FDR - Jean Edward Smith [109]
Back in the United States, the Roosevelts grappled with the future. “We’ve had an interesting trip,” Eleanor wrote her Aunt Bamie, “and F. thinks he succeeded very well with his demobilization of all possible stations in Europe.… He says he now expects to go into business this summer for a time so we may be in New York next year and there may be a little more time which we can call our own.”28
But first Washington beckoned. Secretary Daniels left for Europe in mid-March to attend an Allied naval conference and was gone for two months, again leaving FDR in charge. The Navy’s demobilization was almost complete, and aside from adjusting to Republican control of Congress there was little other than routine housekeeping to occupy the acting secretary. Nevertheless, Daniels left detailed instructions to cover every contingency. The secretary was especially concerned that the admirals running the various bureaus not take advantage of his absence to push their pet projects through Congress. “They will probably present you with letters to sign and send to the new chairmen of the Naval Affairs Committees,” he told FDR. This, Daniels said, you must not do. “It would be very well … for you to have a drawer and put them all in it so that we can make a study of them, and we will discuss them when I get back.”29
Franklin was careful to stay on sides. “Ever since you left,” he wrote Daniels, “things have been so quiet here as to be almost terrifying. Literally nothing has happened outside of routine work, which, however, has been positively voluminous.”30 The workload was indeed heavy. The Navy remained the only cabinet department with just one assistant secretary. Whenever Daniels or Roosevelt was absent, the entire administrative workload fell to the other. By FDR’s account he worked fourteen hours a day and thrived on it. When Daniels returned in late May, Franklin wrote his old golfing partner John McIlhenny, “I have had a perfectly delightful two months, running things with a high hand and getting things done that were never done before. Last Saturday the Secretary got back and now I shall have a little leisure.”31
If the Navy Department had returned to normal by late spring, the city of Washington was anything but. Labor unrest gripped the nation. Prices were high, jobs were scarce, and thousands of returning servicemen clamored for work. Four million Americans went out on strike in 1919, one out of every five industrial workers. Organized labor strove to expand union membership, management resisted fiercely, and both sides carried their cases to Washington. John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers demanded that the government nationalize the coal mines immediately; mine and mill owners responded with court injunctions ordering strikers back to work. As agitation increased, violence became widespread, and Washington was not spared.
On the evening of June 2, 1919, a powerful bomb ripped the façade of the R Street home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, directly across the street from the Roosevelts’. The bomb was the work of a committed anarchist, who was blown up by his own device. Franklin and Eleanor were down the block when the bomb went off, returning from a late party. The blast shattered windows within a hundred-yard radius. Eleven-year-old James was the only Roosevelt child home at the time. Franklin raced upstairs and found him standing in his pajamas, barefoot amid the splintered glass, watching the scene below. “I’ll never forget how unnerved Father was when he found me standing at the window,” James recalled. “He grabbed me in an embrace that almost cracked my ribs.”32
With James safe, Franklin went across the street to assist the Palmers, who had escaped injury. He drove Mrs. Palmer and her daughter to the home of friends and then helped police gather up pages and pages of anarchist literature scattered by the blast. “Now we are roped off,” Eleanor reported to Sara the next morning. “The police haven’t yet allowed the gore to be wiped up on our steps and James glories in every