Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (21 page)

Though neutral in form, Wilson’s credit policy favored France and Britain in practice. Those countries were better connected to American markets than Germany; combined with Britain’s naval superiority, which allowed a more effective blockade of Germany than Germany could impose against Britain, the New York–London–Paris financial connections funneled American money far more freely to France and Britain than any analogous connections did to Germany and Austria-Hungary. Yet even the American credits couldn’t keep the French and British armies provisioned, and in the spring of 1915 French and British officials applied for unrestricted loans. Without the loans, they said, their war effort would collapse, with disastrous consequences for democracy in Europe—and for the economic health of the United States. They persuaded Robert Lansing, Bryan’s second at the State Department. “The result would be restriction of outputs, industrial depression, idle capital and idle labor, numerous failures, financial demoralization, and general unrest and suffering among the laboring classes,” Lansing wrote Wilson regarding a refusal to approve the loans. The president, not wishing to hazard such a result, let the loans proceed.

The
Lusitania
sinking made Wilson’s decision easier, although not at first. American papers reacted with understandable outrage at the mass killing of Americans; editors thundered that Germany must be chastised. Wilson initially resisted the tide of opinion. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” the president declared. But when this evoked an even louder outcry—how could America be “too proud” to avenge its dead citizens?—he adopted a stronger position. He filed a protest with the German government demanding that Berlin alter its submarine policy and provide guarantees against another such attack. After Germany responded unsatisfactorily, Wilson sharpened his warning. He declared that persistence in Germany’s submarine policy would constitute an “unpardonable offense” against American sovereignty and that he would be forced to interpret any future incident similar to the
Lusitania
sinking as “deliberately unfriendly” to the United States.

This was too much for William Jennings Bryan, and almost too much for Josephus Daniels. The secretary of state complained that Wilson’s policy put America on the path toward war; a single torpedo fired by a hot-headed or fog-blinded German U-boat captain could drag the United States into the maelstrom that was consuming Europe. To underscore his objection, Bryan resigned. Daniels supported Bryan, although not to the extent of surrendering his job.

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT OBSERVED
the fight within the administration at first hand, taking mental notes on the subject of wartime leadership. He interjected where he could. The Anglophilia he and most members of America’s upper class exhibited to one degree or another influenced his attitude toward the European war, and he felt himself drawn toward Britain’s side even before the
Lusitania
sinking. “Today Sir C. Spring Rice lunched with me,” he wrote Eleanor in early 1915, referring to the British ambassador, who had been the best man at Uncle Ted’s wedding to Edith and was now cultivating the younger Roosevelt. “Von Bernstorff”—the German ambassador—“was at the next table, trying to hear what we were talking about! Springy and Von B. would kill each other if they had a chance!” The tension of the high-stakes diplomacy delighted Roosevelt, who added mischievously, “I just
know
I shall do some awful unneutral thing before I get through!”

His neutrality diminished further amid the
Lusitania
crisis. If he wished to keep his job—and, with war looming, he definitely did—he couldn’t be as vocal as Uncle Ted, who was taxing Wilson and Bryan loudly for not breaking relations with Germany. But Franklin railed in private against Bryan and Daniels. “These are the hectic days, all right!” he wrote Eleanor. “What d’ y’ think of W. Jay B.? It’s all too long to write about, but I can only say I’m disgusted clear through!” To Bryan’s credit, in Roosevelt’s eyes, the secretary of state finally had the dignity to get out of the way when he could no longer support policies the president deemed essential to American security. Not so Daniels, who continued to obstruct from within. “J. D. will
not
resign!” Roosevelt declared indignantly.

To the president, Roosevelt offered encouragement. Bryan’s departure was a heavy political blow, as Bryan intended it to be. The now-former secretary of state knew his constituency, and he recognized that all those farmers were leery of getting dragged into Europe’s war. Wilson’s personal attraction for this crucial part of the Democratic coalition was essentially nil; without Bryan he’d have great difficulty keeping the Democrats together. Roosevelt realized that other voices counted more with Wilson than his, but he tendered support all the same. “I wanted to tell you simply that you have been in my thoughts during these days and that I realize to the full all that you have had to go through,” he wrote the president. “I need not repeat to you my own entire loyalty and devotion—that I hope you know. But I feel most strongly that the Nation approves and sustains your course and that it is
American
in the highest sense.”

Wilson appreciated the gesture. Roosevelt’s letter “touched me very much,” the president replied. “I thank you for it with all my heart. Such messages make the performance of duty worth while, because, after all, the people who are nearest are those whose judgment we most value and most need to be supported by.”

W
ILSON REQUIRED THE
support especially as the 1916 election approached. Nearly all the Republicans who had followed Theodore Roosevelt out of the party in 1912 were following him back in, and the arithmetic of American national politics increasingly re-summed toward the Republican majority that had characterized the country since McKinley beat Bryan in 1896. In his favor with voters, Wilson could count certain domestic accomplishments: the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission, a downward revision of the tariff. He could also hope that voters worried by the war in Europe would want to stick with the leader they knew. Whether these would outweigh the institutional Republican edge in the electoral college was the central question.

Wilson trod carefully, particularly on matters relating to the war. Ever more he believed that a German victory would endanger the United States in a way a British and French victory wouldn’t. Germany had started the war; Germany’s autocratic government both reflected and amplified what Wilson and many others perceived to be an inherent aggressiveness in the German people. In early 1916 Wilson quietly sent Edward House, his informal intimate, to Britain to test the waters of cooperation. House and British foreign secretary Edward Grey initialed a memorandum of understanding to the effect that the United States would propose a peace conference and that if Germany refused to participate, America would probably enter the war on the side of Britain and France. The House-Grey memo didn’t bind the United States to anything, but it made clear that Wilson himself had abandoned the moral neutrality he had urged on his compatriots not two years before.

Yet he didn’t trumpet the abandonment. In fact he stressed just the opposite: that he had kept the United States out of war. This became the theme of his reelection campaign, to which Franklin Roosevelt contributed his expected share. Roosevelt ignored for the moment his differences with Daniels and Wilson and berated the Republicans for hindering the president’s efforts to prepare the country for whatever might befall it. “Every minute of time taken up in perfectly futile and useless argument about mistakes in the past slows up construction that much,” he told the Navy League. “Worse than that, it blinds and befogs the public as to the real situation and the imperative necessity for prompt action.” Employing an image he would use in similar circumstances more than two decades later, Roosevelt demanded, “How would you expect the public to be convinced that a dangerous fire was in progress, requiring every citizen’s aid for its extinguishment, if they saw the members of the volunteer fire department stop in their headlong rush towards the conflagration and indulge in a slanging match as to who was responsible for the rotten hose or the lack of water at the fire a week ago?”

Roosevelt’s efforts and those of other Democrats almost weren’t enough. The early returns on election night told heavily for Wilson’s Republican opponent, Charles Evans Hughes. Wilson went to bed thinking the race was lost; Roosevelt stayed up to tell friends he might have to return to the practice of law. Things looked grim the next morning; newspapers reported Hughes the victor. But as the ballots in the West were tallied, Wilson’s prospects improved. “The most extraordinary day of my life,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor at noon. “Wilson may be elected after all.” The counting proceeded with nerve-rending slowness. “Another day of the most wild uncertainty,” Roosevelt recorded on the Thursday after the Tuesday election. “Returns, after conflicting, have been coming in every hour from Cal., N.M., N.D., Minn., and N.H.” If Wilson won enough of these, he might barely squeak past Hughes.

This was just what happened. Wilson wound up with 9.1 million votes to Hughes’s 8.5 million, and 277 electoral votes to Hughes’s 254. Less than 4,000 votes ultimately separated the two candidates in California, whose thirteen electors gave Wilson his margin of victory.

W
ILSON’S TRIUMPH SPARED
Roosevelt a return to the private sector; it also freed the president to deal more forthrightly with the German threat. At the end of 1916 the United States was the great imponderable in the European equation. The front in France had scarcely moved for two years, despite casualties on both sides that numbered in the millions. American money and provisions kept the British and French fighting, but not fighting so well as to defeat the Germans. Yet Germany was weakening under the strain of the British blockade, and Berlin realized it couldn’t hold out forever. To break the deadlock, the German government decided to rescind all restrictions on its submarine commanders. The Germans understood that the new policy would bring the United States into the war, but they were willing to gamble that a cutoff of American resupply to the British and French, combined with a major German offensive in France, would compel the Western allies to sue for peace before American troops could reach the battlefield in meaningful numbers. Accordingly, in January 1917 Berlin announced that it would begin sinking all ships—passenger liners and freighters, neutral vessels and enemy—in the waters around Britain.

Wilson might have responded to the German announcement with a request of Congress for a war declaration. Instead he simply handed Bernstorff his passport and severed diplomatic ties with Germany. Perhaps the president still hoped that war might be averted; perhaps he wished to move slowly enough toward war that even the most reluctant Americans could keep pace. When Albert Burleson, the postmaster general, suggested at a cabinet meeting that public opinion could force his hand, Wilson replied, “I want to do right, whether popular or not.” Whatever his reasons, Wilson waited until American ships actually started going down—in late March—before approaching Congress.