Although Roosevelt was not privy to Wilson’s inner circle, he was close to those who were, and was therefore intimately familiar with their concerns and worries as the president wrestled with the difficulties of trying to impose his will upon Germany—which the public clearly wanted him to do—while at the same time keeping America out of the war—which the public also clearly wanted him to do. On June 23, FDR returned to his office after lunching with Josephus Daniels and Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield at the Shoreham Hotel and set down some private thoughts and observations relating to America and the war, as if to find in them some thread of logic or reason to define his own thoughts. These personal notes, which he filed away for future reference, go to the heart of his reactions to the crisis of the Lusitania sinking seven weeks earlier, and provide an insight into how he could understand and define opinions that he did not share, and in some cases strongly opposed:
“As we were walking over Mr. Daniels talked of the difficulty of our position: that Germany might not agree to give up her submarine warfare—that if she did not & refused to do so ever so politely, what could we do? He seemed worried & bewildered questioning without daring to suggest to himself any answers then he said—‘you know one or two men in the Cabinet spend a lot of time working things out to an ultimate conclusion. For instance Garrison [Secretary of War Lindley Garrison, a leading proponent of Preparedness] has kept on speculating about what we could do or should do in case Germany does not back down—of course he has that kind of a mind, the mind of a lawyer & it makes him see a whole lot of unnecessary bogies.’”
“I asked him [Josephus Daniels] ‘Do you think people would stand for raising an army?’ He said ‘No, it would create terrible divisions of opinion.’”
“This reminds me that Garrison told me yesterday that Daniels had said to him ‘I hope I shall never live to see the day when the schools of this country are used to give any form of military training—If that happens it will be proof positive that the American form of government is a failure.’”
“And then he went on to me ‘You know it was just that that made Bryan resign—the fear of the next step if Germany does not give in. It is a mistake to look too far ahead, to cross the bridges before we get to them; it is sufficient to take up each step as it comes up.’”
“My one regret is that the Cabinet has not more Garrisons—the President is not getting real information because the Daniels[es] & Bryans prevent discussion of the future steps because it is a disagreeable subject. I know for a fact that the president has not had the advice of a single officer of the Army or of the Navy on the question of what we could do to carry out our declared policy.”
Given the benefit of hindsight, what we can see in these private notes is that FDR was grappling with Wilson’s problems from Wilson’s perspective. He was attempting to teach himself how to think the way a president has to think.
The Germans replied two weeks later to Wilson’s second diplomatic note protesting the Lusitania sinking. Their response continued to be argumentative and provided none of the assurances demanded by Wilson, so he sent a third, final note that contained serious but ambiguous threats designed to force the Germans to wonder whether they really wanted to risk America joining the Allies. He warned the German Imperial Government “that repetition by the commanders of German naval vessels of acts in contravention of … neutral rights must be regarded by the Government of the United States, when they affect American citizens, as deliberately unfriendly.”
When the newspapers reported that Wilson had sent still a third protest note, a testy Theodore Roosevelt asked his daughter Alice mischievously if she had noticed its serial number. “I fear I have lost track,” he told her, “but I am inclined to think it is No 11,765, Series B.”
But if Uncle Ted ridiculed Wilson’s attempts at diplomacy, he might have looked with greater favor on one of the other actions the president took that same day. In a dramatic about-face, Woodrow Wilson committed himself to the Preparedness program he had heretofore opposed, and formally requested his secretary of war and his secretary of the Navy to prepare expansion programs for both the Army and the Navy.
Franklin Roosevelt, recuperating at Campobello from an appendicitis operation, was delighted by the news. For a year, he had been one of the very few voices warning that the war would be long and brutal and advocating the need for American Preparedness. Now, at last, his message seemed to be getting through to the White House.
Woodrow Wilson’s angry protests to Berlin seemed to be having no effect whatsoever. The Germans continued their campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare. On August 19, three days after Roosevelt returned to his office from his sickbed, the British White Star liner Arabic was torpedoed with the loss of 44 killed, including two Americans. The ship had been bound to New York and therefore could not logically have been carrying contraband, and once again the American public was outraged. But again Wilson refused to take any action other than to fire off still another note of protest to the Germans and then sit back and wait for a response.
Maintaining any sort of diplomatic communication with Berlin was time-consuming because the British Navy, in one of its first acts in the war, had severed all of Germany’s underwater cable connections with the outside world. In consequence, the German government had been forced to develop substitute methods of transatlantic communication, all of which were slow. The wait for answers from Berlin was therefore often a long one. There were now two different protests in the pipeline, the third Lusitania note and the new Arabic note. Two weeks after Wilson sent off the Arabic note, the German ambassador was finally able to present a response to Wilson’s third Lusitania note. This time Wilson’s veiled threats seemed to have forced Berlin to modify its stance. Bernstorff had been instructed to relay to the American government that “Liners will not be sunk by our submarines without warning and without safety of the lives of noncombatants provided that the liners do not try to escape or offer resistance.”
This was a major concession on the part of the Germans and a considerable diplomatic triumph on Wilson’s part, but of course the German promise rang hollow in the face of the much more recent torpedoing of the Arabic. It was not until a month later that Bernstorff was able to confirm in writing that Germany “regrets and disavows” the sinking of the Arabic, and was “prepared to pay an indemnity for the American lives which … have been lost.” Then, in an even more significant passage, “The orders issued by His Majesty the Emperor to the commanders of the German submarines … have been so stringent that the recurrence of incidents similar to the Arabic case is considered out of the question.” The White House and the nation as a whole celebrated the “Arabic pledge,” and Wilson was hailed for his cool negotiating skill. Millions of Americans took note of the fact that once again “he has kept us out of the war.”
Meanwhile Roosevelt, on his own initiative, and taking advantage of Josephus Daniels’s absence from the office on holiday, used his temporary position to move the Navy significantly closer to a wartime footing by announcing the formation of a Naval Reserve which would be made up of fifty thousand men and squadrons of private powerboats, ready to be pressed into service should a national emergency arise. Such a Naval Reserve had long been one of FDR’s pet ideas. He had often suggested such an organization to Daniels, and while the secretary had been agreeable, somehow the idea of a Naval Reserve had never gotten beyond the talking stage.
“Today I sprang an announcement of the national Naval Reserve, and trust J. D. will like it!” he wrote Eleanor. “It is of the utmost importance, and I have failed for a year to get him to take any action, though he has never objected to it. Now I have gone ahead and pulled the trigger myself. I suppose the bullet may bounce back on me, but it is not revolutionary or alarmist and is just common sense.” When he returned from vacation, Daniels did in fact approve the step, but cautioned that it must be run democratically, not just for FDR’s yachting cronies.
Both Roosevelt and Daniels were quick to note that when Wilson made public his shift to Preparedness on September 3, 1915, both the press and the public received the news coolly. Many opposed it outright. Later, in December, when Wilson outlined to Congress his program to expand both the Army and the Navy, the response was equally negative, or at least apathetic. Advocates of Preparedness complained that Wilson’s plans were insufficient, while pacifists— including a significant percentage of Democratic representatives— were sure his program would lead the country closer to war. It was clear that the White House was going to have difficulty negotiating the passage of Wilson’s program.
In December, Roosevelt wrote an article in The Nation’s Business addressing the public’s apathetic response. It laid out in detail what it was that the Wilson administration was committed to do in the way of Navy expansion and made the case that the considerable growth anticipated was “purely defensive.” The article, “The Navy Program and What It Means,” was almost certainly ghost-written by Louis Howe, but it accurately reflected what Franklin was thinking at the time. Roosevelt did not dodge the question of cost. Navies are expensive, he admitted, and the cost of the expansion program would be steep, some $500,000,000 over five years, but he presented the extra millions in the context of other expenditures. He had made the point elsewhere that “we spend more money per year for chewing gum … than we do to keep our Army, and more money is spent for automobile tires than it costs to run the Navy.”
The article deliberately echoed the style of Uncle Ted, combining straight talk with a very personal appeal. “People are beginning to realize that naval defense does not mean merely the protection of certain harbor mouths along our Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Naval warfare from its earliest days has meant the control for defensive purposes of those portions of the ocean in which a country is immediately interested.… The program does not go as far as many would desire, or even as has been suggested as necessary by many experts. It is, however, the first attempt to apply ordinary business sense to this great national problem. It is, of course, for the people of the United States, through their representatives, to say how fast the extension and development shall go on. But a real beginning has for the first time been made in defining the true requirements of national safety.”
While Preparedness and concerns over the U-boat situation continued to dominate talk in Washington, there were certain other gnawing anxieties that simply would not go away, as indicated in a brief New York Times story toward the end of 1915:
GERMAN WIRELESS IN MAGDALENA BAY?
Washington, Dec. 4: A report came to the State Department today, from a source that was not disclosed, that a German wireless station was said to be in operation in Magdalena Bay in the Mexican State of Lower California. The State Department sent the information to the Department of Justice for investigation.
As it turned out, there was nothing to the story, but it served to keep alive the American government’s nervous awareness of Mexico’s political fragility, and the threat it posed to the defense of the United States.
In the Roosevelts’ private life, Eleanor had discovered that Lucy Mercer, who had proved to be invaluable as a social secretary, could also be counted on to fill in as a guest at dinner parties when an extra female was required. The dignitaries and naval officers at the Roosevelts’ table were charmed by the attractive young woman whose youth and looks added such grace and spirit to the occasion.