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Germany threatened to assume control to protect their investors. The Haitian government initially refused American assistance, riot and revolution followed, and in 1915 Wilson ordered Daniels to intervene. Marines were dispatched from Guantánamo to Port-au-Prince, and Haiti, like the Dominican Republic, became an American protectorate. Daniels staunchly opposed long-term occupation of the island, and gradually FDR embraced Daniels’s position.77 In his inaugural address in 1933, FDR replaced the Roosevelt corollary with what he called the “Good Neighbor” policy toward Latin America. Subsequently, at Montevideo in December 1933, the United States joined the nations of the Western Hemisphere in pledging that “No state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another.”78 The following year the United States formally renounced its right to intervene in Cuba under the Platt Amendment,79 and FDR withdrew the last American marines from Haiti—nineteen years after the occupation had begun.

* Wilson, like many white southerners, believed segregation to be divinely ordained. As president of Princeton he barred the admission of blacks and later told Sambo stories in cabinet meetings. When challenged about segregation in the federal government, he defended it as a means of reducing tension. “It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes,” he wrote Oswald Garrison Villard of The Nation. “I sincerely believe it to be in their interest.” In a similar message to H. A. Bridgman, editor of Congregationalist and Christian World, Wilson said, “I think if you were here on the ground [in Washington], you would see, as I seem to see, that it is distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves.”

There is no doubt that was Wilson’s view. There is also no doubt that virtually all black leaders were disappointed by it. “When the Wilson Administration came into power,” wrote New York’s Amsterdam News, “it promised a ‘new freedom’ to all people, avowing a spirit of Christian Democracy. But on the contrary we are given a stone instead of a loaf of bread; we are given a hissing serpent instead of a fish.”

The NAACP was equally critical. In a public letter to Wilson published in The New York Times, the association asked, “Shall ten million of our citizens say that their civil liberties and rights are not safe in your hands? To ask that question is to answer it. They desire a ‘New Freedom,’ too.”

Ironically, Wilson had appealed for black votes in 1912 and had actually won the largest number ever given to a Democratic presidential candidate. But the anti-Negro bias of the administration caused most blacks to return to the Republican Party, where they remained until FDR ran in 1932.

Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House 3, 502 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1947); Josephus Daniels, The Cabinet Diaries of Josephus Daniels 195, 234, 321, 414, 493, E. David Cronon, ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963). WW to OGV, July 23, 1913; WW to HAB, September 8, 1919, Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress. Amsterdam News, October 3, 1913; The New York Times, August 18, 1913.

* FDR met many young officers during his eight years as assistant secretary and did not forget them when he became commander in chief. Lieutenant Commander William D. Leahy was skipper of the Navy’s Dolphin, the official yacht of the secretary and assistant secretary. Leahy became chief of naval operations in 1937, was later FDR’s ambassador to Vichy France, and served as the president’s personal chief of staff throughout World War II. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, commander in chief of the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, had been Roosevelt’s naval aide in 1915. Lieutenant Emory S. Land, who later chaired the nation’s Maritime Commission, served in that post as well. Lieutenants Harold Stark and Chester Nimitz, both CNOs (Nimitz after Roosevelt’s death), were well known to FDR during World War I. The naval historian Robert Greenhalgh Albion wrote that as president, FDR always kept a copy of the