FDR - Jean Edward Smith [104]
* The day Congress declared war, TR went to Washington to ask that he be allowed to raise a division of volunteers and lead it to France. Georges Clemenceau, not yet premier, supported the proposal. The battle-weary soldiers of France needed a miracle to restore their spirits, he wrote Wilson. “Send them Roosevelt.” But the president and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, who received TR cordially, wanted no part of the idea. Wilson had decided to fight the war with a conscript army, in which there was no place for volunteers. “To make an exception of Colonel Roosevelt would have been to strike at the heart of the whole design,” wrote Wilson’s secretary, Joe Tumulty.
Wilson found TR more engaging than he had anticipated: “He’s a great big boy. There is a sweetness about him that is compelling.” But aside from the political and military risks of having TR on board, the Colonel was in poor health and half blind, and had been out of touch with military developments for twenty years. Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as Ex-President 371–373 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973); Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson as I Knew Him 288–289 (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1921).
* FDR pressed the mine barrage, oblivious to the infraction of the law of nations as well as earlier protests lodged by the United States against British and German efforts to mine the high seas. On August 13, 1914, Secretary of State Bryan had warned the British that the laying of submarine mines was in violation of Article 1 of the Hague Convention of 1907. “The Secretary of State is loath to believe that a signatory to that convention would willfully disregard its treaty obligation, which was manifestly made in the interest of neutral shipping.” Diplomatic correspondence on the issue continued through the remainder of 1914 and early 1915, and on February 15, 1915, the United States sent identical notes to Germany and Great Britain expressing hope that the two belligerents “may through reciprocal concessions, find a basis for agreement … that neither will sow any floating mines, whether upon the high seas or in territorial waters.” U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1914, Supplement 454–473; 1915, Supplement 119–120; 1916, Supplement 3–7.
FDR’s memo to Daniels outlining the project (October 29, 1917), as well as his letter to President Wilson (October 29, 1917), made no mention of the earlier American protests or the law of nations. 2 The Roosevelt Letters 293–294, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (London: George G. Harrap, 1950).
* In 1938 FDR related the episode to the Wilson biographer Ray Stannard Baker:
About the middle of June [1918] the political situation in New York flared to the front.… Charles F. Murphy, who had the final say in the City, and sufficient support in several large upstate cities to give him control of the convention, had come to realize that a New York City candidate would stand little chance of election if forced through by the City Organization. The secretary of Tammany Hall, Mr. Thomas Smith, came to Washington to see me with the message from Mr. Murphy that he would be very glad to support me for the governorship as there seemed no other upstate candidate who was well-known in every part of the state and who, at the same time, had a definite connection with war service. I told Mr. Smith I was extremely sorry but that I could not even consider accepting the nomination. Mr. Smith went to New York and returned a few days later to ask me to give Mr. Murphy some recommendations of upstate candidates. A careful check of the field convinced me that the best-known Democrat in the State was Alfred E. Smith.… It was pointed out by Mr. [Thomas] Smith and Mr. Murphy that Alfred E. Smith was not only a Tammany man but a Catholic. My reply was the demand for his nomination for Governor could