FDR - Jean Edward Smith [68]
In 1913 the Navy Department was its own little world. Henry L. Stimson, Taft’s outgoing secretary of war, said it receded from the realm of logic “into a dim religious world in which Neptune was God and Mahan his prophet.”30 That did not deter Daniels. He defined civilian control as civilian command and with Wilson’s support exercised it relentlessly. Daniels abolished the board of four admiral aides that stood between him and the department; limited the term of bureau chiefs to four years; and required deskbound officers to put to sea. He visited naval facilities from coast to coast, often breaking ranks to shake hands with enlisted men lined up for inspection; overrode reluctant admirals and ordered the fleet to cross the Atlantic in winter; and took issue with hallowed naval nomenclature that called left “port” and right “starboard.” At Daniels’s direction, FDR signed General Order No. 30 on May 5, 1913, requiring that directional instructions to the helmsman henceforth be given as “right” and “left.”
Daniels also jettisoned the Navy’s choker-collar uniforms, took engineering officers out of dress whites, and instituted a promotion system based on merit. But his overriding concern was to break down what he considered artificial barriers between officers and enlisted men. He opened the Naval Academy to enlisted applicants, added civilian instructors to the faculty, and sought to make every ship a floating “university” so that sailors would be better prepared to return to civilian life.31 Daniels halted the practice of serving wine in the officers’ mess, not only because he believed in temperance but because he thought it undemocratic. If enlisted men could not drink aboard ship, neither should their officers.32 He also banned the issue of condoms to sailors going on shore leave. “It is equivalent to the government advising these boys that it is right and proper for them to indulge in an evil which perverts their morals.”33
FDR was on an inspection trip to the West Coast when Daniels’s temperance directive came down, but he supported it strongly. “The wine order is … on the whole absolutely right. It took nerve to do it, but tho the Secy will be unpopular in a small circle for a while, it will pay in the end.”34 There is no record of his response to Daniels’s order pertaining to condoms.
Initially FDR thought Daniels a hopeless hayseed who would be overwhelmed by Washington politics. But as he watched the secretary seize control of the Navy Department, socialize with congressional committee chairmen like South Carolina’s irascible “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman,35 and deal intimately with Wilson in the White House, he changed his opinion.36 Two incidents in the spring of 1913 confirmed that judgment. The first dealt with command authority. The State of California had recently adopted legislation forbidding Japanese citizens from owning land in the state.37 On May 9 Japan lodged a vigorous protest with Washington. Wilson rejected the note, tempers flared, and relations deteriorated. Senior military and naval officials believed war to be inevitable. On May 14, the Joint Board of the Army and Navy, chaired by Admiral Dewey, with General Leonard Wood, the Army chief of staff, serving as vice chairman, unanimously recommended that the Navy immediately move the three large battle cruisers of the Asiatic fleet (Saratoga, Monterey, and Monadnock) from their station on the Yangtze River to the Philippines and that additional reinforcements be dispatched to Hawaii and Panama. Secretary of War Lindley M. Garrison approved the recommendations on May 15, and the following day two New York newspapers carried sensational stories that the Army and Navy were preparing for war.38
Daniels was outraged. He had not signed on, he disapproved