FDR - Jean Edward Smith [73]
Much to the discomfiture of the Navy’s stiff-as-starch officer corps, the assistant secretary’s office became the clearinghouse for labor’s complaints. FDR took the workers’ concerns seriously, and whenever possible used his authority to settle their grievances. “The laboring men all liked him,” Daniels remembered. “If there was any Groton complex, he did not show it.”71
Roosevelt’s contact with union leaders filled a large gap in his political education. Many with whom he worked became lifelong friends and supporters. When he stepped down as assistant secretary in 1920, FDR could boast with only slight exaggeration that there had not been a single strike or work stoppage on his watch.72 Eleanor said later that thanks to Louis Howe, FDR’s experience overseeing the nation’s Navy yards was largely responsible for having made her husband “more than just a very nice young man who went out in society and did a fair job but was perfectly conventional about it.”73
Dealing with Congress proved equally instructive. FDR learned that informal favors granted graciously often counted for more on Capitol Hill than cogent arguments and party loyalty. Constituents routinely asked congressmen to run interference with government departments, and the Navy was no exception. Sometimes a sailor wanted an early discharge, sometimes compassionate leave, forgiveness for misdeeds, and so forth. Roosevelt did his best to fulfill every reasonable request that came from the Hill, and many of those that were not so reasonable as well.*
When Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the ranking member of the Naval Affairs Committee, sought a promotion for his nephew, Roosevelt complied.74 When Massachusetts congressman George Tinkham asked that a young sailor, Josef Paul Zukauskas, be discharged because boxing manager John Buckley thought he had promise, FDR did so promptly. Zukauskas later fought professionally as Jack Sharkey, “the Boston Gob,” and took the heavyweight title from Max Schmeling in 1932. Sitting in the Oval Office many years after that favor had been done, FDR told Frances Perkins that what congressmen wanted most was to have “a nice jolly understanding of their problems rather than lots of patronage. A little patronage, a lot of pleasure, and public signs of friendship and prestige—that’s what makes a political leader secure with his people and that is what he wants anyhow.”75
Other department responsibilities molded Roosevelt. The Navy was frequently called upon to maintain order and protect American interests in the Caribbean. For years he enjoyed telling how an agitated William Jennings Bryan raced into his office one afternoon in 1914 shouting, “I’ve got to have a battleship. White people are being killed in Haiti, and I must send a battleship there within twenty-four hours.”
Roosevelt told Bryan that would be impossible. “Our battleships are in Narragansett Bay and I could not get one to Haiti in less than four days steaming at full speed. But I have a gunboat somewhere in the vicinity of Guantanamo and I can get her to Haiti in eight hours if you want me to.”
“That is all I wanted,” said Bryan. The secretary of state turned to leave, then stopped. “Roosevelt,” he said, “when I talk about battleships, don’t think I mean anything technical. All I meant was that I wanted something that would float and had guns on it.”76
The situation in Haiti to which Bryan was responding was not unlike that which had erupted in the Dominican Republic ten years earlier. Because of widespread corruption in the collection of customs revenue, the Dominican Republic had found itself unable to pay the interest on its foreign debt. European powers had threatened to intervene, at which point Cousin Theodore had stepped in and assumed responsibility under color of the Monroe Doctrine.* The United States initially established a fiscal protectorate over the republic and, when unrest did not abate, transformed that into a military occupation that continued until 1924.
In Haiti, the nation’s finances had collapsed and France and