Previously on "The Roosevelts"...
I have always been fond of the Old West African proverb
"speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far."
America's youngest president charged ahead.
The Panama canal is one of the great achievements of the human race.
And after a secret courtship,
the celebrated marriage of Eleanor and Franklin.
My one great wish is always to prove worthy of him.
And now part 3 of "The Roosevelts, An Intimate History."
S01E03 "The Fire Of Life"
In the early autumn of 1910,
voters living along the back roads
of upstate dutchess county, New York,
were startled by something altogether new...
A bright red two-cylinder Maxwell touring car,
draped with bunting.
The car's owner, a poughkeepsie piano-tuner,
was behind the wheel.
Next to him was an eager young candidate for the State Senate,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt of Hyde Park.
When he entered politics, everything was new to him.
And especially new was, was dealing on a more or less
equal basis with ordinary people.
And he loved it.
I don't think he ever lost the sense
that he was a bit apart from everyone else,
but he loved seeing how much like
an ordinary person he could be.
And I think he really did that all his life.
He was a 28-year old lawyer who had never run for anything before.
And he was a Democrat running in a traditionally Republican district.
But he was also the fifth cousin
of the most popular man in America,
the ex-president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt.
Young Roosevelt had promised "a strenuous campaign."
It proved so strenuous that he spent one afternoon
across the state line in Connecticut,
pumping the hands of baffled farmers
who couldn't vote for him even if they'd wanted to.
He professed to be "dee-lighted" by everything,
just as his cousin always was.
"I'm not Teddy, " he liked to tell the crowds.
"A little shaver said to me the other day
"That he knew I wasn't Teddy... I asked him why, and he replied,
because you don't show your teeth. '" but he did.
He was already a top-notch salesman
because he wouldn't immediately enter into a topic of politics
when he met a party.
He would approach them as a friend
and would lead up to that with that smile of his.
Tom Leonard.
The mid-term elections proved a disaster
for the Republicans nationally.
Democrats captured the house for the first time in 16 years.
And, as Franklin's proud mother
kept a tally of her boy's triumph,
the Democratic tide helped sweep him
into the New York State Senate.
He was on his way.
Two weeks after his party's spectacular defeat at the polls,
Theodore Roosevelt traveled to Washington to make a speech.
He stopped by the White House for the first time
since leaving it 11/2 years earlier.
President William Howard Taft and his wife were out of town.
Roosevelt remembered every servant and gardener by name,
asked about their families, and exclaimed over
a piece of the corn bread he'd especially loved
while living at the White House,
brought to him hot from the kitchen.
When he was shown into the handsome new oval office
that had been built over the old tennis court,
he strode across the room and sat down in the president's chair.
It seemed very "natural" to be sitting there, he said.
Roosevelt had a natural capacity to lead in every Avenue of Life.
He could lead men up San Juan Hill.
He could lead men on a posse in the badlands.
And the greatest mistake that he ever made
was to relinquish power when he had it.
And leaving at the height of his powers
as the youngest former president
was a ruinously ludicrous thing for him to do.
He never could live happily on the periphery of anything.
He had to be in the arena. He left power too soon.
During the next 10 years, Franklin Roosevelt
would first follow the political trail his hero,
Theodore Roosevelt, had pioneered.
Then he would deviate dramatically from it
and finally find himself torn among
political and family and personal loyalties
that threatened to destroy what seemed at first
to be a charmed career.
Eleanor Roosevelt would struggle to find
a place for herself in her own growing family,
suffer a betrayal that threatened to shatter forever
her fragile sense of self,
and then begin to build a fulfilling life of her own,
free of crippling fear.
Theodore Roosevelt had once pledged not to try
to run for the presidency again,
but now he had begun to change his mind.
That decision would alter the course of American politics.
And along the way, the old intimate connection
between the Roosevelts of Hyde Park
and the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay would begin to fray.
January 17, 1911.
Senator Franklin Roosevelt is less than 30.
He is tall and lithe.
With his handsome face and his form of supple strength
he could make a fortune on the stage
and set the matinee girl's heart throbbing
with subtle and happy emotion.
But no one would suspect behind that highly polished exterior
the quiet force and determination that now are
sending shivers down the spine of Tammany's striped mascot.
"The New York Times."
Franklin Roosevelt's debut in Albany
was nearly as noisy as his cousin's had been 29 years before.
Theodore Roosevelt had made his reputation by embarrassing
the bosses of his own Republican party.
Franklin lost no time in taking on
the New York City Democratic machine, Tammany Hall.
FDR did everything he could think of
to make himself seem like TR, in Albany.
He, he really was a sort of caricature of a caricature
of, of TR for quite a while.
And just like the boys at Groton and Harvard,
the professional politicians in Albany couldn't stand him.
When the political boss of the bowery
saw Franklin's name on the list of Democratic newcomers,
he said, "well, if we've caught a Roosevelt",
"we'd better take him down and drop him off the docks.
The Roosevelts run true to form."
Meanwhile, a seat in the United States senate for New York had opened up.
In those days, U.S. Senators were still chosen
by their state legislatures.
The Democrats were in control in New York
and their boss, Charles Murphy, had already made his choice:
A Buffalo Millionaire named Billy Sheehan,
personally charming, privately corrupt.
And the outnumbered Republicans had agreed not to put up a fight.
But a band of 21 reform-minded Democrats
had resolved to block Sheehan with a nominee of their own.
Franklin joined their ranks,
and because he alone was wealthy enough
to rent a house in Albany...
The rebels met in its library each morning,
producing so much blue cigar smoke
that Eleanor had to move the children to the top floor.
The press found the idea of a new Roosevelt
repeating his celebrated cousin's Albany battles irresistible.
"It's the most humanly interesting political fight
for many years, " wrote the Albany Stringer
for the "New York Herald, " Louis Howe.
Franklin thought so, too.
He denounced Tammany Hall as a "noxious weed, "
its members as "hopelessly stupid" and "beasts of prey."
Tammany spokesmen responded that Franklin was a snob,
a secret Republican, anti-Catholic.
"There's nothing the matter with Sheehan, "
Manhattan assemblyman Alfred E. Smith said,
"except he's an Irishman."
The stalemate dragged on for 21/2 months...
And might have gone on even longer
if a fire hadn't gutted the state Capitol building,
requiring the weary and impatient Democrats
to caucus in cramped quarters across the street.
Finally, the Tammany boss named a new candidate,
an Irish-American judge every bit as pliant as Sheehan.
Roosevelt and the remaining insurgents gave in...
And then worked hard to make a defeat seem like a victory.
I have just returned from a big fight,
a fight that went 64 rounds,
and there was fighting every second of those 64 rounds.
This fight was a free-for-all,
and many on the other side got good and battered.
The battle ended in harmony, and we have chosen
a man for the people who will be dictated to by no one.
"We are all really proud of the way"
you have handled yourself, "
Theodore Roosevelt told Franklin.
"Good luck to you."
Here in Albany began a dual existence for me
which was to last all the rest of my life.
Public service, whether my husband was in or out of office,
was to be part of our daily life from now on.
Eleanor was fascinated by the Sheehan battle
and pleased at her own ability to function
apart from her mother-in-law in a wholly new world.
She organized a reception for 250 constituents,
supplied food and drink every evening
for Franklin and his fellow insurgents,
and got to know all kinds of people... including a number of
politicians who were unable to resist her
but couldn't stand her husband, because he seemed so unreliable.
Franklin Roosevelt battled hard for a direct primary
that would have allowed voters, not bosses,
to choose their senators, but then backed away
at the last minute from a reform charter for New York City.
After a fire at the triangle shirtwaist company killed 146 women,
a special commission produced a flood of 32 reform bills.
Roosevelt voted for all of them,
but when the most hotly contested vote came...
On a bill setting a 50-hour-per-week work limit
for women and children...
He didn't bother to show up for the debate.
"He was a very uncertain factor, "
one reformer remembered.
"No one could ever tell how he was going to vote."
And throughout, he maintained an earnest, pious air,
compounded by what one observer remembered as
"the unfortunate habit... so natural that
he was unaware of it... of throwing his head up, which,
"combined with his great height,
"gave him the appearance of looking down his nose at most people."
And that famous image we have of him with his,
his chin up, you know, that great pose of confidence,
chin up, at that time it was his nose in the air.
"Awful arrogant fellow, that Roosevelt, "
big Tim Sullivan, a ward boss, said.
Looking back many years later, Franklin himself agreed.
"You know, " he told an old friend,
"I was an awfully mean cuss when I first went into politics."
If they treated Theodore as they deal with
certain composite substances in chemistry
and melted him down to his ultimate, central,
indestructible stuff, it's not a statesman they'd find,
or a hunter, or a historian, or a naturalist...
They'd find a preacher militant.
Owen Wister.
On February 24, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt announced
that he was once again a candidate
for president of the United States.
"My hat is in the ring, " he said,
"the fight is on and I am stripped to the buff."
He had been restless ever since
his return from Africa two years earlier.
He was still only 53 years old.
President Taft, his handpicked successor,
had proved a disappointment to many progressives...
And to Roosevelt.
Amiable, well-meaning, and enormous...
He weighed well over 330 pounds...
Taft backed away from meaningful tariff reform,
retreated in the face of timber and mining interests
eager to get at national forests,
refused to intervene in legislative matters
on the grounds that it would violate the Constitutional
doctrine of separation of powers.
But his critics... TR included... Failed to acknowledge the many
progressive actions he had taken.
Taft had succeeded at everything he had done up to that point.
He'd been Roosevelt's secretary of war.
He'd been a successful judge.
He'd been governor general of the Philippines.
And he was a lovely person to have around.
Everyone loved will Taft.
Roosevelt thought that he would make a wonderful successor.
But I think he would have been disappointed in anyone because
he wasn't president anymore.
Roosevelt now thought Taft
"utterly helpless as a leader."
He felt both personally and politically betrayed.
In a celebrated speech at Osawatomie, Kansas,
he called for a "new nationalism."
Social justice in America, he said, could only be achieved
through a strong federal government
and a president who saw it as his duty to act as
"the steward of the public interest."
But William Howard Taft's Republican party
did not see things that way.
It was actually a collection of strong state parties.
Those state parties controlled their state legislatures,
which were, in turn, controlled by the interests...
Banks in New York, timber in Michigan, copper in Montana,
and rail roads everywhere.
The man who wrongly holds that every human right
is second to his profit must now give way
to the advocate of human welfare,
who rightly maintains that every man holds his property
subject to the general right of the community
to regulate its use to whatever degree
the public welfare may require it.
His wife Edith saw what was coming.
She was against her husband's return to presidential politics.
She was sure the old guard would deny him
the Republican nomination, she said,
and could see no "possible result which could"
give me aught but keen regret."
Roosevelt's old friend, Massachusetts senator
Henry Cabot Lodge, also begged him to stay out of it.
But Roosevelt was determined to run.
7 out of 19 Republican governors promised their support.
Ohio Congressman Nick long worth,
who had married TR's rebellious daughter Alice,
said that at the prospect of a return to action,
he suddenly seemed 10 years younger,
"in such wonderful spirits, that he behaved like a boy."
State party machines still picked most delegates
to the Republican convention,
but a dozen states would hold direct primaries that year.
If Roosevelt could demonstrate in those
that voters overwhelmingly wanted him, he reasoned,
the bosses would be unable to resist.
The fight went on for almost 4 months...
Bitter, damaging, personal.
Roosevelt called Taft a "puzzlewit, " "a fathead, "
"disloyal to every canon of decency and fair play."
"Once Roosevelt gets into a fight, " one friend explained,
"he is completely dominated by the desire to destroy his adversary."
Taft is desolate.
He can't believe that this friendship has been destroyed.
It's inexpressibly sad.
It means more to him to lose the friendship
than to lose the presidency.
"I don't want to fight, " Taft said.
"But when I do fight, I want to hit hard.
Even a rat in a corner will fight."
He denounced Roosevelt as a "freak", a "demagogue, "
"the most dangerous man we have had in this country since its origin."
But his heart wasn't in it.
One evening, a reporter came upon
an exhausted Taft aboard his train.
"Roosevelt was my closest friend, " the president said,
and began to weep.
When the primary season ended,
Roosevelt had captured 9 states...
Including Taft's own home state of Ohio.
It was clear that most Republican Voters wanted change.
But just as Edith had predicted,
when the party met in the Chicago coliseum in June,
the old guard regulars in charge were immovable.
They awarded all but 19 of the 254 contested delegates to Taft.
Roosevelt declared he was being robbed and told his followers
not to bother sitting through the roll call.
They walked out.
"The parting of the ways has come, " Roosevelt said.
The Republican party must stand "for the rights of humanity
or else it must stand for special privilege."
The next day, he appeared before his supporters.
The victory shall be ours,
and it shall be won
as we have already won so many victories,
by clean and honest fighting for the loftiest of causes.
We fight in honorable fashion for the good of mankind;
fearless of the future;
unheeding of our individual fates;
with unflinching hearts and undimmed eyes.
We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the lord!
They cheered him for 45 minutes.
If they wished to form a third party
and have him make the fight, he told them,
"I will make it, even if only one state should support me."
Officially, his followers would call themselves
the progressives, after the social policies
they and he had championed.
But because their candidate had told a reporter he felt
"as strong as a bull moose, "
they would be remembered as the bull moose party.
Many of his closest friends thought he was making a terrible mistake.
I don't think you can say it was a mistake
because he would have exploded from unspent energy if he hadn't done it.
And there's nothing wrong with every once in a while saying
that two parties aren't responsive
to a rising sentiment in the country.
The two-party system is an excellent thing
but it is not graven on the heart of man
by the finger of God.
There are occasions when a serious politician will say
there are serious forces in the country
that are not being responded to by a kind of
political market failure, and a third party is required.
And for all the personal demons that drove him,
I think it's fair to say that Teddy Roosevelt also had
a public spirit that caused him to move.
TR as a student of Lincoln's career knows that
the Republican party was just invented
as this strange third party in 1854.
And if you could do that to meet the needs of the 1850s,
why couldn't you do it in 1912,
because he said, "the two main parties are husks."
Neither party was really addressing modern industrial life.
Both parties were, were stalling and they are stuck with,
you know, party bosses and the issues of a past generation.
A third party was needed to bring
the crucial issues to the forefront.
Roosevelt's blood was up.
He championed positions far more radical
than any he had espoused before,
positions that had been put forward for decades
by Americans who felt left out.
The progressive platform recognized
a woman's right to vote and labor's right to organize;
promised to curtail campaign spending
and defend natural resources;
limit the work day to 8 hours and the work week to 6 days;
and to provide federal insurance
for the elderly, the jobless, and the sick.
If judges dared interfere with the new laws,
he said, they should be recalled by the voters.
"When a judge decides a Constitutional question,
When he decides what the people as a whole can and cannot do,
the people should have the right to recall that decision...
if they think that it is wrong."
He truly had come to believe that
the progressive agenda would save this country
from a bloody social revolution of the kind that
would occur in Russia. This is not political opportunism.
He believed that the only way to save capitalist America
was to have a social Democratic gradualist revolution here,
which we call progressivism.
This was genuine, mature ideology.
But of course he also wanted back in.
Roosevelt was confident he could beat Taft,
but his hope of defeating the Democrats rested on their
picking what he called "a reactionary."
And two of the 3 leading candidates were just the kind of
opponents he'd hoped for.
But after 46 exhausting ballots
at their convention in Baltimore,
the Democrats settled on Woodrow Wilson,
the former president of Princeton University
and governor of New Jersey.
He'd only been in politics two years,
but he appealed to reformers because he'd beaten
his own party machine to pass progressive legislation
in his state.
From Roosevelt's point of view,
Wilson was the worst possible opponent.
Nothing new is happening in politics
except Mr. Roosevelt, who is always new,
being bound by nothing in the heavens above or in the earth below.
He is now rampant and very diligently employed
in splitting his party wide open...
So that we Democrats may get in.
Woodrow Wilson.
Dear Franklin, I hope you will be re-elected
because I know how honest and fearless you are
and that nothing will change when you are honest and right.
I hope the "Bull Moose" party will endorse you.
Of course it ought to, to be true to its principles.
Mama.
For the first time, the 1912 election would divide
the Hyde Park Roosevelts from their Oyster Bay cousins.
Franklin Roosevelt could not help but admire the battle
Theodore Roosevelt was waging.
"It is indeed a marvelous thing, " he told an old friend.
But he was already enlisted in the opposing army.
Long before the bull moose party was created,
he had been a vocal supporter of Woodrow Wilson.
Eleanor remained of two minds.
Franklin is well satisfied
with Mr. Wilson's nomination.
But I wish Franklin could be fighting now for Uncle Ted,
for I feel he is in the party of the future.
Franklin would be unable to fight for himself
or anyone else that fall.
He was up for re-election to the State Senate
but he and Eleanor had both come down with typhoid fever
and were confined to their house on East 65th Street.
Luck brought him an able stand-in.
That fall, the same Red Maxwell
that had introduced Franklin Roosevelt
to his constituents two years earlier
prowled dutchess county again in search of votes...
But this time it was carrying
a very different kind of passenger.
Louis McHenry Howe was a veteran Albany newspaperman,
gruff and diminutive,
chain-smoking and so famously homely
he sometimes called himself a "medieval gnome."
Louis Howe is a marvelous character.
He was a little, tiny, hideous man.
He sort of gloried in being ugly.
He smoked like a chimney and was covered with ashes.
He never stopped talking.
And the Roosevelt children hated him.
Howe loved politics and political maneuvering,
was drawn to power but knew he could never win it for himself,
and saw that the closest he could ever get
was to make himself indispensable
to young Franklin Roosevelt.
He latched on to Franklin Roosevelt and he was
able to tell Roosevelt when he was wrong.
He was really the only person
who ever could do that consistently.
"You're a damn fool, Franklin. Don't think of doing that."
When he met him in 1911,
he actually put aside a bottle of Sherry
and said that he would open it
after Roosevelt became president.
And he decided when no one else
in his right mind would have thought so,
except possibly Roosevelt, that
he should be president of the United States
He had already begun to address his employer,
only partly joking, as "beloved and revered future president."
Howe crisscrossed Roosevelt's district.
He shook hundreds of hands,
promised jobs on behalf of the candidate wherever he could,
and introduced a shrewd innovation...
Mimeographed "personalized" letters to farmers, fishermen,
and apple growers, promising each group special legislation.
And he placed newspaper ads denouncing Republican bosses
and promising support for woman suffrage.
Dear Mr. Roosevelt, here is your first ad.
As I have pledged you in it
I thought you might like to know casually
what kind of a mess I was getting you into.
Please wire ok, if it's all right.
Your slave and servant, Howe.
What a miserable showing some of the so-called
progressive leaders have made.
They represent nothing but sound and fury.
The minute they were up against deeds instead of words,
they quit forthwith.
From the first, Theodore Roosevelt's
third party campaign was crippled.
Many of those who had urged him to challenge Taft...
Including 5 of the 7 Republican governors...
Backed off when he became a Bull Moose.
Those who did rally to him were devoted but disorganized
and often amateurish.
Taft mostly stayed off the campaign trail,
convinced his cause was hopeless,
but he issued statements denouncing what he saw as
Roosevelt's dangerous radicalism.
"One who so lightly regards Constitutional principles,
and especially the independence of the judiciary"
was unfit for the presidency, he said, adding,
"I say this sorrowfully, but I say it
with the conviction of the truth."
Roosevelt and Wilson each traveled the country by train...
And TR sometimes delivered 30 whistle-stop speeches a day,
shadow-boxing through the caboose to maintain his energy
before stepping out onto the platform.
Again and again, he denounced his Democratic opponent
as a secret advocate of state's rights,
a false progressive masquerading as a friend of
strong federal government.
Both candidates actually agreed with Wilson's view that
"the president is at liberty in both law and conscience
to be as big as he can, "
and both men lashed out at the giant trusts and monopolies
at every stop.
But Roosevelt's "new nationalism"
called only for their regulation,
while Wilson's "new freedom" seemed to suggest that
he would actually break them up.
In my dream, I saw President McKinley
sit up in his coffin
pointing at a man in monk's attire
in whom I recognized Theodore Roosevelt.
The dead president said, "this is my murderer,
avenge my death."
On the evening of October 14,
Theodore Roosevelt was in Milwaukee
standing in his open automobile
in front of the gilpatric hotel,
waving his hat to the crowd.
A delusional German immigrant named John Schrank,
standing just 7 feet away, aimed a pistol at his chest.
He had been stalking Roosevelt for a month,
convinced the ghost of William McKinley was directing his hand.
The bullet passed through the ex-president's spectacles case
and the folded 50-page speech behind it,
smashed through his chest wall, and lodged in a splintered rib
less than a quarter of an inch from his heart.
Roosevelt dabbed at his mouth, found no blood,
and concluded his lungs were undamaged.
He insisted on delivering his speech despite his wound.
"I did not care a rap for being shot, " he later told a friend.
"It is a trade risk which every prominent man should accept as a matter of course."
Friends, I shall ask you to be
as quiet as possible.
I don't know whether you fully understand
that I have just been shot.
There is where the bullet went through.
He showed the crowd his mangled glasses case,
unbuttoned his jacket so that they could see his bloody shirt.
The bullet is in me now,
so that I cannot make a very long speech,
but I will try my best.
And now, friends, this effort to assassinate me
emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of the progressive movement.
Every good citizen...
His whole heart and soul was in this struggle,
he said.
"What we progressives e trying to do
"is to enroll rich and poor,
to stand together for the most elementary rights
of good citizenship."
"Mr. Wilson has distinctly committed himself
"to the old flintlock, muzzle-loaded doctrine
"of states' rights.
We are for the people's rights."
Pale and sometimes swaying at the podium,
he went on for more than an hour
before his aides could get him to stop
and agree to go to the hospital.
The news spread fast.
Edith Roosevelt heard it while attending the theater in New York.
He sent her a telegram urging her to stay home.
He'd been far more seriously injured falling off horses,
he said.
But she hurried west, anyway;
assurances like that had been made
about William McKinley, too.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, still recovering from typhoid,
anxiously telephoned "the New York Times" that evening
to get the latest bulletins on his condition.
The ex-president's sons hurried to his side.
Woodrow Wilson suspended his campaign.
Even Roosevelt's enemies were impressed by his courage.
No one should vote for him simply because he'd been shot,
the editor of "Collier's" wrote,
"but no amount of argument, no amount of reflection
"concentrated in many months,
"could have influenced as many Americans as were stirred
by the shot of a madman."
He was out of action and under his wife's strict care
for almost two weeks.
"This thing about ours being a campaign against boss rule
"is a fake, " Roosevelt joked to a reporter.
"I was never so boss-ruled in my life."
The former president made one more campaign appearance in Manhattan.
At the sight of him, moving slowly
and still unable to raise his right arm,
the crowd cheered for 43 minutes.
He believed he would win, he told them.
But win or lose, I am glad beyond measure
that I am one of the many who in this fight
have stood ready to spend and be spent,
pledged to fight while life lasts the great fight
for righteousness and for brotherhood
and for the welfare of mankind.
On election day, Roosevelt cast his vote
at the Oyster Bay firehouse,
then stood aside as first his chauffeur and then his valet
stepped into the same voting booth.
He waited for the returns that evening at Sagamore Hill.
Roosevelt easily beat Taft.
But his entry into the race had ensured a Democratic victory.
Woodrow Wilson won the presidency
with only 42% of the vote,
and his party gained control of both the senate and the house
for the first time in almost two decades.
There is no use disguising the fact that
the defeat at the polls is overwhelming.
I had expected defeat, but I had expected
that we would make a better showing.
I try not to think of the damage to myself personally.
He was so used to being popular and loved
and then he's suddenly a pariah.
Alice used to say that there is a melancholy
that ran through the Roosevelt family.
And he had it throughout his whole life
but he had always had a way to fight it off.
But he fell into a depression.
He just sort of closed himself in
and they had to call a family doctor.
They were very concerned about him.
He was surprised by the defeat
but also by the enormity of the defeat.
I mean, he had, he had lost by quite a bit and just hadn't expected it.
I mean, he's, Theodore Roosevelt doesn't lose.
"I cannot bear to have father beaten, "
Edith confided to her diary at Sagamore Hill.
"It makes me so choke when I think of father
almost being assassinated
and the people being such cold fishes."
He was brave about it in public
and quite sad about it in private.
Mrs. Roosevelt wrote one of the children who was away
that "father spends more time on horseback"
than I have ever known him to do."
On the same day Theodore Roosevelt was defeated,
Franklin Roosevelt was easily re-elected to the State Senate,
thanks largely to the political skill of Louis Howe.
Recovered from their illness,
Franklin and Eleanor went to Washington
for Woodrow Wilson's inauguration,
where Josephus Daniels, the new secretary of the Navy,
sought Franklin out.
Roosevelt had been an early supporter
of the new Democratic president.
He had a reputation as a reformer.
He had a life-long interest in sailing and the sea.
And, most important, he bore the country's most famous name.
"How would you like to come to Washington
as assistant secretary?" Daniels asked.
He was offering him Theodore Roosevelt's old job.
"I'd like it bully well!" Franklin said.
Oyster Bay, March 18, 1913.
I was very much pleased that you were appointed
as assistant secretary of the Navy.
It is interesting to see that you are at another place
which I myself once held.
I am sure you will enjoy yourself to the full
as assistant secretary and that
you will do capital work.
New York Democratic bosses were as glad to see
Franklin leave the State Senate for Washington
as Republican bosses had been to see Theodore Roosevelt
run for vice president 14 years before.
Franklin Roosevelt was just 31,
the youngest assistant secretary of the Navy in history,
7 years younger than Theodore Roosevelt had been
when he first sat at the same desk,
so young and so young-looking
that a dinner companion who didn't catch his name
thought him a "naughty little boy, just out of college."
He and his new boss seemed hopelessly mismatched.
The new assistant secretary had attended Groton and Harvard,
learned to sail aboard his father's yacht,
and, like his cousin Theodore,
believed in a strong defense and a big Navy.
Josephus Daniels was a newspaper editor from North Carolina
who called battleships "boats, "
seemed most concerned with banning wine
from officers' messes throughout the fleet,
and was a close ally of Wilson's secretary of state
William Jennings Bryan,
who believed strong defenses were a provocation
and promised that the United States
would never go to war on his watch.
Not long after Franklin took up his new duties,
his boss went off on an inspection tour,
leaving him in charge.
"There's a Roosevelt on the job today, "
Franklin told a reporter.
"You remember what happened the last time
a Roosevelt occupied a similar position?"
What had happened was the Spanish-American war.
Eleanor, sensitive to any feeling
among her Oyster Bay relatives
that she and Franklin might unfairly be exploiting
their link with Theodore Roosevelt, was appalled.
It was a "horrid little remark, " she told her husband.
Franklin did not apologize.
Secretary Daniels had already noted in his diary
that Franklin's "distinguished cousin TR went from
the Navy department to the presidency.
May history repeat itself, " Daniels said.
Franklin could not have agreed more.
He and Eleanor rented Theodore Roosevelt's sister Bamie's home at 1733 N Street.
TR had spent the first few nights of his presidency there
and afterwards had walked there so often
to talk things over with his shrewd sister
that the press called it the "Little White House."
It would be Franklin Roosevelt's headquarters for the next
several crowded, frenetic years.
Eleanor brought to it all the organizational skills she'd learned in Albany,
seeing to the needs of her growing household,
entertaining her uncle's old friends,
getting to know new people from all over the country,
who might be helpful to her husband's ambitions.
My calls began in the autumn of 1914
under poor auspices, for I was feeling miserable again,
as another baby was coming along.
Somehow or other I made my rounds every afternoon,
and from 10 to 30 calls were checked off on my list day after day.
Mondays, the wives of the justices of the supreme court;
Tuesdays, the members of Congress.
Franklin's official duties at the department
included procurement, budgets, and overseeing
the 65,000 civilians who worked in the Navy yards.
But he was not content with that.
"I get my fingers into about everything, " he said,
"and there's no law against it."
Louis Howe guarded the home-like outer office,
seeing to details, screening admirals and ordinary visitors
with the same brusque air, and always making sure the press
heard what his boss was doing.
When Franklin is assistant secretary of the Navy,
as Theodore was, he first is
associating with his prep school chums
and various people from his social class who he, he meets with.
And as time goes on he, he ends up spending more time
with labor leaders, ship-builders, ordinary people
who made something of themselves.
He started to realize the folks who actually got things done,
made things happen.
Franklin reveled in the trappings of his new job.
17 guns greeted him whenever he stepped aboard a ship.
He affected a Navy cape and designed an official
assistant secretary's flag for himself.
And whenever he could get away
to his summer home on Campobello Island,
he liked to come and go by destroyer,
guiding the big warship through the narrows
with his own sure hand at the wheel.
When it came time for the 10th reunion of his Harvard class,
he arranged to have it held on the deck of the USS "Palmer."
At lunch on the second day,
Franklin made his grand entrance.
He had that characteristic way of throwing his head back
and saying, "how are you, Jack?"
"How are you, waiter?"
I know I had the feeling, "hell, Frank",
"you can't put on all that stuff with us.
We knew you from the old days!"
Walter Sachs, Harvard, class of 1904.
On February 27, 1914, shortly after midday,
we started down the river of doubt into the unknown.
The lofty and matted forest
rose like a green wall on either hand.
The trees were stately and beautiful,
the looped and twisted vines hung from them like great ropes.
After Theodore Roosevelt's defeat
as the progressive party's candidate for president in 1912,
he undertook another great adventure...
An expedition into the Amazon rainforest to chart the course
of a newly discovered jungle waterway.
The expedition's leader was Candido Rodon,
the Brazilian explorer who had discovered its headwaters
and given it its name... "Rio de Duvida"... the "River of Doubt."
No one knew where it led.
Roosevelt's 24-year-old son Kermit, a trained engineer,
went with him.
The depression he'd first experienced as a child had deepened,
and like his late uncle Elliott,
he had begun drinking to obliterate it.
His mother wanted him to take care of his father;
his father hoped this dangerous mission would provide his son
with the kind of action that had always eased
his own bouts of melancholy.
The expedition was the 55-year-old Theodore Roosevelt's
"last chance to be a boy, " he said.
Instead it would nearly kill him...
And turn him into an old man.
The Roosevelt party... 22 men and 7 dugout canoes...
Would not see another human being for 48 days.
Flesh-eating piranhas prowled the river;
so did 15-foot crocodiles.
Insects swarmed so thickly Roosevelt had to wear
protective gear to write articles for "Scribner's."
Termites ate part of his pith helmet.
Rain fell in sheets.
Roosevelt noted that everything that didn't rot, rusted.
The expedition soon ran out of food...
And found it hard to replenish its supply.
The animals they expected to live off were furtive, invisible.
Unseen Indians of the Cinta Larga Tribe,
who sometimes killed and ate strangers
who dared intrude into their forest,
stalked the party... and shot one of the expedition's dogs full of arrows.
These Cinta Larga watched
Roosevelt and his men throughout this trip.
They would sometimes hear them next to them;
they never saw them.
They would sometimes come across their villages
even with smoke still rising out of fires
that they had just put out.
They would sometimes see footprints.
Their dogs sensed them all the time.
They were always barking at the woods.
And they lived in terror.
5 out of 7 dugout canoes were lost
in the fast-moving water.
New ones had to be carved from hollowed trees
and hauled by land around rapids and waterfalls.
One man was swept away by a torrent.
Roosevelt and Kermit both contracted malaria.
Things got steadily worse.
Two of their canoes were trapped in the water.
And Roosevelt, being Roosevelt,
even though he's already ill with malaria,
he charges right into the river
to try to free some of these trapped canoes.
And he slips and gashes his leg.
He immediately knows that he's in trouble.
He very quickly develops an infection.
And he gets to a point where he can't lift his head off a cot.
The expedition struggled on.
They came to a set of rapids.
It was a series of 6 falls, the final of which was 30 feet.
And Colonel Rondon, who had spent
half of his life in the rainforest, said,
"there's no way we can get through these.
We're going to have to leave our canoes
and strike out into the rainforest.
Every man for himself."
And Roosevelt couldn't even sit up, much less walk,
much less fight his way through this rainforest.
And so he calls for his son and he says, "get out."
I will stay here."
The ex-president of the United States of America
intended to swallow a lethal dose of the morphine
he always carried with him into the wilderness.
He did not want to be a burden.
It wasn't a decision built of fear,
and it wasn't a dramatic thing.
It was simply "this is the right thing to do"
and I'm going to do it."
But Kermit would not hear of it.
He was, after all, a Roosevelt, too.
He would sooner have died himself
than leave his father behind, alive or dead.
I saw that if I did end my life,
that would only make it more sure
that Kermit would not get out.
For I knew he would not abandon me,
but would insist on bringing my body out, too.
That, of course, would have been impossible.
So there was only one thing for me to do,
and that was to come out myself.
Kermit was terrified.
He kept a diary and every day it's, "I'm worried about father."
"I'm worried about father.
We have to get father out."
Kermit's weeks of working alongside
the expedition's porters and paddlers paid off.
He used his engineering skill to lower the dugouts
down the steep canyon walls,
and kept his men moving forward.
But there was still more trouble.
A Porter shot and killed a companion and fled into the forest.
A deep gorge and an apparently impassable series of new rapids
stretched on ahead.
Theodore was helpless now, forced to be paddled along
beneath a makeshift tent.
His fever rose to 104.
He grew delirious, reciting the same few lines of poetry
"In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
a stately pleasure-dome decree..."
The expedition's doctor cut open his leg to save his life.
Roosevelt endured the surgery without anesthetic.
Under Kermit's command, the party staggered on.
Finally, on April 26,
after a month and a half in the wilderness,
they came upon a 6-man relief party
that had been sent to help them out of the rainforest.
Here's Roosevelt so ill,
and he looks up and he sees on this bank the Brazilian flag
and the flag of the United States of America.
And he knows that they're gonna be ok, that they're saved.
The River of Doubt, which turned out to be almost
half as long as the Rhine, was renamed "Rio Roosevelt."
New Yorkers gave Roosevelt another big welcome when he returned home,
but friends were shocked by his appearance.
He had lost 55 pounds... roughly a quarter of his weight...
Could barely make himself heard when speaking,
and leaned on a cane he bravely called "my big stick."
As he limped down the companionway,
the impression was strong that the colonel had endured
the greatest hardships of his life.
"New York Sun."
It now seemed likely that his public life
really had come to an end.
August 1, 1914.
As I am writing, a great black tornado
trembles on the edge of Europe
and the whole question of peace and war
trembles in the balance.
It is not a good thing for a country to have
a professional yodeler, a human trombone
like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state,
nor a college president like Mr. Wilson as head of the nation,
with a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people
and no real knowledge or wisdom
concerning internal and international affairs.
In early August of 1914,
5 weeks after the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo,
Germany declared war on Russia and France
and sent troops across the Belgian border.
Britain then declared war on Germany.
Russia then went to war against the Austro-Hungarian empire.
By the end of the year, almost all of Europe and part of Asia
were engulfed in what the world would call the Great War.
Eleanor was at Campobello with the children.
A complete smash-up is inevitable.
Mr. Daniels totally fails to grasp the situation.
I'm alive and well and keen about everything,
running the real work, though Josephus is here!
He is bewildered by it all, very sweet but very sad.
I am not surprised at what you say
about Mr. Daniels
for one could expect little else.
To understand the present gigantic conflict,
one must have at least a glimmering of understanding
of foreign nations and their histories.
I can see you managing everything while J.D.
Wrings his hands in horror.
President Wilson called for
"strict and impartial neutrality, " and insisted that
strengthening American armed forces would only serve
to provoke the belligerents.
The British fleet blockaded Germany to choke off armaments.
The Germane... in retaliation... Unleashed submarines and warned
they would sink enemy vessels on sight.
All of the Roosevelts sided with england and her allies
from the moment the first gun was fired.
"Even I long to go over into the thick of it
and right the wrong, " Franklin told an old British friend.
"England's course has been magnificent...
If that German fleet would only come out and fight!"
But as an official in the Wilson administration,
Franklin had to keep such thoughts to himself.
Theodore Roosevelt did not.
More and more I come to the view
that in a really tremendous world struggle,
with a great moral issue involved,
neutrality does not serve righteousness;
for to be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.
In the spring of 1915, as the war intensified,
Theodore Roosevelt found himself in a Syracuse courtroom...
On trial for libel.
In a recent speech, he'd said that when it came down to
a struggle between "popular rights
and corrupt and machine-ruled government"
the interests of the Republican and Democratic
bosses of New York were "fundamentally identical."
The Republican boss, William Barnes, immediately sued.
Roosevelt cast about among old friends and allies
for those willing to testify to the truth of his charge.
Most backed away, unwilling to risk the wrath
of one boss or the other.
Franklin was different.
During the 1911 senate battle over Billy Sheehan,
he'd seen collusion between the bosses of both parties firsthand
and was more than willing to say so in court
on behalf of the man who continued to be his hero.
When a lawyer asked Franklin what relation he was
to the former president, he grinned.
"Fifth cousin by blood, " he said proudly, "and nephew by law!"
"I shall never forget the capital way
in which you gave your testimony, "
the ex-president told Franklin afterwards.
Theodore Roosevelt himself was such a voluble,
intimidating witness in his own defense
that the plaintiff's lawyer begged the judge
to make the ex-president "confine himself to words
and not answer with his whole body."
Theodore Roosevelt was asleep in his Syracuse hotel room
on the night of may 7 when the telephone rang.
A newspaperman was calling.
A German submarine had sunk
the British passenger ship "lusitania" off the coast of Ireland.
More than 1,100 men, women, and children had drowned,
including 128 American citizens.
Did Roosevelt have a comment?
The trial was still on.
Two German-Americans sat on the jury that would decide his fate.
But Roosevelt could not keep from speaking out.
This represents not merely piracy,
but piracy on a vaster scale of murder
than the old-time pirates ever practiced.
It seems inconceivable that we can refrain
from taking action in this matter,
for we owe it not only to humanity
but to our own national self-respect.
It took the jurors two days, but in the end,
all 12 of them exonerated Roosevelt,
who went right back on the attack.
There is a chance of our going to war,
but I don't think it is very much of a chance.
Wilson and Bryan are cordially supported
by all the hyphenated Americans,
by the solid flub-dub and pacifist vote.
Every soft creature, every coward and weakling,
every man who can't look more than 6 inches ahead,
every man whose God is money, or pleasure, or ease
is enthusiastically in favor of Wilson;
and at present the good citizens, as a whole,
are puzzled and don't understand the situation.
It was excessive.
But it also was visceral in the sense that
he didn't like the presbyterian moralist,
just struck Teddy Roosevelt as, I think, part of the effeminacy
that he associated with a commercial Republic.
Wilson declared, "there is such a thing
as being too proud to fight"
He complained again and again about Secretary Daniels being
that further infuriated Theodore Roosevelt.
But the president also agreed to double the defense budget
in the interest of what Wilson now called "preparedness."
Theodore Roosevelt called it "half-preparedness."
Meanwhile, Franklin organized a 50,000-man naval reserve,
relentlessly drove shipyards to greater efforts,
and laid the keels of new battleships,
including one being built in the Brooklyn Navy yard,
the USS "Arizona."
He complained again and again about secretary Daniels being
"too damned slow for words"...
And surreptitiously slipped damaging information
about his boss and the administration's defense efforts
to the ranking Republican
on the house military affairs committee.
If the public ever turned on the administration for having been
too slow in preparing for war,
he was determined he would not be blamed.
And he shared his cousin Theodore's conviction
that the United States not only would... but should...
Hyde Park was very definitely
my most favorite place in life.
Hyde Park was home and the only place I ever thought
was completely home.
Anna Roosevelt.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had houses
in New York City and Washington, D.C.
And on Campobello Island.
But for their 4 children... Anna, James, Elliott,
and the second Franklin Jr...
It was their grandmother's home at Hyde Park that represented
a sanctuary from their parents' increasingly turbulent world.
In 1915, Sara Delano Roosevelt greatly expanded Springwood
to accommodate them and the nurses and maids
that traveled with them.
The house now included so many bedrooms
she sometimes called it "our hotel."
The renovated first floor, modeled after
the country houses of the Roosevelts'
aristocratic friends in england,
was meant to be a showcase for her son and his collections...
His stuffed birds; His naval prints and books;
and albums filled with stamps.
When he was there, Franklin acted just as his own father had:
He rode with his children, swam and sledded,
and took them ice boating on the Hudson.
But his visits with the family were always brief.
I do so wish
the holiday had been longer and less interrupted
while it lasted.
I felt Tuesday as if I was really getting
back to earth again... and I know it is hard for us both
to lead this kind of life...
But it is a little like a drug habit...
Almost impossible to stop.
Eleanor liked the new Springwood at first.
It was "very home-like and for the chicks, " she told a friend,
"ideal."
But it remained her mother-in-law's home,
she remembered many years later, and, "I was only a visitor."
Sara Delano Roosevelt
was a very great mother and a very tough mother-in-law.
And part of the reason we remember her as a dragon,
she's often portrayed as a dragon,
is that her daughter-in-law, in the end,
came to think of her as a dragon.
Sara ran everything.
She called her grandchildren "our children."
She weighed them, dressed them,
saw to their manners, showered them with gifts...
And offered what Anna remembered as
"consistent, warm, spontaneous love"...
The kind of love Eleanor had never known when she was a girl
and now found hard to provide to her own children.
Up to a point it is good for us to know that
there are people in the world who will give us love
and unquestioned loyalty.
I doubt, However, if it is good for us
to feel assured of this devotion
without the accompanying obligation of having to justify
this devotion by our behavior.
Sara had firm views
about her daughter-in-law, as well.
"If you'd just run your comb through your hair, dear, "
she once told Eleanor in front of dinner guests,
"you'd look so much nicer."
On March 11, 1916, Eleanor gave birth
to John Aspinwall Roosevelt.
She had now borne 6 children, 5 of whom had lived.
There would be no more. She was 31 years old.
The decade during which, she said,
"I was always just getting over a baby or about to have another" was over.
She was ready to resume a life of her own,
to find a new kind of fulfillment, on her own terms.
On June 14, 1916, with the nominating conventions
just weeks away, President Wilson led a preparedness parade
up Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House...
And made sure that Theodore Roosevelt's
young Democratic cousin
was marching with him.
The Navy department made an excellent showing
in the parade, and when I passed the reviewing stand
I was sent for to join the president in the stand
and spend the next 4 hours there!
It would be a mistake
to re-nominate me in 1916
unless the country has in its mood
something of the heroic... Unless it feels not only
devotion to ideals but the purpose to realize
those ideals in action.
Theodore Roosevelt hoped somehow to obtain
both the progressive and the Republican
presidential nominations that year.
But the old guard of his old party
had not forgiven him for 1912.
And while most Americans
sympathized with Britain and France
and now supported preparedness,
they still remained reluctant to get involved in a far-away war.
The Republicans chose instead the austere, mildly progressive
supreme court justice Charles Evans Hughes.
Roosevelt privately called him "the bearded lady."
But when Roosevelt's name was placed in nomination
at the progressive party convention in June,
he sent a telegram from Sagamore Hill declining the honor
and urging his followers to abandon their new party
and vote Republican.
The delegates were stunned.
When the telegram was read, for a moment,
there was silence.
Then there was a roar of rage.
It was the cry of a broken heart
such as no convention ever had uttered in this land before.
I had tears in my eyes.
I saw hundreds of men tear
the Roosevelt picture or the Roosevelt badge
from their coats, and throw it on the floor.
William Allen White.
In November, Wilson won a narrow victory
on the slogan, "he kept us out of war."
"We are passing through a streak of yellow in our national life, "
Roosevelt told his sister.
The progressive party disintegrated without its hero.
Some members returned to the Republicans;
some became Democrats.
A number of the social and economic reforms
Roosevelt and the progressives had championed
had already become law thanks to Woodrow Wilson's
shrewd political skills...
A new antitrust statute, workmen's compensation,
a ban on most child labor, a federal reserve board
and federal trade commission.
But making a reality of other planks
in the old progressive platform
would have to wait for another time... and another Roosevelt.
Let us dare to look the truth in the face.
There is no question about "going to war."
Germany is already at war with us.
The only question for us to decide
is whether we shall make war nobly or ignobly.
In Europe, the war on the Western front dragged on.
New machines of war made old tactics obsolete.
Millions died.
The battle lines had been frozen for nearly 3 years now,
along a line that stretched 450 Miles
from Belgium to Switzerland.
In early 1917, in an attempt to strangle British supply lines
and break the deadlock,
Germany began waging unrestricted submarine warfare
on all vessels... including American merchant ships.
Wilson severed relations with Germany.
Then, an intercepted German telegram
to the Mexican president promised that
in exchange for help in the event of war
with the United States,
Texas, Arizona, and new Mexico would be returned to Mexico.
Wilson still seemed reluctant to take further action.
"My God, why doesn't he do something?"
Theodore Roosevelt said.
"If he does not go to war with Germany now,
I shall skin him alive."
And I think he felt that
Woodrow Wilson flinching from the great test of our time,
world war I, was unworthy of our energetic country.
War is good for us.
This is a side of Mr. Roosevelt
that's not attractive but really there.
On the evening of March 9, 1917...
Just 4 days after Wilson's second inauguration...
Franklin met secretly in a private room
at the metropolitan club in Manhattan
with 9 of the president's most important
interventionist opponents... Including his lifelong hero,
Theodore Roosevelt.
Some wanted to praise Wilson's recent actions in the hope that
it would stiffen his spine,
but the ex-president called for keeping up
a relentless all-out attack.
In his diary, Franklin noted, "I backed TR's theory."
In the ongoing struggle between
the president he was supposed to serve
and the ex-president he venerated,
Franklin seemed to have made his choice.
9 days later, the germane made that choice irrelevant.
On March 18, they torpedoed 3 American merchant ships.
Wilson polled his cabinet as to what he should do.
All 10 members voted for war.
Josephus Daniels cast his vote with tears in his eyes.
On the evening of April 2, 1917,
Woodrow Wilson finally asked Congress
for a declaration of war.
It is a fearful thing to lead
this most peaceful people
into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars.
But the right is more precious than peace,
and we shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts.
Franklin sat next to secretary Daniels
on the house floor.
Eleanor was in the gallery, listening "breathlessly, "
she remembered, and then "returned home still half-dazed
by the sense of impending change."
Franklin, eager to do his part
and mindful always of Theodore Roosevelt's example,
volunteered to serve overseas.
President Wilson told him to stay where he was.
"Neither you nor I nor Franklin Roosevelt, "
Wilson told Josephus Daniels,
"has the right to select the place of service
to which our country has assigned us."
Just as the United States entered the war,
Franklin and Eleanor were living in a house in Washington.
And their two youngest boys were asleep
on the fourth floor of the house
when suddenly the door burst open and Theodore Roosevelt,
whom they had barely met,
appeared, grabbed one under each arm,
said, "it's far too early for you to be in bed, "
it was about midnight,
and thundered down 4 flights of stairs
with these terrified children under his arms and then,
plunked them on the floor and then spent an hour or so
orating about hi..., the role
that he hoped to play in the war
while they stood and watched him
and tried to figure out who this man was.
The former president was in town
to see the current one and to try... like Franklin...
To get into the war.
He called at the White House the next day.
All his previous criticism was now "dust in a windy street, "
he assured Wilson.
All he wanted to do was help.
The allies were desperate.
It would take time to build and train an American army.
He was sure he could raise a division of volunteers
virtually overnight, lead it into battle,
and inspire the allies to hold on.
"He is a great big boy, " Wilson told an aide
after Roosevelt had left.
"There is a sweetness about him.
You can't resist the man."
But the president still had the secretary of war turn him down.
Theodore Roosevelt was half-blind, in bad health,
out of touch with military developments, and an amateur.
"The business now at hand, " Wilson said later,
"is undramatic, practical, and of scientific
definitiveness and precision."
Roosevelt was deeply wounded.
"This is a very exclusive war, " he told a friend,
"and I have been blackballed by the committee on admissions."
I think that's when it all ended for him.
First of all, the first World War
was not a heroic war anymore.
The old idea of we're all crusaders, cavaliers,
this is romantic and we're charging in on our horses,
all over.
Tanks, machine guns, airplanes, poison gas, it's not his world.
His world has ended.
And he gets very old very rapidly.
You look at the photographs of him or the old film clips,
he's old, old man as if he's a high intensity light bulb
that burned out quickly.
But if he could not fight, his 4 sons could,
and one by one, he secured places for them
that would nudge them as close as possible to danger.
"I should be ashamed of my sons if they shirked war, " he wrote,
"just as I should be ashamed of my daughters
if they shirked motherhood."
I have always explained to my 4 sons that if
there is a war during their lifetime,
I wish them to be in a position to explain to their children
why they did go to it, and not why they did not go to it.
The war was my emancipation and education.
Instead of making social calls, I found myself spending
3 days a week in a canteen down at the rail road yards,
one afternoon a week
distributing free work for the Navy league,
two days a week visiting the naval hospital,
and contributing whatever time I had left
to the Navy red cross and the Navy relief society.
I loved it. I simply ate it up.
The war liberated all of what Eleanor called
her "executive ability."
In order to undertake the war work which consumed her,
she had to organize her busy household
to function without her.
She rose often at 5 in the morning,
and spent 12 hours without a break
at the union station red cross canteen
making coffee and jam sandwiches
for the dough boys passing through.
Sometimes, I wondered if I could
live that way another day.
Strength came, However,
with the thought of Europe and a little sleep,
you could always begin a new day.
One day, the red cross asked Eleanor
to inspect St. Elizabeth's hospital, a mental facility
filled with sailors and marines
suffering in the aftermath of battle.
The prospect terrified her.
Her experiences with her alcoholic father and uncles
made her frightened of anyone without what she called
"the power of self-control."
She never forgot the sound of the door locking behind her
or the sight of the dark ward filled with shattered men,
some chained to their beds, muttering, staring.
They continued to frighten her but she came back to see them,
week after week, and lobbied the government
and raised private funds to improve the conditions
under which they lived.
"You must do what you think you cannot do, " she wrote.
She would keep doing that all her life.
Dear Rosy was in town yesterday
and says they all feel quite upset
at your appearance at the Tammany club
as your speaking strengthens Tammany.
Uncle Warren says one of the papers
has pictures of you and Murphy side by side.
All this rather upsets me, I confess.
Mama.
On July 4, 1917,
Franklin addressed the annual Tammany Hall celebration in New York.
He assured his mother afterwards
it had been a "purely patriotic" event,
part of the larger war effort.
In fact, it was a signal to Boss Murphy
and the big-city Democrats that once the fighting ended,
he would no longer be their enemy.
To succeed in post-war politics,
he would need the bosses he had once fought so hard.
Meanwhile, he did all he could
to strengthen and speed up the Navy.
Daniels over-ruled his plan
to build hundreds of small craft to patrol American harbors
that were not under any real threat...
"I fear buying a lot of junk, " he wrote...
But when the secretary also opposed a far grander scheme
to eliminate the submarine menace
by laying half a million nets and mines
between Scotland and Norway,
he went over his head to the president himself
to win approval.
71,000 mines would be put in place before the war ended.
"Chicago Post."
Mr. Daniels has one, only one,
virile-minded, hard-fisted, civilian assistant.
Uncuriously enough, his name is Roosevelt.
Privately, Franklin continued to be
scornful of his slow-moving boss
and never abandoned hope of supplanting him as secretary,
but he also learned lessons from Daniels
that would prove essential to him later...
How to work his will with Congress
and how to keep control out of the hands
of ambitious military men who assumed
they knew better than civilians.
FDR took from the first World War
a great sense of the bureaucratic con.
He always understood where people were
hiding money in budgets or why certain things wouldn't happen
because he had once hidden money in budgets and not done things,
that, that his superiors wanted.
We forget sometimes how important Woodrow Wilson
and the legacy of Wilson was to Roosevelt's generation.
He spent 7 years next door to Wilson's White House.
Wilson was hugely important to him
and he learned from Wilson's mistakes,
but also in serving that administration,
he came to understand politics in a very practical level.
In the summer of 1918,
Roosevelt finally persuaded his chief
to let him sail for Europe on an inspection tour.
If Franklin Roosevelt could not fight,
at least he could see the fighting for himself.
The good, old ocean is so absolutely normal...
Just as it has always been... Sometimes tumbling about
and throwing spray like this morning...
Sometimes gently lolling about with occasional points of light
like tonight... but always something known...
An old friend of moods and power.
But now, though the ocean looks unchanged,
the doubled number on lookout shows that even here
the hand of the hun false God is reaching out to defy nature,
that 10 Miles ahead of this floating city of souls
a torpedo may be waiting to start on its quick run;
that we can never get our good, old ocean back again
until that God and the people who have set him up
are utterly cut down and purged.
The enemy torpedo he feared never materialized.
But an enemy submarine was spotted several miles away...
And over the years, in Roosevelt's retelling,
the American destroyer and the German submarine
grew closer and closer until he was claiming
it had come up first on one side of his ship and then the other.
Dearest Ted, you and your brothers
are playing your parts in the greatest of
the world's great days,
and what man of gallant spirit does not envy you?
You are having your crowded hours of glorious life;
you have seized the great chance,
as it was seized by those who fought
at Gettysburg and Waterloo,
and Agincourt and Arbela and Marathon.
He was at Sagamore Hill doing routine correspondence
when Phil Thompson of the Associated Press
came to see him on July 16, 1918.
And Thompson was a friend of Roosevelt's, and he said,
"The New York Sun" has just received a telegram.
Part of it's been censored but it says,
"watch Oyster Bay for" and then it's blank.
When Roosevelt saw that telegram he said,
"one of my boys is in trouble."
Two of them had already been in trouble.
First, Archie's knee and elbow
had been shattered by German shells,
and he had been awarded the French Croix de Guerre.
Ted had been gassed leading his men
on the front lines in one battle
and been awarded the silver star
for his gallantry in another.
Kermit was unhurt, but he had survived several close calls
fighting with the British army in Mesopotamia.
He, too, had been decorated for his bravery.
"I wish to heaven that it was my worthless, old body
that was exposed to the danger in the place of my sons, "
their father had told a friend.
"But I would not have them elsewhere
for anything in the world."
Quentin, the youngest and perhaps
the best-loved of the Roosevelt children,
had joined the army's fledgling air service.
He was engaged to Miss Flora Payne Whitney,
but forbidden by her parents to marry until the war was over.
When a visitor told Quentin how proud the country was
to see all the Roosevelt sons in uniform, he just grinned.
"Well, " he said, "you know it's rather up to us
to practice what father preaches."
His fellow flyers in the 95th "kicking mule" aero squadron
called Quentin the "go and get 'em man"
because of his eagerness for combat.
On July 5, 1918, he'd survived his first dogfight.
"You get so excited that you forget everything
except getting the other fellow, " he wrote to his mother.
On the 10th, he'd shot down a German plane.
"The last of the lion's brood has been blooded!"
His proud father said when he heard the news.
On the 14th, Quentin had gone up again with his comrades.
A stiff wind blew them dangerously deep into Germany.
An enemy formation rose to meet them.
14 planes mixed in a "general melee, "
one American pilot remembered,
"rolling and circling and diving
with the continuous tat, tat, tat, tat of the machine guns."
The Americans flew separately back to their base.
Bullets had riddled his cockpit.
His plane plunged into a rutted field.
The next morning at dawn,
Phil Thompson, his friend from the associated press,
is back with the confirming telegram.
And Roosevelt looked at it and he walked in towards the house
and he said, "how am I going to tell Edith?"
"How will I, how will I break this news to Edith?"
And so he did and they issued a statement
about how proud they were that their son
had gotten to the front and had seen action
and had done his national service.
When the Roosevelts lived in the White House,
those children were in the news all the time,
and Quentin was, I think, about 4
when his father became president.
And he was really in a large sense the country's little boy.
So when he died, this was front-page news
across the country.
There was a town in Pennsylvania,
which had been named Bismarck,
that changed its name to Quentin.
To feel that one has inspired a boy to conduct
that has resulted in his death
has a pretty serious side for a father...
And at the same time I would not have cared for my boys
and they would not have cared for me
if our relations had not been just along that line.
Roosevelt remained stoical in public,
but his coachman came upon him in the stable,
his face buried in the mane of his son's pony, murmuring,
"poor quentyquee, poor quentyquee."
A German soldier photographed Quentin's corpse.
Copies of the picture made their way to all the Roosevelts.
"Two bullet holes in the head, " Eleanor Roosevelt told a friend,
"so he did not suffer and it is a glorious way to die."
A few weeks later, she saw her uncle at a family gathering.
He took her aside.
She was still his favorite niece
and he had no wish ever to wound her.
But, he said, it was her duty to persuade her husband to enlist
and get to the front in uniform before this war ended.
Eleanor was annoyed; Only Franklin
could make such a decision and President Wilson himself
had told him to stay at his post.
Meanwhile, overseas on his inspection tour,
her husband had been having the time of his life.
In London, Roosevelt bought himself
3 pairs of silk pajamas,
praised the heroism of the men he called "my" marines
at the Battle of Belleau Wood,
chatted with king George V, who told him
he'd "never seen a German gentleman"...
And had a brief encounter with the man with whom
he would one day direct a far bigger war.
It was Monday, July 29, 1918
at Gray's Inn in London.
There's a great dinner of the war ministers.
Fdr was assistant secretary of the Navy.
Winston Churchill was there
and Churchill was quite grumpy about being there.
And to FDR's everlasting chagrin,
Churchill didn't remember him at all.
Which is possibly for a politician
the single worst thing that can happen to you.
He made no impression whatever.
In France, Franklin visited his wounded cousins
Ted and Archie,
accompanied a drunken Congressional delegation
to the folies-bergere,
and tirelessly toured the battlefields
in a special costume he'd designed for himself.
At one battered village, he was allowed
to fire an artillery shell into the German lines, 7 Miles away.
And at a crossroads called "the angle of death, "
he stood in the open snapping photographs long enough
for the germane to call in artillery.
He and his party had to drive off so fast
he left his suitcase behind.
"The more I think of it, " he wrote Eleanor, "the more I feel
that being only 36 my place is not at a Washington desk,
even a Navy desk.
I know you will understand."
He now hoped to get himself a Navy commission
and join a naval battery on the Western front.
But first he traveled to Scotland
to inspect the north sea mines
and spent a couple of days salmon-fishing in a cold rain
before sailing home.
Once aboard the USS "Leviathan, "
he collapsed in his cabin with double pneumonia.
When the ship docked in New York,
orderlies had to carry him ashore.
An ambulance brought him to his mother's house.
He was carried to a guest room upstairs.
Eleanor unpacked her husband's luggage
and came upon a bundle of letters tied with a string.
They were addressed to him and written by
her own one-time Social Secretary Lucy Mercer.
At that moment, she remembered later,
"the bottom fell out of my own particular world, "
and she was forced, she said,
to "face myself, my surroundings",
my world, honestly for the first time."
Lucy was beautiful, cultured, soft-spoken,
6 years younger than Eleanor.
She came from an old Catholic family from Maryland
that had fallen on hard times.
Bamie Roosevelt had recommended her
not long after the young Roosevelts arrived in Washington
5 years before,
and Eleanor had been pleased with the way she had helped
steer her through the shoals of society in the nation's capital.
Lucy Mercer had been part of the Roosevelt household for 3 years.
The children liked her. So did Sara.
"She is so sweet and attractive, " she wrote,
"and she loves you, Eleanor."
But she also came to love Franklin...
"His ringing laugh, " Lucy remembered,
"all the ridiculous things he used to say...
His extraordinarily beautiful head."
Lucy Mercer was a beautiful, sweet-natured,
nice woman who adored the husband of her employer.
She adored Franklin.
And he had a deep need to find substitutes
for the kind of unquestioning adoration
that his mother had given him.
And Lucy Mercer was that person.
She was younger than he.
She thought everything he did was marvelous.
He was sweet to her.
And, she fell in love with him
and he fell in love with her.
When Eleanor and the children
were away at Campobello,
Lucy and Franklin had spent time together,
dining at the homes of discreet friends,
sailing and picnicking along the potomac.
Alice Roosevelt long worth,
Theodore Roosevelt's oldest daughter,
had seen them driving around Washington together
and teased Franklin about miss Mercer.
Rumors may have reached Eleanor.
She had let her secretary go in June of 1917,
but within two weeks Lucy had enlisted in the Navy,
and was conveniently assigned to Franklin's office
at the Navy department.
At Campobello that summer, Eleanor worried about
where her husband was and what he was up to.
In October, Franklin's boss Josephus Daniels
dismissed Miss Mercer from the service.
The threat to the Roosevelt marriage
seemed to have been lifted.
But now, more than a year later,
it was clear that Lucy Mercer
was still an important part of her husband's life.
I'm sure he regretted hurting his wife.
But I think Franklin Roosevelt didn't dwell very much
on the impact he had on people.
He, he was in many ways
a very selfish, a very self-centered person.
Lucy's relationship with Franklin
confirmed every fear Eleanor Roosevelt
had ever harbored about herself:
No one would ever love her for long.
She offered her husband his "freedom."
His mother was said to have told her son
she would not stand in his way
if he wanted to leave his wife and 5 children...
But she also would not provide him with another penny,
would make sure he did not inherit his beloved Springwood.
Louis Howe weighed in, too:
A divorce, he said, would end Franklin's political career.
Franklin promised never to see Lucy Mercer again.
Eleanor agreed to remain with him.
But the experience taught her,
she would write many years later,
"that practically no one is entirely bad or entirely good,
that a man must be what he is."
Eleanor Roosevelt never forgave
or forgot what he had done.
She resented it really all her life.
She told all of her intimate friends about it.
It was the sort of almost the brand of
your intimacy with Mrs. Roosevelt
that she would tell you the story of his betrayal
and how she had dealt with it.
I think she was extremely bitter about it.
Now, having said that, their marriage went on.
And it would be one of the great partnerships
in the history of the world, let alone the United States.
At 11:00 in the morning on November 11, 1918,
the great war ended in an allied victory.
"The feeling of relief and thankfulness
was beyond description, " Eleanor wrote.
New York. November 19, 1918.
Well, we have seen the mighty days...
Have lived through the most tremendous tragedy
in the history of civilization.
In spite of our pacifists and sentimentalists
and tricky politicians,
America did finally play a real part in the war
and played it manfully.
Ted and Kermit have taken part in the last fighting,
and I believe they are now walking toward the rhine.
Archie, pretty badly crippled, is back with us.
This is Quentin's birthday.
I think that Theodore Roosevelt
was in a lot of pain through much of his life,
physical pain, emotional loss, suffering from emotional loss.
And yes, he wanted to be courageous in the face of pain,
but he also didn't want to inflict that pain on us,
on his audience.
That was for him to have to deal with.
And he'd known it since childhood, all his life.
And he'd known loss all his life.
And this brevity of life is painful for him to face.
Dear Ted, father was in your old nursery
and loved the view, and as it got dusk
he watched the dancing of waves
and spoke of the happiness of being home,
and made little plans for me.
I think he had made up his mind
that he would have to suffer for some time to come
and with high courage had adjusted himself to bear it.
He was very sweet all day.
Since Quentin was killed he has been sad.
Only Ethel's little girl had the power to make him merry.
On the evening of January 5, 1919,
Theodore Roosevelt sat reading by the fire
in his children's empty nursery.
He'd recently been hospitalized for inflammatory rheumatism;
was still weak, weary, oddly short of breath.
But he'd long since made his peace with the Republican party
and was certain that 1920 would bring him back to power at last.
Meanwhile, he needed rest.
As he closed his book and got ready for bed that evening,
he said to Edith, "I wonder if you will ever know"
how I love Sagamore Hill."
He never woke up.
He was just 60 years old.
"The old lion is dead."
"I have never known another person so vital, "
the editor William Allen White wrote,
"nor another man so dear."
"Death had to take him sleeping, "
Vice President Thomas Marshall told the press,
"for if Roosevelt had been awake,
there would have been a fight."
Two days later, as pallbearers prepared to carry his coffin
to a hilltop grave at Oyster Bay,
a New York police captain said to Roosevelt's sister Corinne,
"do you remember the fun of him?
It was not only that he was a great man,
but, there was such fun in being led by him."
My sorrow is so keen for the young who die
that the edge of my grief is blunted
when death comes to the old, of my own generation;
for in the nature of things we must soon die anyhow...
And we have warmed both hands before the fire of life.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had been unable
to attend the funeral.
They were at sea, on their way to Europe.
He was going back to dismantle naval installations.
She insisted she go along, too, to look after him, she said.
His health was still fragile.
So was their marriage.
Theodore Roosevelt's death stunned them both.
He had been Franklin's hero all his life...
"The greatest man I ever knew, " he said.
He had been a hero to Eleanor, too...
And a vivid link to her beloved father.
But Theodore Roosevelt's death
was about to provide Franklin Roosevelt
with a great opportunity.
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