FDR - Jean Edward Smith [84]
For the next fourteen months the argument within the administration turned on how rapidly the United States should mobilize, not whether mobilization was necessary. FDR devised a plan for a Council of National Defense to oversee war production and took it directly to Wilson, who was unwilling to go that far. “It seems that I can accomplish little just now,” Franklin wrote Eleanor. “The President does not want to ‘rattle the sword,’ but he was interested and will I think really take it up soon.”72 Roosevelt continued to press the project, and the council came into being in August 1916, the proposal attached as a rider to the Army appropriations bill. The council was empowered to place defense contracts directly with suppliers and draw plans for the “immediate concentration and utilization of the resources of the nation.”73 FDR played an important role in establishing the council and would draw on that experience in 1940, after the fall of France, when he reactivated the council’s advisory panel as the first significant defense agency of World War II.74
Another pet project involved creation of a naval reserve. FDR was impressed with the training camp Cousin Theodore and General Leonard Wood had established at Plattsburgh, New York, to drill young gentlemen in the rudiments of military life, and he wished to establish a naval counterpart.* Initially, the going was heavy. Daniels feared the reserve would appeal primarily to rich young Ivy Leaguers and well-to-do yachtsmen and would have an upper-class bias. Franklin assured him otherwise. “You may take my word for it,” he told Daniels, the reserve would be constituted “on absolutely democratic lines.”75 Daniels was won over and permitted a preliminary cruise in the summer of 1916 but procrastinated establishing the reserve itself. On September 2, with Daniels away, FDR as acting secretary ordered the creation of a Naval Reserve of fifty thousand men along with an auxiliary complement of patrol boats.76 “Today I sprang the announcement … and trust J.D. will like it,” Franklin wrote Eleanor. “It is of the utmost importance and I have failed for a year to get him to take any action, though he never objected to it. Now I have gone ahead and pulled the trigger myself. I suppose the bullet may bounce back on me, but it is not revolutionary nor alarmist and is just common sense.”77
Nineteen-sixteen was a presidential election year, and as a preparedness Democrat FDR was a distinct asset to the administration: a Roosevelt on display to offset the criticism of Cousin Theodore and the interventionist wing of the GOP. Wilson’s chances looked dim. His narrow victory in 1912 traced to the split in Republican ranks between party regulars under Taft and progressive insurgents backing TR. But in the spring of 1916 the Colonel returned to the fold. The GOP regulars were a sordid bunch, he told friends, but “a trifle better than the corrupt and lunatic wild asses who seem most influential in Democratic councils.”78 Wilson’s recent marriage to the Washington socialite Edith Galt, a widow considerably younger than he, also did not help his chances, coming so quickly after his first wife’s death. And the preparedness issue cut both ways. While TR lambasted the administration for being too weak, many in the Middle West—where isolationist sentiment was strong—condemned Wilson for being too bellicose.
When the Republican National Convention convened at Chicago in early June, anticipation of victory was in the air. Supreme Court justice