It was dawn on a morning in late January 1917, and Franklin Roosevelt was having an absolutely wonderful time. He was standing on the bridge of the United States destroyer Wainwright, dressed in top hat and morning coat. Above him fluttered the flag of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and before him lay the entire Atlantic fleet at anchor, awaiting his inspection: ninety-two warships drawn up in two parallel lines that stretched halfway to the horizon. The place was Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the warm Caribbean sun was already making his heavy formal wear uncomfortable, but Roosevelt was enjoying himself too much to care. As the Wainwright made her way grandly through the massive display of seapower, each vessel in turn boomed out the seventeen-gun salute FDR so delighted in.
Early in January, when Josephus Daniels had offered to send him on an inspection trip to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Roosevelt had jumped at the opportunity. The warmth of the Caribbean sun was a powerful inducement for such a trip in the midst of a wintry Washington, and an opportunity to get away from the frustrating indecisiveness of the Wilson White House was still a further attraction, but it was the political and military aspects of the trip that primarily intrigued him.
From the founding days of the Republic, the Caribbean had been a contentious sea of troubles for the nascent United States. Located right at the nation’s doorstep, it presented a number of problems and headaches. It was dotted with islands controlled by European powers, each one a handy base for potentially troublesome naval operations. Dutch, British, French and Spanish planters governed the economy of the area, often assisted by pirates preying on merchant shippers trying to do business there.
The twentieth century had brought new problems. In 1906, when the Dominican Republic defaulted on its debts, Germany, which held a large number of Dominican bonds, threatened to invade. President Theodore Roosevelt hastily reinterpreted the Monroe Doctrine and sent the Marines into Santo Domingo before the Germans could make good their threat. More recently, the continuing civil instability and frequent revolutions in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, Woodrow Wilson had once again sent in the Marines.
And now Washington had something new to worry about—the Panama Canal. The Canal, so vital to the mobility of the U.S. Navy, could easily be compromised should an unfriendly power find a way to establish its presence in the Caribbean. The protection of the Canal was the main reason the Atlantic Fleet spent so much time at its base at Guantanamo.
Roosevelt made sure his inspection trip would be designed as much for recreation as it was for carrying out government business, and headed south on board a Navy destroyer on January 21, accompanied by his old college chum Livingston Davis, as well as by Major General George Barnett, Commandant of the Marines, and John A. McIlhenny, chairman of the U.S. Civil Service Commission. After a stopover in Cuba to sample the daiquiris and the nightlife, the group had steamed east to Haiti to begin the official part of the trip. After the fleet review, they spent several days exploring the interior, traveling on horseback through the back country, accompanied by 50 Marines and 150 Haitian militia.
Then it was on to the Dominican Republic, which occupies the eastern half of the island. Here they were greeted with appropriately elaborate ceremonies by the local Marine contingent stationed at Santiago.
On the evening of their arrival, as the party was enjoying an outdoor dinner hosted by the local Marine commandant and his wife, Roosevelt’s orderly entered the courtyard and handed him a cryptic message from the secretary of the Navy which had just been received over the field radio set. Roosevelt recognized the code. It was a simple but effective one he shared with Josephus Daniels and Louis Howe for confidential communications, based on the word positions in a pocket dictionary that all three men carried. Roosevelt left the table to decode the message, and was instantly excited when he was able to make out the plain text: “Because of political situation please return to Washington at once,” it read. “I am sending ship to meet you and party at Puerto Plata tomorrow evening.”
The message actually told him little, but implied a great deal, and when he returned to the table he could not disguise his excitement. He told the others that he was being recalled because of “political conditions.” His hostess, the commandant’s wife, said, jokingly, “What can ‘political conditions’ mean? It must be that Charles Evans Hughes has led a revolution against President Wilson.” FDR laughed. “My dear lady, you have been in the tropics too long!”
What had happened? he wondered. How had the political situation changed? Was the country on the brink of war? Was it actually at war? Roosevelt, an acknowledged hawk, was impatient to find out. He and his party cut short their inspection tour and immediately began making arrangements to get to the coast the next day.
The voyage north on board the Navy collier Neptune was tense and filled with speculation. Roosevelt and his companions had learned by radio prior to departure that Count von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, had been handed his passports and was on his way home, but there had been no further news. Did the ambassador’s dismissal indicate the breaking of relations with Germany? It seemed likely. It also seemed probable that the United States and Germany were already at war, but there was no way to know if such were the case or not. The Neptune was sailing under strict wartime conditions, which meant her guns were manned around the clock, there were no lights at night, and the ship maintained strict radio silence. As she made her way north through the Caicos Island Passage, lookouts were posted with orders to keep watch for any signs of U-boats, while the passengers nervously discussed the possible ramifications of what little information they had.
Finally, on February 8, the Neptune made her way through the Virginia Capes and into Hampton Roads. When she landed her passengers at Fortress Monroe, they were nonplussed to discover that the Army colonel in command seemed utterly surprised by their concern. No, he told them, the United States was not at war, no special preparations had been called for, and there were no orders from Washington to stand by.
“Late that afternoon we were back in Washington,” Roosevelt recalled later. “I dashed to the Navy Department and found the same thing … no excitement, no preparations, no orders to the fleet at Guantánamo to return to their home yards on the East Coast.”
If Franklin Roosevelt, who modeled himself so closely on his Uncle Ted, and who yearned for a world of adventure and decisive action, was disappointed by the relaxed and unhurried atmosphere he found on his return to Washington, he need not have been overly concerned. War was in the air. In the early weeks of 1917, the world was changing significantly, and it would continue to change even more in the weeks ahead. The war that TR had been stridently calling for since the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and which FDR had quietly supported, would soon enough become a reality.
That decision had already been made in Berlin.