Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (26 page)

But hubris had set in. As the end of the war hove into sight, Wilson looked to the peace conference that would follow. For Wilson the war had always been about the peace; an unsatisfactory settlement, he believed, would render all the carnage, all the expense, all the compromises with principle wasted. He had decided to attend the peace conference himself, and to bolster his position he called on the American people to rally behind him. “If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad,” he said, “I earnestly beg that you will express yourselves unmistakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”

He knew he was taking a chance. His closest advisers, including his wife, told him so. But he couldn’t help himself. He needed the vote of confidence, the better to speak at the peace conference for humanity, as he intended to do. Predestinarian that he was, he may have believed that God wouldn’t let him down.

But the American people did. They handed not one but both houses of Congress to the Republicans. Wilson wasn’t simply repudiated; he was delivered over to his enemies. Any treaty he brought home from Paris would have to win the approval of two-thirds of the Senate, a formidable standard under the best of circumstances but one made suddenly more daunting by the presence of Henry Cabot Lodge at the Senate door. Lodge would chair the foreign relations committee, which would examine the treaty, conduct hearings, and report its findings to the full Senate. Lodge opposed Wilson politically and despised him personally; he dismissed Wilson’s literary productions with the comment that while they might suit Princeton they would never have passed muster at Harvard, Lodge’s school. Lodge’s dark eyes and Van Dyke beard had always given him a slightly sinister aspect; now, in the malevolent satisfaction of his and the Republicans’ victory, he seemed likely to be downright Mephistophelean toward anything the president returned with from Paris.

F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT SAW
the disaster approaching but was helpless to prevent it. If the president wouldn’t listen to his intimates, he certainly wouldn’t heed an assistant secretary. Fortunately for Roosevelt, no one could blame the debacle on him. The lingering effects of the pneumonia—perhaps compounded by the emotional stress of his confrontation with Eleanor over Lucy—allowed him to beg off from campaigning for the Democrats that season. When the roof fell in on the president, none of the debris hit Roosevelt.

At least not at once. The wounded Wilson set off for Paris in January, and when he arrived, Roosevelt was there to greet him. Roosevelt had hoped to return to France to fight; instead he oversaw the denouement of the fighting. The U.S. navy’s large wartime presence in Britain and France required liquidating; Roosevelt got the assignment.

Eleanor accompanied him. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have, as he was on government business, and spouses typically stayed behind. But after his pneumonia he still needed a nurse or the equivalent, and Eleanor filled the part. In light of what had transpired between them the last few months, she may have considered herself equally his chaperone. This, obviously, wasn’t for public consumption.

The voyage was uneventful. Walter Camp, the Yale coach who essentially invented American football, had taken his philosophy of physical training to Washington during the war, leading government officials in calisthenics each morning to clear their heads and ready them for a hard day at their desks. Franklin Roosevelt was one of Camp’s prize specimens—“a beautifully built young man, with the long muscles of the athlete,” Camp observed. Having contributed his part toward winning the war, Camp now determined to help secure the peace by similar attention to the mind-body connection. He joined Roosevelt’s France-bound American contingent and drilled the travelers on the deck of the
George Washington.
Roosevelt again bent and stretched in the front row, doubtless happy for the physical release the exercise afforded. When the others headed for their staterooms and showers, Roosevelt hit the shuffle-board and quoits courts. Occasionally he reviewed his papers, sitting beside Eleanor, who slogged her way through Henry Adams’s dismal autobiography. “Very interesting, but sad to have had so much and yet find it so little,” she remarked.

The most important development of the eight days of the voyage occurred not on the ship but on the shore of Long Island Sound. Theodore Roosevelt had been in and out of the hospital, but in the year of the flu pandemic so had tens of thousands of other Americans. His various maladies made him uncomfortable, yet none seemed likely to kill him. And so, when he died in his sleep on January 6, 1919, the loss took America by surprise. “The old lion is dead,” his son Archie cabled the other sons. Franklin and Eleanor got the word by wireless aboard the
George Washington.
“We were shocked by the news of Uncle Ted’s death,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “Another big figure gone from our nation, and I fear the last years were for him full of disappointment.”

Franklin Roosevelt didn’t comment directly on his cousin’s passing. Perhaps he reflected on ambition’s—and life’s—ultimate end; perhaps he wondered whether he would be remembered and mourned as widely at his own death as Theodore was being remembered now. He may have felt a certain relief at the prospect of no longer being the “other Roosevelt,” the one in the Rough Rider president’s shadow.

Whatever musings Theodore’s death evoked, they dissipated soon after Franklin and Eleanor reached France. January 1919 was a glorious time to be an American in Paris, and especially to be associated with Woodrow Wilson. The people of France knew nothing of Wilson’s political setback at home, or if they knew they ignored it in their ecstatic welcome to the American president. Banners awaited his docking at Brest, bearing the message “Hail the Champion of the Rights of Man.” Two million Parisians lined the Champs Elysée to pay Wilson homage; three divisions of French troops struggled to keep the crowds from lifting him bodily from his carriage and hoisting him on their shoulders. “I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops,” an American newsman remarked. “But Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman.”

Franklin and Eleanor absorbed the excitement. “I never saw anything like Paris,” Eleanor wrote Sara. “It is full beyond belief, and one sees many celebrities and all one’s friends! People wander the streets unable to find a bed, and the prices are worse than New York for everything.”

The thrill of being at the center of the world while the statesmen of the great powers negotiated humanity’s future doubtless eased, or perhaps simply disguised, the personal tension between Franklin and Eleanor. The relaxation, or distraction, continued as Franklin took Eleanor to visit some of the battlefields. Because the fighting had halted under an armistice rather than a surrender, the front technically remained a war zone, and most women, including wives of assistant secretaries, weren’t allowed. But Roosevelt ignored the ban, and before anyone acted to enforce it, Eleanor’s observation of the battle sites was, as Franklin told Sara, “a fait accompli.”

Franklin’s official business focused on selling American assets to the French government. The navy’s ships, of course, could be sailed home, but bases and other immovable infrastructure would have to be left in place. Or so the French supposed, and they offered the American government a pittance in payment for the facilities. Roosevelt, in one noteworthy instance, informed them that they were wrong. The wireless station at Bordeaux appeared quite permanent to most observers, but when the French made what Roosevelt deemed an insulting offer, he ordered the American personnel to prepare to dismantle it. The navy would ship it home, he told his French counterparts. The French government quickly recalculated and the next day improved its offer substantially. Roosevelt was delighted and shared his pleasure with Eleanor. She passed the good news to Sara: “This is a big success but don’t mention it!”

Other successes were smaller. Roosevelt visited a fort held by U.S. marines at Ehrenbreitstein in the occupied German Rhineland; seeing no American flag above the battlements, he demanded of the commandant to know why. The officer said he didn’t want to offend the Germans. Roosevelt indignantly returned to Paris and informed General Pershing that this would never do. “The German people ought to know for all time that Ehrenbreitstein flew the American flag during the occupation,” he declared. Pershing agreed, and soon Old Glory was snapping in the German breeze.

Within a month Roosevelt completed most of what needed doing. He might have stayed longer, but Eleanor wanted to get back to the children, and he wished to share a sea voyage with Wilson, who was returning to America to sign legislation and tend to other pressing executive business before resuming his seat at the peace conference. The president had been far too busy with Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando to have time for his assistant navy secretary at Paris, but Roosevelt hoped that aboard the
George Washington
they might speak.

And so they did, albeit not as confidentially as Roosevelt would have preferred. Wilson invited Franklin and Eleanor to lunch with him, Mrs. Wilson, and a few other distinguished passengers. Never one for small talk, Wilson launched into an impassioned defense of the League of Nations, the centerpiece of his plans for the postwar settlement. “The United States must go in, or it will break the heart of the world,” he told the group, “for she is the only nation that all feel is disinterested and all trust.” Eleanor thought this statement sufficiently noteworthy that she recorded it verbatim. Something else Wilson said also caught her attention, and doubtless Franklin’s too. “He said he had read no papers since the beginning of the war, that Mr. Tumulty”—Joseph P. Tumulty, Wilson’s private secretary—“clipped them all for him, giving him only important news and editorials.” Eleanor wondered at handing a secretary such implicit power. “This is too much to leave to any man,” she remarked in her diary.

T
HE FIGHT FOR
the League of Nations dominated American politics from the spring of 1919 through the autumn of 1920, and it commenced upon the
George Washington
’s landing in Boston. The destination had originally been New York, the vessel’s home port, but Wilson decided to take the fight to Henry Cabot Lodge’s turf. Boston held a parade for Wilson, which suggested that not all of New England, or even of the Bay State, stood behind Lodge. Roosevelt rode in the parade, and he joined Wilson for lunch with Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge. He sat on the platform at Mechanics Hall while Wilson summoned America to enlist with him in a mission devoted to the highest ideals of democracy. A peace not based on ideals would be unworthy of the American people, Wilson said, and would not last. The president declined to mention his principal antagonist by name, but everyone knew he was speaking of Lodge in warning of the fate that would befall those who opposed the League. “Any man who resists the present tides that run in the world,” Wilson declared, shaking a long, accusing finger, “will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever.”

Roosevelt’s opinion of the League of Nations at this point is unclear. Nothing in his past—and not much in his future—suggested an affinity for the kind of impassioned idealism that informed Wilson’s vision of the League. Roosevelt was more the pragmatist than the idealist, more the tinkerer than the true believer. He also realized that the League had become a monomania with Wilson. The president could justify any compromise at Paris, any political tactic at home, that would deliver the League and secure American membership therein. Roosevelt would never get so passionate about anything. Monomania wasn’t in his nature. He was a politician, not an ideologue; he served people, not causes.