FDR - Jean Edward Smith [435]
The weather was thick at the time and the President’s ship and her escort were running on dead reckoning.… When the wind shifted and the fog lifted, one of the officers perched on the upper deck sang out:
“Thatcher’s Island dead ahead.”
Assistant Secretary Roosevelt, who took the bridge immediately with Captain [Edward] McCauley, had yachted in the waters in which the Washington lay and gave it as his guess just before the fog lifted that the ship and her escort were in the vicinity of Marblehead. It turned out that the secretary was very nearly accurate in his guess.
28. Quoted in Ward, First-Class Temperament 436.
29. Daniels to FDR, March 13, 14, 1919, Daniels Papers, Library of Congress.
30. FDR to Daniels, April 3, 1919, ibid.
31. FDR to John McIlhenny, May 23, 1919, FDRL.
32. James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R. 60 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959).
33. ER to SDR, June 3, 1919, FDRL.
34. FDR to ER, July 23, 1919, 2 Roosevelt Letters 381 (FDR’s emphasis). The riot, one of twenty-five that broke out in the nation that year, was triggered by rumors that a white woman, the wife of a naval officer, had been jostled by blacks. A mob of several hundred white servicemen, supported by an estimated thousand civilians, retaliated by rampaging through black neighborhoods, shooting into apartments, and beating up men and women encountered on the street. Blacks armed themselves and fought back. The Washington Herald subsequently declared the capital “the most lawless city in the Union.”
35. The tenor of hysteria is reflected in the numerous articles written during this period by the attorney general. One such appeared in The Forum in February 1920, in which Palmer warned of the dangers of the Red menace: “Like a prairie fire, the blaze of revolution” would devour “every American institution. It was eating its way into the homes of the American workman, its sharp tongues of revolutionary heat were licking at the alter of churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bells, crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace the marriage vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of our society.” A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the Reds,” The Forum 19 (February 1920).
36. Morison, History of the American People 883.
37. The 1918 results from the Fifth Congressional District of Wisconsin show Berger, the Socialist candidate, with 17,920 votes; Joseph P. Carney, Democrat, 12,450; and William H. Stafford, Republican, 10,678. Following the refusal of the House to seat him, Berger was indicted in U.S. District Court for sedition, tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court in 1921, Berger v. United States, 255 U.S. 22, after which the government withdrew all charges. Berger stood for election to Congress again in 1922 as a Socialist and was overwhelmingly elected. This time he was seated, and he served in Congress from March 4, 1923 until his death in 1929. See Blanche Wiesen Cook, “The Socialist Party Convention,” in Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution 349–356 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
38. FDR to Rear Admiral Samuel S. Robinson, December 30, 1919, FDRL.
39. Paul Tuckerman to FDR, FDRL.
40. ER to Isabella Ferguson, September 16, 1919, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.
41. Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living 29–30 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960).
42. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 257–258.
43. ER to SDR, October 28, 1919, FDRL.
44. Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story 304.
45. Albert Fried, ed., A Day of Dedication: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Woodrow Wilson 395 (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
46. To mock Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Lodge introduced fourteen reservations, the most serious of which merely reasserted the constitutional power of Congress to declare war. Later, in a bow to his Irish constituents in Massachusetts, Lodge added a fifteenth reservation