Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (20 page)

This reassuring logic began to unravel in the summer of 1914, when Serbian terrorists calling themselves the “Black Hand” killed the next in line to the throne of the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The terrorists were almost ludicrously inept; the bomb they tossed at the car of Franz Ferdinand bounced off without igniting, and most of the plotters were arrested. Only by the dumbest luck did one of those not arrested find himself face-to-face with the archduke later that day, and this time he couldn’t miss. Gavrilo Princip’s bullets killed Franz and his wife, Sophie, and triggered a slow-motion cascade of diplomatic protests as Austria demanded of Serbia the right to investigate the murder, Russia warned Austria not to pressure Serbia, Germany told Russia to leave Austria alone, and France and Britain threatened Germany over Russia. Each protest prompted the armies of the countries involved to prepare for war. At first the preparations were chiefly demonstrative: to lend weight to what the ambassadors were telling the foreign ministers. But the reciprocal mobilizations developed a dynamic of their own. Any reasonably efficient army can mobilize to go to war on a given day, but no army can maintain war readiness for long. As the Russians, Germans, French, and British approached peak readiness, each feared the consequences of standing down first. The Germans, loathing the Russians and disdaining the French, decided to strike rather than step back. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914, and on France on August 3. The first general European conflict since Napoleon began.

Americans watched in hypnotized horror as Europe went over the brink. They thanked God for having dug the Atlantic Ocean so wide and deep and congratulated their ancestors for having evinced the foresight to leave that lunatic continent. Hardly an American man or woman registered disapproval when Wilson, following the precedent of George Washington at the outbreak of the previous round of Europe’s attempted self-destruction, declared American neutrality. Again following General Washington, who in his farewell address had warned his compatriots against excessive emotional attachment to foreign countries, Wilson urged Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action.”

U
NTIL
1914 Theodore Roosevelt had been a good loser regarding his defeat at Wilson’s hands two years before. The people had spoken, and anyway the prize he lost to Wilson was no more than he had held before. The outbreak of war in Europe, however, changed things entirely. TR knew enough history to realize that the European conflict afforded the statesmen of the world, including the American president, the opportunity to transform international affairs—and to win reputations of truly historic proportions. Roosevelt was proud of the record he had compiled in the White House from 1901 to 1909, but he knew it would never vault him into the pantheon of American politics—into the company of such towering figures as Washington and Lincoln, who had led the country through war. Though he had received much criticism for his assertion that “no triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war,” he still stood by every word. And now it galled him to think that Wilson, who had never served under arms, who didn’t know a mortar from a howitzer or a destroyer from a dreadnought, and who had defeated him in 1912 only because the Republican regulars immorally denied him the nomination, was the president to enjoy this rare chance at historical greatness. Roosevelt gnashed his teeth and cursed the unfairness of it all.

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t communicate directly with Theodore these days. As one of the most visible members of the Wilson administration, Franklin had to exercise care not to consort conspicuously with the enemy. Theodore understood. “Now, Sara,” he wrote Franklin’s mother in response to an invitation to him and Edith to stay at Hyde Park while visiting the Hudson Valley, “I am very doubtful, from Franklin’s standpoint, whether it is wise that we do so…. I shall be in the middle of a tour in which I am attacking the Administration, and I think it might well be an error, from Franklin’s standpoint, if we stayed with you…. I hope you understand, dear Sally, that it is the exact truth to say that I am only thinking of Franklin’s interest.”

The outbreak of the European war diminished what little discouragement Franklin felt at the failure of his halfhearted bid for the Democratic nomination for the Senate that year. A post with a peacetime navy could be enjoyable, especially for a sailor like Roosevelt, but it didn’t do much for a man’s reputation after the initial benefits of the appointment wore off. A job with a wartime navy was another matter. Roosevelt didn’t know whether the United States would enter the European war, but he had to prepare for that possibility. The opponents of American intervention, currently led by President Wilson, were invoking George Washington; Franklin Roosevelt could cite the father of his country, too, about preparation for war being the best preventive.

Doing so meant drawing farther from Josephus Daniels and the pacifist wing of the administration. Daniels and Secretary of State Bryan believed, General Washington notwithstanding, that preparing for war made war more likely. Bryan resisted efforts to upgrade the army, while Daniels denied that the European war demanded any acceleration of the Navy Department’s construction program. The navy’s general board was still recommending four new battleships a year; Daniels again told the House naval affairs committee that two were plenty.

Members of the House committee, who generally found the arguments of the career admirals more persuasive than those of the North Carolina newspaperman, summoned Franklin Roosevelt for a third opinion. They had reason to believe he would bolster the admirals’ case, for he had just produced a detailed estimate of navy readiness that declared the service singularly unready. Scores of American ships were in reserve rather than on active duty. “That is to say, they have on board only from 25 percent to 50 percent of the crews necessary to man them in case of war,” Roosevelt explained. Dozens more were even less ready—“manned by from 10 percent to 20 percent of their regular complements, just enough to prevent them from rusting to pieces.” Still more were “hopelessly out of date.” To remedy the shortfall in readiness required a major infusion of personnel. Roosevelt said the navy needed eighteen thousand enlisted men to bring all existing vessels into war-fighting trim. The additional ships currently under construction would demand still more—a thousand men each, for example, for the new battleships
Oklahoma
and
Nevada.

Roosevelt’s report was a work of political art as much as a statement of policy. It didn’t exactly contradict Daniels, who had focused on the construction of ships rather than the enlistment of sailors. But its essential thrust was in the opposite direction, for whether the navy lacked metal or men, it was, in Roosevelt’s view, far less ready for use than Daniels let on.

Roosevelt recognized the danger his borderline insubordination involved. Sending Eleanor a copy of the report, he declared, “The enclosed is the truth, and even if it gets me into trouble I am perfectly prepared to stand by it. The country needs the truth about the Army and the Navy instead of the soft mush about everlasting peace which so many statesmen are handing out to a gullible public.”

In his appearance before the House committee, Roosevelt did stand by his report. A correspondent covering the hearings explained, “Mr. Roosevelt impressed the committee by his promptness in answering questions and by his candor.” Afterward Roosevelt himself thought he had done well. Describing the hearings as “really great fun and not so much of a strain,” he told Sara: “I was able to get in my own views without particular embarrassment to the Secretary.”

The House committee invited him to return. Members wanted to know where the United States ranked among the naval powers of the world. Roosevelt responded with what must have seemed an obscure formula, named for the German naval strategist Otto Kretschmer, that involved tonnage, armor, gun size, and speed. After a certainly intentional eye-glazing exposition of the Kretschmer formula, Roosevelt revealed that the United States ranked third, far behind Britain, a bit behind Germany, and comfortably ahead of France.

Committeemen pressed him on the readiness of the fleet. He noted a difference between theory and practice. The Navy Department’s theory was that a ship in reserve could leave port within twenty-four hours and start fighting at once; the practice was rather different. “A battleship in reserve could go to sea tomorrow,” Roosevelt said. “But it would take three months to shake her down. Two-thirds of her crew would be new to the ship and would have to fit themselves to her.” When a committee member asked why more ships weren’t kept in commission, ready to fight, Roosevelt answered, “It is a necessity as a matter of economy that all our ships should not be in commission all the time. No navy does that—except that of one country.” Roosevelt’s listeners perhaps expected him to identify Britain as the perpetually ready power; he got a laugh when he explained that it was Haiti. “She has two gunboats, and they are in commission all the year around.”

The hearing went smoothly for Roosevelt until members delved into his apparent difference with Secretary Daniels regarding manpower. Again Roosevelt carefully avoided prescribing policy, but he didn’t retreat from his earlier description. If anything, the situation seemed to have gotten worse. “We are from 30,000 to 50,000 men short of the needs of the navy as laid down in the confidential war plans of the War College,” he informed the committee.

U
NTIL THE SPRING
of 1915 the debate over the size and strength of the navy was, if not quite academic, less than immediately consequential. The fighting among the major belligerents had stagnated in the mud of northern France, with neither the Germans, on one hand, nor the French and British, on the other, able to break the murderous deadlock imposed by the momentary advantage in armaments defenders held over attackers. Trench warfare claimed lives in numbers no one had imagined just months before, but the front lines barely moved.

So the belligerents turned to naval warfare to secure the mastery both sides were denied on land. The British blockaded Germany with surface ships; the Germans reciprocated with submarines. The latter were slow and unarmored; they attacked effectively only without warning. And when their torpedoes struck their targets, the U-boats lacked the capacity to rescue survivors.

Americans understood the situation but appreciated its import only after a German submarine sank the British liner
Lusitania.
The British had exploited the Germans’ reluctance to target passenger ships, by transporting munitions aboard the liners. Notices from the German government warning Americans to stay off British vessels traversing the war zone were published in American papers; one such notice appeared in New York papers on the day the
Lusitania
left New York, bound for Liverpool. But the passengers ignored the warning as disinformation, assuming, in any event, that the swift liner could outrun the U-boats. This assumption proved tragically mistaken when, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo boat blasted a hole in the
Lusitania
’s hull, triggering a secondary, internal explosion that sent the vessel to the bottom just off the southern coast of Ireland, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives, 128 of them American.

This first direct blow against the American people sorely tested the Wilson administration’s neutrality policy. The policy was already under strain from a different direction. Just weeks into the war the French government, aware that its cash reserves couldn’t sustain a protracted conflict, had asked J. P. Morgan & Company to float French bonds in the United States. Secretary of State Bryan vehemently opposed the bond sale, on the ground that it would erode American neutrality more surely than any other action. Wilson initially accepted Bryan’s argument and vetoed the loan. But when the French modified the request, asking simply for credits toward the purchase of American goods, Wilson gave his approval. He added that he would approve credits requested by the other warring powers as well.