FDR - Jean Edward Smith [420]
35. The sobriquet derives from a Tillman speech in 1896 in which he proposed to stick a pitchfork in the broad posterior of Grover Cleveland. Daniels accumulated a unique record as secretary of the Navy: during his eight-year tenure, Congress approved every request he made except for the large construction program he submitted after the armistice in 1918. Paolo E. Coletta, “Josephus Daniels,” in Coletta (ed.), 2 American Secretaries of the Navy 530 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
36. Wilson and Daniels remained close throughout their eight years in Washington. Professor Arthur Link, Wilson’s principal biographer, attributes it to the fact that “Daniels was willing to give friendship on Wilson’s terms. There was nothing calculated about the North Carolinian’s devotion and loyalty; he simply loved the President and supported him without question. Wilson returned Daniels’s love and trust with an affection equally warm … and the more Daniels’s critics raged, the stronger Wilson’s affections grew.” Wilson: The New Freedom 125.
37. In 1923 the Supreme Court upheld the California statute, holding that the right of Japanese aliens to own land was not secured by treaty. Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S. 197 (1923). But twenty-five years later, in Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948), the Court found the law in conflict with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a view subsequently adopted by the California Supreme Court in Sei Fujii v. State, 242 P. 2d 617 (1952).
38. The New York Times, May 16, 1913; The New York World, May 16, 1913.
39. Daniels, Wilson Era: Years of Peace 163–167. Also see Daniels, Cabinet Diaries 48–68; Link, Wilson: New Freedom 289–304. FDR supported Daniels vigorously. There was “no Japanese scare,” he told the press, since “Japan doesn’t want war and neither does this country. It is a California question purely.” But Roosevelt was always his own best revisionist. Writing to Admiral Mahan a year later (June 16, 1914), he said, “I did all in my power to have the ships return nearer their base.… Orders were sent against my protest to Admiral Nicholson, telling him not to move out of the Yangtze River.” Watertown (Mass.) Standard, May 29, 1913; FDR to Mahan, FDRL.
40. Daniels was not content with simply driving the price down. The Navy, he thought, should have its own plant for making armor plate, and in 1914 he cajoled Congress into passing authorizing legislation. The general board of the Navy recommended that for security reasons the plant be located at least 100 miles inland, and Daniels selected Charleston, West Virginia, for the site. The plant was begun in 1917 but not completed in time to produce armor plate for the war. After the war it produced shells for the Navy, but the Harding administration chose not to complete the armor plate facilities. “Monopoly won when it put Harding in the White House,” said Daniels. Wilson Era: Years of Peace 355–363.
41. Roosevelt paid approximately $2,000 annually in club dues, roughly 40 percent of his $5,000 salary as assistant secretary. His checkbook stubs are among his personal papers at the FDRL.
42. Henry B. Wilson to FDR, July 7, 1913.
43. William F. Halsey and J. Bryan III, Admiral Halsey’s Story 18 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1947).
44. Quoted in Geoffrey C. Ward, A First-Class Temperament 205 (New York: Harper & Row, 1989).
45. ER to FDR, July 1913, FDRL.
46. FDR to Charles A. Munn, March 26, 1913, FDRL.
47. Elliott Roosevelt and James Brough, An Untold Story: The Roosevelts of Hyde Park 24 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973).
48. Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 352 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
49. Quoted in Jonathan