Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (17 page)

Yet Roosevelt surprised them, as he surprised many others in his career. He afterward explained his Navy Department initiation into labor relations:

I had not been there more than about a week when a delegation from the Brooklyn navy yard came down and said, “Mr. Roosevelt”—they had not started to call me Frank; they did in about another week—“there is one thing that we want you to do. You know, you, as assistant secretary of the navy, have charge of all labor matters.” I said, “That is fine; I did not know it.” “Will you do something to change the present method of working out the wage scale paid in the navy yard?” I said, “Fine. How is it done?” “Well,” they said, “do it yourself.” I said, “Why, hasn’t it been done by the assistant secretary in the past?” “No, it has been done by the officers.” And they went on to tell me how unjustly the wage scales in all of the navy yards on both coasts and on the Gulf of Mexico had been arranged each year by a special board of naval officers. After I had been there about three days longer, I think, I got Joe Daniels to sign an order making it the duty of the assistant secretary to fix the wage scale each year.

But the assistant secretary didn’t fix the wage scale by himself. The naval board continued to meet and make its recommendations; these reflected the view of the admirals and embodied, to a more or less obvious degree, the disdain the braided classes felt for the toilers who strained with wrench and riveter. The workers felt particular resentment at the refusal of the board to take sufficient account of local costs of living in determining the wage scales.

Roosevelt couldn’t work magic with the wages. Congress set the department’s overall budget, and more money for workers meant less for ships and naval operations. Besides, the admirals had powerful friends on Capitol Hill and were astute at protecting what they had come to consider theirs. Yet Roosevelt made clear to the labor leaders—the ones who soon called him Frank—that his door was always open. And with a shamelessness that would have been infuriating had he not been so personally charming, he took credit when wages went up and dodged blame when they didn’t. He attended hearings where workers aired their grievances, and though he couched any encouragement in reminders that regardless of what he proposed, Congress would ultimately dispose, his warm handshake and reassuring smile let the workers know he was on their side. Daniels, who didn’t mind delivering bad news, acquiesced in Roosevelt’s arrangement and let his assistant be gone when that bad news reached the workers. “Take what is offered,” one labor leader counseled his negotiators, regarding a parley with Daniels. “And go after the rest when Mr. Roosevelt returns.”

It helped matters that Roosevelt’s years at the Navy Department were a flush time for American shipyards. His relentless calls for a bigger navy contributed to the building boom, but the great events of world affairs—in particular the First World War—contributed much more. All the same, it was with substantial and not entirely unwarranted pride that Roosevelt was able to boast, after the fact, that during his seven and a half years at the Navy Department labor relations had been productive and smooth. “We did not have one single major dispute—no strike, walk-out, or serious trouble in all of the navy yards all over the United States.”

7.

H
ENRY
A
DAMS HAD BEEN YOUNG ONCE
, E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT ASSUMED.
It was hard to know for sure. Adams lived across Lafayette Square from the White House, in the home he had built two generations earlier beside that of John Hay, his longtime friend and fellow ironist. Though Hay died a decade before Eleanor and Franklin arrived in Washington, Adams remained at his post, guarding the republic against the shenanigans of the transients at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The old-timers in the capital, the ones who stayed from Congress to Congress and administration to administration, called themselves “cave dwellers” Henry Adams in 1913 was the senior troglodyte. “He was pointed out to us as a leaf-frail old man in a Victoria, drawn by one horse which looked as if it had made the whole trip with him from his boyhood,” Jonathan Daniels, Josephus’s son, remarked. For fifty years since the 1860s, when it had become clear that the nation had nothing to offer Adams by way of office or authority comparable to that which it had bestowed on his great-grandfather and grandfather, presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, he had muttered into his tea against the trend of public affairs. “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin,” Adams wrote. He hadn’t approved of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he dismissed as “pure act.” Woodrow Wilson appeared somewhat more thoughtful, but Adams could never bring himself to trust a Democrat or a native southerner. On an afternoon when Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt came for lunch, Franklin was discussing a matter of pressing importance for the administration. “Mr. Adams looked at him rather fiercely,” Eleanor recalled, “and said: ‘Young man, I have lived in this house many years and seen the occupants of that White House come and go, and nothing that you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long!’”

Adams tolerated dogs better than humans, and after Eleanor one day caught him playing with a Scottish terrier she thought she detected a soft heart behind his cynical façade. But other aspects of life in Washington remained mysterious to her. Not that she lacked counsel. On learning that Franklin would be joining the Navy Department, Theodore Roosevelt sent a special message to Eleanor via Franklin. “I do hope she will be particularly nice to the naval officers’ wives,” Theodore wrote. “They have a pretty hard time, with very little money to get along on, and yet a position to keep up, and everything that can properly be done to make things pleasant for them should be done.” Aunt Anna, who had astonished the whole family by finally marrying at the age of forty, offered similar advice. Her husband was a retired rear admiral, William Cowles, who educated her to the challenges of navy life, especially for the officers’ spouses. “You can do a great deal to make life pleasant for them when they are in Washington,” Anna told Eleanor. “And that is what you should do.”

Eleanor certainly tried. During the early weeks in the capital she religiously traced the circuit of official Washington. On Mondays she called on the wives of the justices of the Supreme Court. On Tuesdays she saw the spouses of members of the House of Representatives, starting with the New York delegation but gradually including the other states. On Wednesdays she covered the cabinet, on Thursdays the Senate, on Fridays the diplomatic corps. When she was lucky the wives in question were not at home; many were making their own rounds. Eleanor left her card. To those who were in she recited what soon sounded like a jingle in her own ears: “I am Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt. My husband has just come as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”

That first spring flew by, till she made her escape to Campobello with the children. She wasn’t surprised to discover that the Navy Department claimed more of Franklin’s time than the legislature at Albany had, or that he was delighted that it did. He shared his enthusiasm for his work in his letters. After a strategy session aboard the presidential yacht
Sylph
—which landsman Wilson regularly lent to his subordinates—Franklin could hardly contain himself. “I have never had such an interesting conversation on that kind of a trip,” he wrote Eleanor. “We covered every country on the globe!” But offsetting her happiness that his responsibilities engaged his passion was the disappointment she felt each time he postponed his own journey north.

When he did come she wasn’t entirely pleased he had. He celebrated the Fourth of July by ordering the battleship
North Dakota
to join the festivities at nearby Eastport, Maine. The townsfolk were thrilled, but Eleanor was aghast to learn that she was expected to entertain the officers. She survived the weekend’s picnics and parties yet could manage no more than a grim smile when Franklin jokingly promised that in the future he’d never dispatch anything larger than a destroyer to the vicinity of Campobello.

His joke was serious, as Eleanor discovered when Franklin subsequently arrived aboard the destroyer
Flusser,
following an inspection voyage in adjacent waters. The skipper was William Halsey, a young navy lieutenant. “Unlike most Assistant Secretaries of the Navy (and Secretaries, for that matter), he was almost a professional sailorman,” Halsey wrote of Roosevelt years later. “I did not know this then. All I had been told was that he had had some experience in small boats. So when he asked me to transit the strait between Campobello and the mainland, and offered to pilot us himself, I gave him the conn (steering control) but stood close by. The fact that a white-flanneled yachtsman can sail a catboat out to a buoy and back is no guarantee that he can handle a high-speed destroyer in narrow waters. A destroyer’s bow may point directly down the channel, yet she is not necessarily on a safe course. She pivots around a point near her bridge structure, which means that two-thirds of her length is aft of the pivot, and that her stern will swing in twice the arc of her bow.” Yet the amateur pilot proved his mettle. “As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over; he knew his business.”

In the autumn of 1913 Eleanor and Franklin settled into a house they rented from Anna and William Cowles at 1733 N Street. The residence had been called the Little White House during Theodore’s presidency, in recognition of the amount of time TR spent there consulting his sister, who was widely considered one of the sharpest political analysts in Washington. The name lingered, and more than a few observers supposed that Franklin Roosevelt was planning to move from the Little White House to the real thing. He brushed off such suggestions by pointing out that the location, just six blocks from the Navy Department, was most convenient for a busy public servant. The small backyard with roses climbing an arbor provided the children a place to play and Franklin and Eleanor to sit in the moments they found together.

Eleanor discovered that domestic issues were more complicated in Washington than in New York. She unthinkingly imported her favorite servants, who happened to be white, only to be informed by the keepers of the capital culture that in Washington, as elsewhere in the South, servants were black. To confuse the issue by employing white servants risked blurring the color line essential to southern life. Eleanor eventually swapped her white servants for black ones, even as she wondered that so much depended—in the minds of her new neighbors, at any rate—on so little.

T
HE CULTURAL CONSERVATISM
of the capital extended beyond the race question. Despite the progressivism of the era and of the Wilson administration, women in Washington were essentially confined to traditional roles. “Nearly all the women at that time were the slaves of the Washington social system,” Eleanor wrote. They supported their husbands and raised their children, and counted themselves lucky to do so. Two women alone, of Eleanor’s acquaintance, challenged the status quo. One was Martha Peters, the wife of a Massachusetts congressman and the sister of William Phillips, the assistant secretary of state. Her rebellion was primarily negative; she opted out of the calling-card circuit.

The other was Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Alice’s White House wedding to Congressman Nicholas Longworth had been a brilliant occasion, either because of or despite the presence of her father, who stole the show even more thoroughly than he had at the wedding of Franklin and Eleanor. But the Longworth-Roosevelt marriage hadn’t gone well. Nick drank copiously and philandered notoriously, humiliating and outraging Alice. She contemplated divorce but learned that her father and stepmother wouldn’t stand for it. “Although they didn’t quite lock me up,” she recalled, “they exercised considerable pressure to get me to reconsider.” So she took her pleasures elsewhere. She made her home a salon where the mildly disreputable might gather and gossip. She herself was a marvelous mimic and spared no one. Her imitation of Helen Taft amused even friends of the Republican First Lady, although it prompted Edith Roosevelt to urge her to watch her step. “Remember for Nick’s sake to be really careful what you say,” Edith warned. “People are only too ready to take up and repeat the most trivial remarks.”

Careful was the last thing Alice chose to be. If her actions reflected poorly on Nick, she judged, it was no more than he deserved. Eleanor Roosevelt, observing her cousin, was at once appalled and attracted by such independence, which was far beyond anything she could muster at this stage. “I was perfectly certain,” Eleanor remembered, “that I had nothing to offer of an individual nature and that my only chance of doing my duty as the wife of a public official was to do exactly as the majority of women were doing, perhaps to be a little more meticulous about it than some of the others were.”