FDR - Jean Edward Smith [65]
—FRANCES PERKINS
THE WILSON ADMINISTRATION commenced on a high plane of moral rectitude. Mrs. Wilson canceled the inaugural ball as too frivolous for so solemn an occasion; the president, an avid golfer, declined membership in the Chevy Chase Country Club because it was too exclusive; and incoming Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan initiated the era of grape juice diplomacy by refusing to serve alcohol at state functions.1 Wilson had campaigned under the banner of the New Freedom, which promised “the emancipation of the generous energies of the people,” primarily through states’ rights, free competition, and tariff reform.2 But for the Virginia-born Wilson, the New Freedom was for whites only. The first southerner elected president since Zachary Taylor, Wilson immediately segregated the government’s workforce. Black Republican appointees in the South were discharged and replaced by whites, and within six months government workers in Washington who had worked side by side for years found themselves separated by race.3 “Public segregation of civil servants, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government,” lamented W. E. B. Du Bois, who, unlike most black leaders, had supported Wilson.4*
After sixteen years in the wilderness, the Democrats had returned to power—not old-school, high-caste, hard-money Cleveland Democrats but a coalition of agrarian populists, urban workers, middle-class progressives, and all ranks of southerners, who voted Democratic for the same reason most blacks voted Republican: Abraham Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War.5 The southern tilt of the Democratic party was more pronounced than ever, and with the GOP hopelessly divided, it was the South that called the tune.6
To head the Navy, Wilson had chosen Josephus Daniels, the populist editor of the Raleigh News & Observer, who had managed his campaign publicity in the South. Partially to achieve regional balance, Daniels chose FDR as his assistant secretary, and the president submitted Franklin’s nomination to the Senate on March 12, 1913. He was confirmed unanimously five days later. No hearings were held. Roosevelt, who had been waiting anxiously, promptly took the oath of office. It was March 17, his eighth wedding anniversary, and he immediately wrote Eleanor, who was at home in New York with the children:
My own dear Babbie:
I didn’t know until I sat down at this desk that this is the 17th of happy memory. In fact with all the subdued excitement of getting confirmed and taking the oath of office, the delightful significance of it all is only beginning to dawn on me. My only regret is that you could not have been with me but I am thinking of you a great deal.7
The desk at which FDR wrote was the same mahogany behemoth Cousin Theodore had salvaged from a Navy storeroom sixteen years earlier. Festooned with hand-carved warships bulging from the side panels, it had originally been made for Gustavus Fox, the Navy’s assistant secretary during the Civil War. TR had been thirty-eight at the time he was appointed; Franklin was barely thirty-one—the youngest assistant secretary in the history of the Navy, twenty years junior to Secretary Daniels, half the age of most flag officers, and forty-five years younger than Admiral George Dewey, hero of the battle of Manila Bay, the ranking officer on active duty.
Government was small in 1913, and the entire Navy Department was housed on two floors of the old State, War, and Navy Building, adjacent to the White House. An architectural monument in more ways than one (the stone walls were four feet thick), the opulent Second Empire style of the building epitomized the conspicuous consumption of America’s Gilded Age.8 Roosevelt’s office on the third floor was almost as large and ornate