross-purposes to the department, he told the House Budget Committee in 1919—but it was not until after the attack on Pearl Harbor that he succeeded in bringing them under executive control.16
Roosevelt’s duties as assistant secretary were not defined by statute.17 Traditionally, the secretary of the Navy worked with the president on policy matters, dealt with Congress, and watched over the fleet. The assistant secretary handled the Navy’s business affairs, rode herd on the bureaus, supervised civilian personnel, and negotiated contracts. But, as FDR said, “I get my fingers into just about everything and there’s no law against it.”18 When TR had occupied the post, he had taken advantage of Secretary John D. Long’s one-day absence from the department to flash the historic signal to Commodore Dewey to move against the Spanish fleet in the Philippines, and Franklin, whenever Daniels was away, enjoyed twitting reporters about potential parallels.19 “There’s another Roosevelt on the job today,” he would say with a grin. “You remember what happened the last time a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?”20
Daniels and Roosevelt made an odd couple. Yet they served together harmoniously for virtually the entire eight years of Wilson’s presidency. The strengths of one complemented the weaknesses of the other, and FDR learned from Daniels the folksy art of Washington politics. The fact is, Josephus Daniels was the only person to whom Franklin Roosevelt was ever directly subordinate. It was Daniels who made the decision to appoint him; it was Daniels who brought him to Washington; and it was Daniels who treated him as a father might treat a prodigal son whenever FDR wandered off the reservation. Daniels’s motives were primarily political. Aside from regional balance, the name Roosevelt was solid gold in every wardroom in the fleet. Daniels also recognized that an energetic assistant with an amateur’s knowledge of the sea would make his job easier. And though he did not know FDR well, he had liked him from their very first meeting and saw in him the future of the Democratic party.21 Roosevelt, who throughout his life called Daniels “Chief,” never forgot the debt he owed him.22 Upon taking office in 1933, one of FDR’s first acts as president was to appoint Daniels ambassador to Mexico, a post in which he served with distinction until 1941.23
FDR cut a splendid figure as assistant secretary: tall, athletic, well spoken, enthusiastic. Daniels called him “as handsome a figure of an attractive young man as I had ever seen.”24 The secretary, by contrast, was short, pudgy, slow-moving, and deliberate. Always slightly rumpled, he nevertheless dressed with studied southern formality—a tailored black frock coat in winter, white linen and seersucker in the summer. His pleated shirts were always white, his ties always black, and his high-top shoes always well polished. He wore broad-brimmed hats to shield his face from the sun and to the uninitiated looked like a stock figure from central casting.25
Courtly and modest, Daniels had an amiability that concealed an iron will and a remarkably wide-ranging intelligence. He was a tireless worker, a shrewd judge of people, and a longtime rebel against established authority. He suspected that what every admiral told him was wrong, and, as one observer noted, nine times out of ten he was correct.26 Daniels could be as stubborn as a country mule, and he was also without fear. Two months after taking office he went for a training flight with Lieutenant John H. Towers, the pioneer Navy aviator, in a rudimentary open-cockpit, 75-horsepower flying machine at the breathtaking speed of sixty miles an hour—the first high-ranking government official to fly in an airplane. Asked by President Wilson why he had risked his life in such a contraption, Daniels said it was his duty to sign orders for naval officers to fly and “I would not assign any man to any duty I would not try myself.”27
Daniels and William Jennings Bryan were intimate friends of long standing. They were also the two most radical members of Wilson’s cabinet. For seventeen years they had worked to free the common man from the clutches of trusts, railroads, robber barons, and whatever other vested interest appeared on the horizon. Daniels served as Bryan’s publicity director in each of his presidential campaigns, and the two shared a contempt for anything that smacked of wealth and special privilege. Together they sought to promote the values of an old-fashioned, rural, small-town America: pacifist, prohibitionist, and religiously fundamental. They opposed sin with the same vehemence that they opposed the plutocracy of the Republican party and often found it difficult to distinguish between the two.
Daniels brought these values to the Navy Department and aroused the wrath of the naval establishment in so doing. TR thundered that Wilson was guilty of “criminal misconduct in entrusting the State Department and the Navy Department to Bryan and Daniels.”28 While Bryan sought to paper the world with arbitration treaties, Daniels dreamed of disarmament, saw the Navy in terms of Wilsonian neutrality, and was more concerned with the welfare of the enlisted men entrusted to his care than building battleships or expanding the officer corps.29
In 1913 the Navy Department was its own little world. Henry L. Stimson, Taft’s outgoing secretary of war, said it receded from the realm of logic “into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God and Mahan his prophet.”30 That did not deter Daniels. He defined civilian control as civilian command and with Wilson’s support exercised it relentlessly. Daniels abolished the board of four admiral aides that stood between him and the department; limited the term of bureau chiefs to four years; and required deskbound officers to put to sea. He visited naval facilities from coast to coast, often breaking ranks to shake hands with enlisted men lined up for inspection; overrode reluctant admirals and ordered the fleet to cross the Atlantic in winter; and took issue with hallowed naval nomenclature that called left “port” and right “starboard.” At Daniels’s direction, FDR signed General Order No. 30 on May 5, 1913, requiring that directional instructions to the helmsman henceforth be given as “right” and “left.”
Daniels also jettisoned the Navy’s choker-collar uniforms, took engineering officers out of dress whites, and instituted a promotion system based on merit. But his overriding concern was to break down what he considered artificial barriers between officers and enlisted men. He opened the Naval Academy to enlisted applicants, added civilian instructors to the faculty, and sought to make every ship a floating “university” so that sailors would be better prepared to return to civilian life.31 Daniels halted the practice of serving wine in the officers’ mess, not only because he believed in temperance but because he thought it undemocratic. If enlisted men could not drink aboard ship, neither should their officers.32 He also banned the issue of condoms to sailors going on shore leave. “It is equivalent to the government advising these boys that it is right and proper for them to indulge in an evil which perverts their morals.”33
FDR was on an inspection trip to the West Coast when Daniels’s temperance directive came down, but he supported it strongly. “The wine order is … on the whole absolutely right. It took nerve to do it, but tho the Secy will be unpopular in a small circle for a while, it will pay in the end.”34 There is no record of his response to Daniels’s order pertaining to condoms.
Initially FDR thought Daniels a hopeless hayseed who would be overwhelmed by Washington politics. But as he watched the secretary seize control of the Navy Department, socialize with congressional committee chairmen like South Carolina’s irascible “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman,35 and deal intimately with Wilson in the White House, he changed his opinion.36 Two incidents in the spring of 1913 confirmed that judgment. The first dealt with command authority. The State of California had recently adopted legislation forbidding Japanese citizens from owning land in the state.37 On May 9 Japan lodged a vigorous protest with Washington. Wilson rejected the note, tempers flared, and relations deteriorated. Senior military and naval officials believed war to be inevitable. On May 14, the Joint Board of the Army and Navy, chaired by Admiral Dewey, with General Leonard Wood, the Army chief of staff, serving as vice chairman, unanimously recommended that the Navy immediately move the three large battle cruisers of the Asiatic fleet (Saratoga, Monterey, and Monadnock) from their station on the Yangtze River to the Philippines and that additional reinforcements be dispatched to Hawaii and Panama. Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison approved the recommendations on May 15, and the following day two New York newspapers carried sensational stories that the Army and Navy were preparing for war.38
Daniels was outraged. He had not signed on, he disapproved of the recommendation, and he saw the press leak as a deliberate attempt to force his hand. He told his operations aide, Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, that there would be no movement of ships without his or the president’s order. Daniels said he did not think war was inevitable and that such a move by the Navy would scuttle efforts to achieve a negotiated settlement. He said that in his view the board had exceeded its authority, but he would lay the matter before the president.
Wilson backed Daniels, and that should have ended the discussion. But the admirals, accustomed to having their way under Taft and TR, appealed the decision. Wilson came down hard. It was the duty of the military to follow orders, not to challenge them, he told Fiske. The president thereupon ordered the Army and Navy Board not to meet again without his express authorization. The war scare subsided, and the board remained in limbo for the next two and a half years until, with World War I lapping at America’s shores, Daniels recommended that it be reconvened.39
The second key event for FDR involved the Navy’s contracting authority. Daniels hated monopolies, and the collusion among American steel companies bidding for Navy contracts aroused his special ire. FDR enjoyed telling how in the spring of 1913 he was present when Daniels met with representatives of Bethlehem, Carnegie, and Midvale Steel, each of which had submitted an identical bid for the armor plate to be used in constructing the battleship Arizona. Daniels threw the bids out and asked the companies to submit new figures by noon the next day. “I loved his words,” FDR recalled, reflecting on the pained expressions of the businessmen as they left and his and Daniels’s pleasure at their distress. But at noon the next day the steel men returned with exactly the same figures. Daniels threw those out as well and told FDR to take the next train to New York and meet with Sir John Hatfield, the leader of a British steel consortium who had just arrived in the United States. Hatfield submitted a substantially lower bid, which the American companies agreed to meet. Daniels told Congress that the Navy had saved $1,110,084 (roughly 10 percent of the total cost) as a result.40
For the first six months FDR led a bachelor’s life in Washington, living first at the Willard, then at the Powhatan Hotel, an aging landmark at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, little more than a block from his office. He joined the ultraexclusive Metropolitan Club (Wilson was not tendered an invitation), the Army-Navy Club, the University Club, and the Chevy Chase Country Club—these in addition to the New York clubs to which he already belonged: the New York Yacht Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the City Club, the Racquet and Tennis Club, and the Harvard Club—to all of which he paid dues regularly.41 Eleanor was in New York with the children, then at Campobello for the summer. Franklin visited for the July Fourth weekend and ordered one of the Navy’s largest battleships, the 22,000-ton North Dakota, to stand off Eastport, Maine—just across the narrow strait from Campobello—for the Independence Day celebration. The Roosevelts entertained the officers on the island, and FDR, who relished the pomp and ceremony attached to his office, later went aboard ship. He would not dress formally, he told the captain, but would appreciate the seventeen-gun salute to which he was entitled since his Campobello neighbors would expect it.42
Shortly thereafter, FDR ordered the destroyer Flusser to take him to the naval base at nearby Frenchman’s Bay for an inspection. The Flusser was commanded by Lieutenant William F. Halsey, Jr., the famous Bull Halsey of World War II. Roosevelt asked Halsey’s permission to pilot the ship through the treacherous Lubec narrows between Campobello and the mainland. With some misgiving, Halsey agreed. Handling a 700-ton destroyer under full power is a lot more complicated than sailing a pleasure boat. According to Halsey, “a destroyer’s bow may point directly down the channel, yet she is not necessarily on a safe course. She pivots around a point near her bridge structure, which means that two-thirds of her length is aft of the pivot, and that her stern will swing in twice the arc of her bow. As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over. He knew his business.”43*
Back in Washington, Franklin found the city hot and humid. Congress and the Supreme Court were adjourned, but in the executive branch it was business as usual. “The Secretary and I worked like niggers all day,” he wrote Eleanor in late July. Daniels was preparing to go on vacation for two weeks and would leave FDR in charge. “He has given me carte blanche and says he will abide by my decisions.”44
“I think it is quite big of him to be willing to let you decide,” Eleanor replied. “It shows great confidence.”45
Roosevelt could not have been happier. “I now find my vocation combined with my avocation in a delightful way,” he wrote an old Harvard chum, Charlie Munn.46 Socially, FDR had also arrived. Years later he liked to joke that Washington society provided three diversions: “the saloon, the salon, and the Salome.” The “saloon” was a house where drinks flowed freely; the “salon” a house where artists and intellectuals congregated; the “Salome” was Roosevelt’s term for “a mansion where the music was soft, so were the sofas, and the ladies were very pretty.” Franklin was welcome at all three.47
As a member of Wilson’s subcabinet and as a Roosevelt, Franklin was readily accepted by Washington’s cave-dwelling social establishment. His good looks, natural friendliness, and buoyant optimism made him a much-sought-after dinner companion. Bainbridge Colby, later secretary of state, thought him “the handsomest and most attractive man in Washington.”48 British diplomat Nigel Law found him “the most attractive man whom it was my good fortune to meet during my four years in America.”49 Yale football coach Walter Camp called him “a beautifully built man, with the long muscles of an athlete.”50
Franklin was a frequent guest at the home of Cousin Alice and Nicholas Longworth, fashionable leaders of Republican society in exile. Longworth had been given a two-year sabbatical from Congress by the voters of Cincinnati, but that did little to dampen his hospitality or stanch the flow of booze and gossip for which he and Alice were famous.51 TR’s old friends such as the British and French ambassadors, Sir Cecil “Springy” Spring-Rice and Jules Jusserand, made a point of seeking Franklin out, as did Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge.* Harvard friends seemed to appear from nowhere; FDR entertained many of them cruising down the Potomac on the Sylph, the smaller of two yachts the Navy maintained for the president. Weekends were sometimes spent at Doughoregan Manor, the baronial Maryland estate leased by his old Harvard roommate, Lathrop Brown, who had just been elected to Congress as a Democrat from New York’s silk-stocking First District on the Upper East Side.
For lunch, FDR usually dined at either the Metropolitan Club or the Army-Navy Club, both of which were within easy walking distance. Several times a week, and most weekends, he would hoist his golf bag over his shoulder and clamber aboard the Connecticut Avenue streetcar for the long ride to Chevy Chase. “Yesterday P.M. I golfed and went to the Department in the evening,” he wrote Eleanor. “Today I have played 45 holes and am nearly dead!”52 Roosevelt was a natural long-ball hitter and, according to the author Don Van Natta, Jr., one of the best presidential golfers to play the game.53 Sometimes FDR would join a congressional foursome at Chevy Chase, and in later years he was often paired with the junior senator from Ohio, Warren G. Harding, who was as easygoing and likable as Roosevelt himself.54
In the autumn of 1913 Eleanor and the children joined Franklin in Washington. They moved into the handsome four-story brick town house owned by TR’s sister Bamie (Eleanor’s aunt and FDR’s cousin) at 1733 N Street, N.W., six short blocks up Seventeenth Street from the Navy Department. Bamie and her husband, Rear Admiral W. Sheffield Cowles, had lived there when the admiral was stationed in Washington, and both Eleanor and Franklin had stayed in the house on their various visits to the capital when TR was president. In 1901 TR himself lived there briefly while Ida McKinley, the president’s widow, vacated the White House. Later, as president, TR visited so frequently that the press began to call it the Little White House. “We’re really very comfortably settled now in this dear, bright house,” Eleanor wrote her friend Isabella Ferguson. “I feel very much at home, chiefly because Auntie Bye [Bamie] lived here.”55
It was a snug fit. In addition to the three children (Anna, James, and Elliott), Eleanor brought a car and chauffeur from Hyde Park, four servants, a nurse, and a governess. Four years later, after the addition of two more children (FDR, Jr., and John), the Roosevelts moved to much larger quarters at 2131 R Street, a double town house some sixty feet wide that Bamie also owned.56 Franklin and Eleanor paid the expenses in both houses but lived rent-free. Bamie and her husband were comfortably ensconced at “Oldgate,” the Cowles estate in Farmington, Connecticut, and were content simply to have their Washington homes remain in the family. Meanwhile, FDR leased his New York town house on East Sixty-fifth Street to Thomas W. Lamont, a senior partner (and later chairman) of J. P. Morgan & Co.
Nineteen-thirteen was the first year for federal income tax under the Sixteenth Amendment. The rate was 1 percent, graduated to 6 percent for those with incomes above $500,000 a year. Dividends were not taxed. FDR’s returns for the eight years he was in Washington show a gross income that averaged slightly more than $20,000 annually. (To convert to current dollars, multiply by 18.) Five thousand dollars came from his salary as assistant secretary, another $5,000 from rent on the New York town house, and the remainder from interest and dividends. FDR invested primarily in high-dividend-paying banks, railroads, and General Electric. After deductions and exemptions, his federal tax bills averaged somewhat less than $200.57*
It was as assistant secretary of the Navy that FDR established his enduring relationship with Louis Howe. Two days after he was sworn in, Franklin asked Howe to join him at the Navy Department (evidently he had made the offer before leaving Albany). “Dear Ludwig,” he wrote. “Here’s the dope. Secretary—$2000—Expect you April 1 with new uniform.”58 Howe telegraphed his acceptance instantly: “I am game but it’s going to break me.”59 In truth, Howe had never made so much money, nor with more security. He hurried to Washington, bringing his family with him, and rented an apartment in the 1800 block of P Street, two blocks from the Roosevelts. Every morning at 8:15 sharp he would call for Franklin, and the two would walk to the Navy Department. FDR’s son Elliott fondly remembers his father “striding down Connecticut Avenue with Louis hurrying along at his side. The two of them looked uncannily like Don Quixote and Sancho setting out to battle with giants.”60
Howe was more than a secretary. Later he joked that when he arrived in Washington he knew so little that for the first several days he was reduced “to blotting Franklin’s signature.”61 Within weeks he was on top of the job. Howe became the junior member of a two-man firm dedicated to furthering FDR’s career. As one biographer has written, Howe and Roosevelt played politics like doubles partners played tennis and their goal from the beginning was the White House.62 For Howe the decision was simple: he loved power. Eleanor, who later developed a great affection for Howe, said, “Louis had enormous interest in having power, and if he could not have it for himself, he wanted it through someone he was influencing.”63 Roosevelt, for his part, found in Howe an extension of his own persona who automatically operated in his interest without requiring hands-on control. Howe had no agenda of his own. The veteran journalist John Gunther put it best when he wrote, “If FDR had come out for the Devil, it wouldn’t have mattered much to Louis Howe.”64
Ostensibly, Howe’s duties involved labor relations, special investigations, and speechwriting. He also took charge of patronage, handled Roosevelt’s correspondence, made appointments for his boss, wheedled postmasterships for deserving upstate Democrats, and kept his finger on the pulse of New York politics, building an organization to challenge Tammany when the time came. He thought up myriad projects for Roosevelt to sponsor and insofar as possible took the blame for whatever went wrong. He mastered the intricacies of the Navy’s bureaucracy with remarkable swiftness. As Daniels put it, Howe “knew all the tides and eddies in the Navy Department, in the administration, and in the political life of the country. He advised [FDR] about everything. His one and only ambition was to help steer Franklin’s course so that he could take the tide at the full. He was totally devoted. He would have sidetracked both President Wilson and me to get Franklin Roosevelt to the White House.”65
FDR was never a friend of paperwork. He had an exceptional ability to absorb information and was able to make decisions rapidly, but his attention span was short. Paperwork was Howe’s strength. He read quickly, wrote quickly, and had a way with words that was lucid and convincing. He had a newsman’s ability to distill essential facts from vast amounts of information and make the most wearisome details appear interesting. Howe’s mordant sense of humor, his distrust of piety, and his biting cynicism also appealed to FDR. Roosevelt’s personal letters to Howe, often in a jocular German, express an instinctive rapport. “Lieber Ludwig,” he would write. “Hier bin ich, mit grosser Gesundheit und Vergnügen,” which translated means “Here I am in great health and having loads of fun.”66 FDR benefited personally as well. Howe, who loved to bet on the ponies and visit establishments less than genteel, knew much about life that Roosevelt never had the opportunity to learn. Howe shared those experiences and made Franklin more worldly. Frances Perkins once wrote that FDR’s Harvard education was a political handicap.67 In many respects Louis Howe was the antidote.
Howe, the older man, always called Roosevelt by his first name and spoke out whenever he thought FDR was mistaken. “Louis Howe was a damned smart able man and the best advisor Roosevelt ever had,” said Admiral Emory S. Land, “because he had the guts to say ‘no.’ ”68 Few people could have talked to FDR the way Howe was overheard on the telephone: “You damned fool! You can’t do that! You simply can’t do it.… If you do it, you’re a fool—just a damned idiotic fool.” Howe said jokingly that his principal function in Washington was to provide “toe weights to keep Franklin’s feet on the ground,” and FDR accepted Howe’s advice, usually without question.69*
As assistant secretary of the Navy, Roosevelt’s impact on the policies of the Wilson administration was minimal. But his duties in the Navy Department were significant, and, more important, his eight years in Washington provided a proving ground where he learned the realities of national politics. Under the tutelage of Daniels and Howe, FDR came to appreciate the diversity of the Democratic party, the need to accommodate regional politicians, and the importance of small favors and public gestures. Howe taught Franklin how to deal with organized labor. As assistant secretary, FDR had supervisory responsibility for the Navy’s vast civilian workforce—tens of thousands of workers at Navy yards across the country. Howe insisted that Roosevelt handle labor relations personally. Time and again he would usher union leaders and delegations of workmen into Franklin’s office to chat with “the Boss.” Always a good listener, FDR was at his best in these exchanges. “I want you to feel that you can come to me at any time in my office,” he was soon telling union spokesmen, “and we can talk matters over. Let’s get together for I need you to teach me your business and show me what’s going on.”70
Much to the discomfiture of the Navy’s stiff-as-starch officer corps, the assistant secretary’s office became the clearinghouse for labor’s complaints. FDR took the workers’ concerns seriously, and whenever possible used his authority to settle their grievances. “The laboring men all liked him,” Daniels remembered. “If there was any Groton complex, he did not show it.”71
Roosevelt’s contact with union leaders filled a large gap in his political education. Many with whom he worked became lifelong friends and supporters. When he stepped down as assistant secretary in 1920, FDR could boast with only slight exaggeration that there had not been a single strike or work stoppage on his watch.72 Eleanor said later that thanks to Louis Howe, FDR’s experience overseeing the nation’s Navy yards was largely responsible for having made her husband “more than just a very nice young man who went out in society and did a fair job but was perfectly conventional about it.”73
Dealing with Congress proved equally instructive. FDR learned that informal favors granted graciously often counted for more on Capitol Hill than cogent arguments and party loyalty. Constituents routinely asked congressmen to run interference with government departments, and the Navy was no exception. Sometimes a sailor wanted an early discharge, sometimes compassionate leave, forgiveness for misdeeds, and so forth. Roosevelt did his best to fulfill every reasonable request that came from the Hill, and many of those that were not so reasonable as well.*
When Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the ranking member of the Naval Affairs Committee, sought a promotion for his nephew, Roosevelt complied.74 When Massachusetts congressman George Tinkham asked that a young sailor, Josef Paul Zukauskas, be discharged because boxing manager John Buckley thought he had promise, FDR did so promptly. Zukauskas later fought professionally as Jack Sharkey, “the Boston Gob,” and took the heavyweight title from Max Schmeling in 1932. Sitting in the Oval Office many years after that favor had been done, FDR told Frances Perkins that what congressmen wanted most was to have “a nice jolly understanding of their problems rather than lots of patronage. A little patronage, a lot of pleasure, and public signs of friendship and prestige—that’s what makes a political leader secure with his people and that is what he wants anyhow.”75
Other department responsibilities molded Roosevelt. The Navy was frequently called upon to maintain order and protect American interests in the Caribbean. For years he enjoyed telling how an agitated William Jennings Bryan raced into his office one afternoon in 1914 shouting, “I’ve got to have a battleship. White people are being killed in Haiti, and I must send a battleship there within twenty-four hours.”
Roosevelt told Bryan that would be impossible. “Our battleships are in Narragansett Bay and I could not get one to Haiti in less than four days steaming at full speed. But I have a gunboat somewhere in the vicinity of Guantanamo and I can get her to Haiti in eight hours if you want me to.”
“That is all I wanted,” said Bryan. The secretary of state turned to leave, then stopped. “Roosevelt,” he said, “when I talk about battleships, don’t think I mean anything technical. All I meant was that I wanted something that would float and had guns on it.”76
The situation in Haiti to which Bryan was responding was not unlike that which had erupted in the Dominican Republic ten years earlier. Because of widespread corruption in the collection of customs revenue, the Dominican Republic had found itself unable to pay the interest on its foreign debt. European powers had threatened to intervene, at which point Cousin Theodore had stepped in and assumed responsibility under color of the Monroe Doctrine.* The United States initially established a fiscal protectorate over the republic and, when unrest did not abate, transformed that into a military occupation that continued until 1924.
In Haiti, the nation’s finances had collapsed and France and Germany threatened to assume control to protect their investors. The Haitian government initially refused American assistance, riot and revolution followed, and in 1915 Wilson ordered Daniels to intervene. Marines were dispatched from Guantánamo to Port-au-Prince, and Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, became an American protectorate. Daniels staunchly opposed long-term occupation of the island, and gradually FDR embraced Daniels’s position.77 In his inaugural address in 1933, FDR replaced the Roosevelt corollary with what he called the “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America. Subsequently, at Montevideo in December 1933, the United States joined the nations of the Western Hemisphere in pledging that “No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.”78 The following year the United States formally renounced its right to intervene in Cuba under the Platt Amendment,79 and FDR withdrew the last American marines from Haiti—nineteen years after the occupation had begun.
* Wilson, like many white southerners, believed segregation to be divinely ordained. As president of Princeton he barred the admission of blacks and later told Sambo stories in cabinet meetings. When challenged about segregation in the federal government, he defended it as a means of reducing tension. “It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes,” he wrote Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation. “I sincerely believe it to be in their interest.” In a similar message to H. A. Bridgman, editor of Congregationalist and Christian World, Wilson said, “I think if you were here on the ground [in Washington], you would see, as I seem to see, that it is distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves.”
There is no doubt that was Wilson’s view. There is also no doubt that virtually all black leaders were disappointed by it. “When the Wilson Administration came into power,” wrote New York’s Amsterdam News, “it promised a ‘new freedom’ to all people, avowing a spirit of Christian Democracy. But on the contrary we are given a stone instead of a loaf of bread; we are given a hissing serpent instead of a fish.”
The NAACP was equally critical. In a public letter to Wilson published in The New York Times, the association asked, “Shall ten million of our citizens say that their civil liberties and rights are not safe in your hands? To ask that question is to answer it. They desire a ‘New Freedom,’ too.”
Ironically, Wilson had appealed for black votes in 1912 and had actually won the largest number ever given to a Democratic presidential candidate. But the anti-Negro bias of the administration caused most blacks to return to the Republican Party, where they remained until FDR ran in 1932.
Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House 3, 502 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947); Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels 195, 234, 321, 414, 493, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). WW to OGV, July 23, 1913; WW to HAB, September 8, 1919, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress. Amsterdam News, October 3, 1913; The New York Times, August 18, 1913.
* FDR met many young officers during his eight years as assistant secretary and did not forget them when he became commander in chief. Lieutenant Commander William D. Leahy was skipper of the Navy’s Dolphin, the official yacht of the secretary and assistant secretary. Leahy became chief of naval operations in 1937, was later FDR’s ambassador to Vichy France, and served as the president’s personal chief of staff throughout World War II. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, had been Roosevelt’s naval aide in 1915. Lieutenant Emory S. Land, who later chaired the nation’s Maritime Commission, served in that post as well. Lieutenants Harold Stark and Chester Nimitz, both CNOs (Nimitz after Roosevelt’s death), were well known to FDR during World War I. The naval historian Robert Greenhalgh Albion wrote that as president, FDR always kept a copy of the Navy Register close at hand and knew most senior officers personally. “Some were remembered favorably, a few unfavorably, and some were not remembered at all.” Makers of Naval Policy: 1775–1941 385 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
* As a young diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice served as best man at TR’s wedding to Edith Carow in 1886 and always had a warm spot in his heart for the president. “You must always remember that Roosevelt is about six,” he gently reminded a friend when TR was in the White House. Jusserand, for his part, had once skinny-dipped with TR in the Potomac near Chain Bridge wearing only his gloves. “We might meet ladies,” he informed the president when asked about his attire. Lodge and TR had maintained a mutual admiration society since the Republican National Convention in 1884, co-authored three books, and shared a view of America’s muscular role in the world. Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 249–250, 357 (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); Theodore Rex 512–513 (New York: Random House, 2002).
* FDR received his pay from the Navy Department every two weeks. Initially, he took it in cash and put the money in his pocket. “I don’t know where it went, it just went. I couldn’t keep an account with myself. After about six months of this, certain complaints came back from home about paying the grocery bill. And so I began taking my salary by check and putting it in the bank and taking perhaps five dollars cash for the week and putting it in my pocket—trying to anyway.” Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 66 (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
* FDR’s son James reports a rare instance in which Roosevelt overruled Howe. It was 1932 in Chicago, en route to accepting the Democratic nomination. “I squeezed into the car which carried Father to the hotel. Louis Howe rode in the back seat next to Father, and immediately there began one of the most incongruous performances I have ever witnessed. Louis had strong objections to parts of Father’s proposed acceptance speech and he began arguing with him even as the car was rolling in from the airport. Pa listened with one ear—all the while smiling and waving at the wildly cheering crowds. Finally, Pa exploded: ‘Damnit, Louie, I’m the nominee.’ ” James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 225–226 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
* Occasionally a request was beyond the pale, especially if it ran against Daniels’s puritanical instincts. In 1915 Congressman Lathrop Brown, FDR’s Harvard roommate, wrote to request that a young friend named Donald Clapham be allowed to enlist in the Navy. Clapham had gone astray with a young woman, had been convicted of stealing $38, and had received a suspended sentence. Howe replied to Brown on FDR’s behalf:
Now, about your young friend … who appears to be one of nature’s noblemen and to have nothing against him except that he has broken most of the Ten Commandments. I am willing to admit that if we bar from the Navy every gent who has become mixed up with a beautiful female we would have to put most of our ships out of commission and I am afraid we might lose an admiral or two, but in this case the young man was unfortunately caught with the goods. You have run against one of the secretary’s strongest antipathies. And while I know Mr. Roosevelt will speak to Mr. Daniels about the case again, I honestly do not think he has a chance on earth. Do you want one of those “we are doing everything on earth to get this done because of the affection for the Congressman” letters or not? Will send you a masterpiece that will convince your friends that Mr. Roosevelt is sitting on Mr. Daniels’ doorstep every night waiting for a chance to make one more plea when he comes home to supper, if that will ease the strain any.
Louis Howe to Lathrop Brown, September 21, 1915, FDRL.
* The “Roosevelt corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, announced by TR in his annual message to Congress on December 6, 1904, provided that “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States … to the exercise of an international police power.” It was a unilateral blank check that allowed the United States to intervene in Latin America and became the bedrock of America’s hemispheric policy from 1904 until 1930, when it was repudiated by Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson on behalf of the Hoover administration. The Monroe Doctrine, said Stimson, was “a declaration of the United States versus Europe, not the United States versus Latin America.”