Nineteen-sixteen would be a presidential election year, and, as the new year opened, that meant a time of decision for Franklin Roosevelt. Four years earlier, he had cast his lot with Woodrow Wilson, and he owed his current position to that original leap of faith. Now it was time to decide whether to stand pat and put his faith in Wilson’s ability to win the November election, or to strike out in a new direction, either in New York politics or perhaps in the private sector. And behind that question lay another: if Wilson were to win reelection, could FDR expect to retain his position as assistant secretary of the Navy, or might he even hope to be rewarded with some even more important job, even a cabinet post?
And still another question: could Wilson win? Any realistic handicapping of the president’s chances in November had to take into account the growing discontent within his party. The resignation of William Jennings Bryan had exposed a bitter divide within the Democrats. The millions—particularly in the West—who still revered and trusted the Great Commoner felt betrayed by Wilson. Even those who sided with the president found his shifting positions relative to the Allies and the Central Powers inconsistent and unpredictable, and his September shift into the Preparedness camp was seen as more worrisome than welcome.
There was still another factor which, while not strictly political, was likely to have significant political consequences. In December 1915, to the distress of many of his fellow citizens, the president had married Edith Galt, widow of a Washington jeweler. His remarriage, coming so soon after his first wife’s death, seemed likely to cast a shadow over all of Wilson’s initiatives.
And once again, there was the nagging question of Uncle Ted. Theodore Roosevelt, whose split with William Howard Taft had made Wilson’s election possible in 1912, was still hugely popular, and was now making it increasingly clear that he wanted very much to run again for the White House. This time he stipulated beforehand that he would only run if he could get the backing of the Republican Party, and the consensus among most knowledgeable observers was that if TR could somehow manage to mend fences with the GOP, he would be unbeatable.
Franklin Roosevelt knew he would have to address the question of his own future at some point, but he also recognized that the unpredictable nature of the European war and America’s responses to the constantly shifting state of play as it approached its third year would generate any number of opportunities and points of danger as the year progressed, and that, for the time being, the prudent expedient was to stay the course and see what happened.
Many politicians in his position, with their future in the balance, might decide to adopt a cautious, wait-and-see attitude, but Roosevelt’s response was exactly the opposite—an increased boldness and self-confidence, which would make itself evident throughout the year in both his public and private lives.
That January, Roosevelt was suffering with a throat infection so severe and intractable that he barely had the energy to get through each day, let alone face the problems of his job. He was still sick when Wilson set out on a cross-country tour to sell the public on his new plans to expand America’s military forces. In St. Louis, in his final address of the tour, he defended his Preparedness campaign with an enthusiasm and eloquence that Franklin Roosevelt would have appreciated. “Have you ever let your imagination dwell upon the enormous stretch of coast from the Canal to Alaska, from the Canal to the northern corner of Maine?” Wilson asked his audience. “There is no other navy in the world that has to cover so great an area of defense as the American Navy and it ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”
The tour seemed to have the desired effect, and public opinion appeared to be moving Wilson’s way. He returned to Washington ready to move forward on his plans for a larger and stronger Army and Navy, when he was momentarily caught off guard by the resignation of Lindley Garrison, his bellicose secretary of war. Unlike Bryan, who had resigned because he felt Wilson’s policies were too warlike, Garrison, who had been a staunch supporter of military expansion from the beginning, resigned because he felt Wilson’s new measures were too modest, nowhere sufficient to the need.
There was immediate speculation in the press that Roosevelt might be selected to replace Garrison, and various high-ranking Army officers and powerful members of the business community let it be known that they were very much in favor of such a move. Louis Howe, who still maintained close relations with his colleagues in the press, undoubtedly helped spread the story. But even had FDR wanted to bring about such a move—and there is no question he would have eagerly welcomed such a promotion, even if it meant leaving his beloved Navy Department—he was in no position to make it happen. By the time of Garrison’s resignation, an ailing Roosevelt had decamped for Atlantic City, where his doctors hoped the sea air would improve his sore throat. There, under the watchful eye of his mother, he wrote to Eleanor on the twenty-first of February:
This “health resort” is purgatory, the place of departed spirits. It is a heavenly day and my throat is, if anything, a little redder, but what I fail to understand is how anybody can stay here more than 24 hours without wanting to murder somebody. Except for throat I feel better as to strength.
I shall return Friday if I can stick it out that long.… Your affectionate but mad clear through F
As it turned out, Roosevelt had never been in the running for secretary of war. The president eventually announced that his choice for the position was Newton D. Baker, a cautious Ohio mayor who had recently announced himself strongly opposed to the Preparedness program. The fact that Wilson had now appointed pacifists in charge of both the Army and the Navy indicates just how complicated and volatile the situation had become within the Democratic Party and how difficult it was to find a way to accommodate its contending factions.
Soon after the announcement, there was once again troubling news from the American Southwest, reminding everyone in the defense establishment that the European war was not the only threat to America’s security. On March 9, Pancho Villa, the Mexican general who was at that time in a struggle with General Carranza for control of the northern states of Mexico, crossed the American border to sack the town of Columbus, New Mexico, killing nineteen Americans before he was driven off. Villa’s raid was a deliberate attempt to exact revenge on Woodrow Wilson, who had helped Carranza make an end run around Villa’s troops by allowing Carranza to pass through U.S. territory. Villa hoped to provoke America into war so he could exploit the turmoil, but Wilson avoided the trap. Instead of declaring war, he ordered General “Black Jack” Pershing to cross the Rio Grande with a force of 5,800 men and chase down Villa.
But public attention quickly veered back to the European war when, on March 24, a U-boat torpedoed the ferry-steamer Sussex in the English Channel, killing several passengers and injuring four of the twenty-four Americans on board. Once again, Americans reacted with fury. What had happened to all those German promises to abandon such tactics in the wake of the sinkings of the Lusitania and the Arabic? Once again, on April 18, 1916, Wilson sent an angry note to the German government, this one stronger than any of his previous ones. He threatened to sever diplomatic relations if Germany did not immediately abandon its present method of submarine warfare.
This was head-to-head diplomacy, demanding an unequivocal answer, and the Germans responded quickly, promising to mend their ways but insisting that the United States must make similar demands on the British to abandon their blockade, which they claimed was the sole reason for the U-boat attacks. The White House hailed the German note as the “Sussex triumph.”
From the Germans’ point of view, their response was well timed, and something of a propaganda victory. Americans did not much care one way or another about the blockade, but they were growing increasingly upset by the Royal Navy’s high-handed and capricious blacklisting of certain American companies, and by the ever-lengthening list of goods that the British determined were “contraband” and therefore subject to seizure on the high seas without payment, as well as by their interference with Red Cross hospital shipments. Anti-British feelings—particularly in the large and politically influential Irish American community—was also increasing as a result of reports of the British government’s brutal suppression of the Easter Rising in Dublin.
It did not go unnoticed by Roosevelt that Wilson was gaining support in American public opinion, while the Allies were losing it. Franklin Roosevelt was keenly interested in such shifts in public sentiment. Privately he had been a staunch supporter of the Allied cause from the beginning (as had Wilson), but he continued to maintain an impartial even-handedness in his public statements, in deference to the president’s neutral position. Even so, in the spring of 1916 his increasing independence and self-confidence was becoming more evident. He eagerly accepted an invitation to speak once again to the Navy League in New York, despite the fact that Josephus Daniels was at that point openly boycotting the League, which he described as nothing more than a pressure group of greedy industrialists whose call for a larger Navy was motivated primarily by a desire for fat new construction contracts. Roosevelt was well aware that his superior and the League held each other in contempt but chose to pay no attention, and many both in and out of government saw his speech to the Navy League as a source of tension between the two men.
The month of May 1916 was to prove a landmark in Woodrow Wilson’s tortured progress in self-education as he wrestled with his efforts to master two irreconcilable political goals—how to stay out of the most terrible and pointless war in history while simultaneously finding a way to end that war and establish some mechanism to guarantee that it would never be repeated. When he had first called for enlarging the Army and Navy in 1915, he knew it was a risky move and might be seen as taking the first significant step toward engagement in the European war. In May 1916, he deliberately took the next step, which was to define the goals and purpose of that war. It was a radical and even presumptuous move for a noncombatant to set the terms for a war that was being fought by other nations on another continent, and many Americans saw it as a step toward intervention. While Franklin Roosevelt had little if anything to do with the preparation of the speech that Wilson gave on May 27 to an influential ad hoc group called the League to Enforce Peace, he would spend the rest of his life profoundly influenced by the principles expressed in it.
The League had been put together in 1915 by former president Taft and Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, and aimed to establish a postwar international organization to keep the peace. Wilson made it abundantly clear that he was in accord with the League’s goals. “We are participants, whether we would or not, in the life of the world,” he told his two thousand listeners, and “the nations of the world must in some way band together to see that right to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live.” Then, in solemn tones he declared, “the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objectives and make them secure against violation.”
The speech was Wilson’s first public attempt to define what would become his primary contribution to history—the establishment of a League of Nations.