A Young Man Enamored of Naval Power

 

Author John T. Flynn brings to question the sort of person Americans raise to high leadership positions, and what little qualifications those people may possess. FDR was a dangerous man to raise to the presidency, and by 1935 was using the communist-infiltrated American labor unions and their immense financial power to control the Democratic party and the federal government.  Flynn was being generous to FDR is stating that he did not realize “the peril to which he and the labor leaders were exposing both the unions and the country.” He further stated that “Roosevelt, through a combination of events and influences, fell deeper and deeper into the toils of various revolutionary operators, not because he was interested in revolution but because he was interested in votes.”

--Bernhard Thuersam

A Young Man Enamored of Naval Power:

“At Columbia, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s studies took about the same course as his journey through college. He did not seem interested – rather bored. He studied but little and was never able to graduate. He was admitted to the bar later by taking a bar examination without his degree.  

His career as a lawyer was more or less casual.  He got a place in the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn [a firm which would usually] select their young law clerks from among the honor men in the leading Eastern law schools. Roosevelt was not an honor student, didn’t even graduate. But his family influence was sufficient to replace these qualifications. 

What practice he did was in admiralty law.  And always he continued to buy naval pictures – engravings of old battleships and books on naval history. He was never a reader of books. He did not give much of his time to the reading or study of history or the history of government. Such reading as he did was rather in the field of military and particularly naval history. But it would be a mistake to describe him as a student of these things.  It was a hobby, a form of pleasure and not a field of study or research.

In New York City and State one of the master politicians of our history was towing the Democratic party, with Tammany [Hall] as his tractor. This was Charles Murphy….[who] skillfully managed [the Democratic ticket in New York]…and young twenty-eight year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt was swept into the State Senate [in 1910] on the crest of that wave. 

I think we shall be fair to Mr. Roosevelt if we say at this point that there was no special reason why he should be named to the Senate. He had taken no part in politics. He had no career of any sort. He ran for reelection in 1912 and, in that great Democratic year, was re-elected. 

He became enthusiastic for [Woodrow] Wilson and made an effort to organize a Democratic movement for him in New York States. He had been a delegate from his district to the Baltimore convention which nominated Wilson [for president] and there had met Josephus Daniels and other national leaders.

[Roosevelt] belonged to that element in New York that might be called the “social welfare” school. It was made up largely of wealthy people who were interested in doing something for the poor with private funds. It was based, of course, very solidly upon the complete defense of wealth accompanied by a generous sense of obligation to use that wealth in the public good.

Politics afforded that easy-going mingling with people, talking, going to meetings, holding conferences, sitting around, making friends, having one’s say, without digging or that severe discipline essential in the professions or business. When Roosevelt got to Washington, what he wanted was offered to him. Josephus Daniels had been selected by Wilson as secretary of the navy. Daniels had asked Wilson if he would approve the appointment of young Roosevelt as assistant secretary….Wilson liked the idea of a Democratic Roosevelt in his administration. 

The day of the inauguration Daniels offered the post to Roosevelt – asked him if he would like it. “Why I would like it!” rhapsodized Roosevelt. “I’d rather have that place than any other in public life….All my life I have been crazy about the navy.”

The Assistant Secretary of the Navy is a very important person. One wonders what training or experience this young man had had that supported his claim for this post. He had never had any administrative experience whatever. He had literally no career outside a brief political one in the State legislature.  His sole work in private life had been as a law clerk….for a couple of years, to which job he devoted but little of his time and that without interest. He had no experience around the navy. He had merely collected a lot of pictures of battleships and some books on the navy. 

He was chosen, of course, because of two utterly hostile forces – Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt – the Wilson tide that washed the Democrats into power; the Roosevelt name in New York that invested this untried youth with a special value to the Democrats. 

As soon as he found himself in that [Navy] office he did, of course, precisely what you would expect of the youth who wanted to go to Annapolis, who collected naval battle scenes, worshipped warships. The world was in profound peace. But before he was on the job a month he began to clamor for a big navy.  Roosevelt became almost the only exponent of a big navy in the [Wilson] administration. Secretary Daniels was suspicious of the idea as well as of the big shipbuilding and steel interests that were interested in the subject.  So Roosevelt was looked upon in the department as God’s gift to the admirals. 

On April 11, only weeks after he was sworn in (when there wasn’t a war-cloud in the world), he said:

“This [need for a large navy] is not a question of war or peace….We are confronted with a condition….We want the country to feel, too, that in maintaining a fighting force of the highest efficiency we are at the same time educating thousands of young men to be better citizens.”

[He] wrote in the Scientific American, February 28, 1914: 

“In time of war, would we be content [to see] an enemy supersede us in every outlying port, usurp our commerce and destroy our influence as a nation throughout the world? We must create a navy not only to protect our shores and our possessions but our merchant ships in time of war, no matter where they may go.”

Here, twenty-six years ago, before the World War was launched or even dreamed of – this young man, enamored of naval power and of ballet squadrons, was talking about national defense. But he explained very clearly that he [was speaking] about naval power upon all the seas of the world, great enough to assert our might everywhere, “running a thousand miles out to sea.”

When the war in Europe began, Mr. Roosevelt became immediately one of the most bellicose of the administration group in Washington. He continued, after the war was over, to clamor for more ships and more fighting men. 

One of the strange episodes of the Navy Department occurred after the war was all over. During the war there had been an immense haste [to build ships, but by June 1919,] when the terms of the Treaty were settled….the Navy Department went ahead with its war building program as if nothing had happened.  The keels of ninety-seven destroyers were laid after the armistice, costing $181,000,000. There was of course no justification for this.  Ten cruisers, costing about ten millions of dollars each, were also rushed ahead after the war was over.  [The young secretary] was merely carried away by his enthusiasm for warships. It was this which made his office so hospitable a place for the shipbuilders. 

[Roosevelt] had never been in any business. It is a singular feature of his career that his first administrative post was one that involved the expenditure of countless millions and under circumstances that suspended all the normal and necessary restraints and cautions. Money was no object alongside of victory. In a speech later in the Brooklyn Academy of Music he told with a great deal of satisfaction how he had thrown money around during the war. On another occasion he boasted that he had paid no attention to rules, regulations, and laws – that he had broken enough laws to be put in jail for 999 years. 

It is a fact of importance that in the shaping of his public career his first experience in administration should have been under circumstances where ordinary prudence, the rules of the department, the normal scrutinizes of business and the very laws themselves could be daily thrown into the wastebasket. It made a profound impression upon his habits of thought and his methods of doing things. 

It was therefore a simple matter, when the war was over and the need had passed and the public attention was directed elsewhere, that in his zeal for war vessels, his ambition for a vast naval establishment, the “greatest in the world,” capable of extending its power over the oceans “a thousand miles out to sea,” able to defend our ships “no matter where they may go,” he should be willing to slip over these hundreds of millions of contracts.”

(Country Squire in the White House, John T. Flynn, Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1940, pp. 8-14; 16-23)