In his first two years in Washington, Franklin Roosevelt had learned a lot about polishing his social skills, particularly his ability to charm the press. A good example of his skill at winning over and even dazzling interviewers can be found in a rapturous description of him that appeared in the Utica Saturday Globe of January 23, 1915: “As he stood in front of a cheerful wood fire, his arm resting on the marble mantle, a bronze bust of John Paul Jones peering over his shoulder, he was an engaging picture of young American manhood,” gushed reporter Ashmun Brown, who interviewed him in his office. “Through the wide windows rays of dazzling light, reflected from the snow-clad expanse of the White House grounds across the street, caught the clean lines of his face and figure and threw them into sharp relief. They, the air of alertness they conveyed, the natural pose, were the sort of thing one sees in the work of leading American illustrators more often than in real life. The face was particularly interesting. Breeding showed there. Clearly cut features, a small, sensitive mouth, tiny lines running from nostrils to the outer lines of the lips, a broad forehead, close-cropped brown hair, frank, blue eyes, but, above all, the proud, straight, upstanding set of the head placed the man.”
This admiring verbal portrait of the assistant secretary of the Navy is a far cry from the lightweight dandy described by Frances Perkins in her account of that long-ago Gramercy Park tea dance in 1911. Nor were such worshipful descriptions all that rare. Another, published in the New York Tribune, is almost as laudatory: “His face is long, firmly shaped and set with marks of confidence. There are faint wrinkles on a high straight forehead. Intensely blue eyes rest in light shadow. A firm, thin mouth breaks quickly to laugh, openly and freely. His voice is pitched well, goes forward without tripping. He doesn’t disdain shedding his coat on a hot afternoon; shows an active quality in the way he jumps from his chair to reach the cigarettes in his coat. He is a young man, a young man with energy and definite ideas.”
While good looks and an ability to charm can be important assets for any political figure, they are primarily valuable only if they help the politician accomplish his goals. In the Washington of early 1915, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Franklin Roosevelt to accomplish almost any goal, due to the sharp division within the administration relating to America’s proper relationship to the European war. There were those who advocated ignoring the war entirely and adopting a strictly isolationist policy toward the combatants, and those who wanted to maintain a closer, but still hands-off, policy, favoring neither side, standing ready at all times to broker peace. For those like Roosevelt, who actually favored taking sides and supporting the Allies, the problem was all the more difficult.
The question had been exacerbated when Wilson, early in the war and in spite of Secretary Bryan’s pleading, decided not to back up his neutrality proclamation with effective restrictions upon the sales of American goods or the extension of American credit to the belligerents. Theoretically that meant that all the European powers had an equal right to trade with American firms, but in reality, because of the British Navy’s control of the seas, only the Allies could take delivery of American goods, while Germany and the other Central Powers were effectively cut off from any trade. This resulted almost immediately in an increasingly heavy economic investment in the Allies by Wall Street and leading American manufacturers. Bryan fulminated against the British blockade, which he claimed was against international law, but in this he was either naïve or mistaken. True enough, a proposal to ban blockades had been floated at a London naval conference attended by European powers plus Japan and the United States in 1909, but Britain, which had employed blockades as its principal means of warfare for centuries, refused to ratify the proposal, as did most of the other parties. The United States was one of the few to accept it, so while it might be true that blockade was against American law, it was not against international law.
Germany, in an attempt to counter the Royal Navy’s control of the seas, had vastly expanded its U-boat fleet as a means of evading Britain’s domination of the ocean’s surface. In the early months of the war, when Britain was still establishing its blockade, German submarines limited their activities to the long-established wartime practice known as guerre de course, preying exclusively on unarmed Allied merchant ships in a relatively gentlemanly fashion. In accordance with international maritime law, when a patrolling U-boat encountered an enemy merchantman, it would surface nearby, and the German captain, standing in the conning tower, would declare his intention of torpedoing the merchant ship, giving the crew only enough time to lower lifeboats and abandoned the doomed vessel.
Over the years, many nations—including the United States—had employed this form of warfare, but the conventions governing guerre de course covered only armed surface raiders chasing their quarry across the open sea and took no account of the nature of submarines, which approached their victims by stealth. The ability of submarines to operate underwater gave them a certain advantage, but it also entailed a great disadvantage. Because they had to be built for maximum buoyancy, submarines were almost as fragile as aircraft. They had no armor plating to protect them, and they were so defenseless that theoretically a single rifle shot could puncture their ballast tanks and sink them. Their only safety lay in secrecy and surprise, and so long as the merchant vessels they preyed upon were unarmed, the submarines could safely operate under the laws governing the guerre de course.
The British quickly developed countermeasures to take advantage of the vulnerability of U-boats, the most dramatic of which were the Royal Navy’s “Q-boats,” which were heavily armed warships disguised as innocent merchantmen. When a U-boat, attracted by what looked like an easy kill, surfaced to order the ship’s crew into the lifeboats, the false bulkheads on the Q-boat would be thrust aside to reveal multiple guns which would open fire and make quick work of the U-boat. By this and other stratagems, the British seemed to have contained the U-boat threat, but seven months into the war the Imperial German Government took the fight to the next level. On February 15, 1915, Berlin announced: “The waters around Great Britain, including the whole of the English Channel, are declared hereby to be included within the zone of war, and after the 18th inst., all enemy merchant vessels encountered in these waters will be destroyed, even if it may not be possible always to save their crews and passengers.”
This was unrestricted submarine warfare, and the reaction in America was one of shock and anger. The idea that Germany would deliberately target unarmed civilians as well as uniformed fighting men was seen as barbaric and helped move public sentiment closer to the Allied cause, at least in those areas in the East bordering the Atlantic. Like many others in Washington, Roosevelt thought long and hard about how the new German policy might play out in regard to American interests. As it happened, the answer would not emerge until the late spring.
Early in March, Franklin and Eleanor were assigned to accompany Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and his wife to the opening of the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. It was to be a grand affair, a world’s fair full of parties and ceremony, celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal. Marshall was a genial travelling companion who has come down in history principally for his oft-quoted aphorism, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” When Roosevelt discovered that the office of Vice President did not have its own naval flag, he quickly remedied the situation by designing one and arranging for it to be stitched together in time to be displayed—along with the flag of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, of course—at the fleet review.
On that occasion, Vice President Marshall was delivered alongside the flagship by the admiral’s barge and clambered up the gangway, apparently unaware of the protocol involved in coming aboard a Navy vessel and totally unprepared for what was about to happen. He stepped jauntily over the rail and onto the grating—silk hat, frock coat, gloves in his left hand, pearl-handled cane in his right, a cigar stuck jauntily in his mouth. He was momentarily startled by the piercing shriek of the boatswain’s pipe, followed immediately by four drum ruffles and the whole ship’s company at salute, and when the band struck up “The Star Spangled Banner,” Marshall realized he had to do something and do it quickly. After a moment of hesitation, he transferred the cane from right hand to left, whipped the cigar out of his mouth, and somehow managed to get his hat off. As the band came to the end of the national anthem, he started putting his hat on—once again transferring his cigar, cane, and gloves to his left hand, at which point the first gun of his salute went off with a bang, and the whole kit and caboodle flew two feet into the air.
A few days later, watching the motion-picture record of the scene, a mortified vice president turned to Roosevelt and said, “My God, if I looked like that, I will never go on board another ship as long as I live.”
After leaving the Exposition and before returning east, Roosevelt continued down the coast on Navy business. While in Los Angeles, he learned that the Navy submarine F-4 had failed to surface after a dive off Pearl Harbor, with the loss of her entire crew. In a message to the stunned public, he addressed the loss, noting that, sad as it was, it was something “that must be expected in any great navy.” Then, with the press standing at dockside, he arranged to board a submarine at San Pedro and make a very public dive. On resurfacing, a beaming Roosevelt told reporters that for the first time since leaving Washington, he felt “perfectly at home.” He then boarded a destroyer for a storm-tossed run down to San Diego before finally catching a train east.
As he crossed the country, dispatches and local newspapers along the route told of the first occasion in which Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare policy had directly impacted the United States. A U-boat in the Irish Sea had without warning torpedoed a small British liner, the Falaba, killing several crewmen and passengers, including an American engineer, Leon C. Thrasher, en route to his job in West Africa. Newspapers across the country rose as one to condemn this latest act of German barbarism; in Washington, statesmen worked late into the night worrying about how to respond to the “atrocity.” Eventually, much to Roosevelt’s displeasure, it was decided not to send even a note of protest.
Viewed from a century’s distance, with the intervening history of two cataclysmic world wars, the first of which accounted for over twenty million deaths and the second fifty-five million, it is difficult to comprehend the shock and distress brought on by the death of a single American civilian, killed while traveling on a belligerent vessel in a war zone; but in 1915, the concept of total war was still new. In a time before huge civilian casualties became commonplace, the casualties of war were still assumed to be borne pretty much exclusively by men in uniform. Noncombatants were still understood to be bystanders.
On May 1, the Germans upped the ante again, this time torpedoing an American tanker, the Gulflight, once again in the Irish Sea, this time with the loss of three American lives. But much worse was about to happen, with profound effect upon the Wilson cabinet.