Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times

7. Splendid Little Wars

247 7. Splendid Little Wars I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men. —WOODROW WILSON At daylight we marched right through Vera Cruz. —MAJOR SMEDLEY BUTLER, U.S.M.C. American diplomat John Hay will forever have a place in the history books if for no other reason than for his characterization of the Spanish-­American conflict as that “splendid little war.”1 The phrase has come to be associated with wars that might or might not have been little but were by no means splendid. Among these were several Latin American campaigns overseen by Josephus Daniels during his tenure as secretary of the navy. They included Nicaragua, the occupation of which Daniels inherited from the Taft administration in 1913; Mexico (1914); Haiti (1915); the Dominican Republic (1916); and Cuba (1917).2 In addition, from its first days, the Wilson administration faced crises in China and disputes with Japan that involved the navy. The imperialistic policies of the three Republican presidents who immediatelyprecededWilson —McKinley,Roosevelt,andTaft—­foreshadowed subsequent complications. Initially, however, Daniels expected the administration to concentrate on its domestic agenda, and he was optimistic that Wilson would not perpetuate the gunboat diplomacy of his predecessors. In this he would be disappointed. Wilson was to the right of his party’s mainstream when it came to imperialism. Indeed, he had “publicly argued that America should take Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines as colonies.”3 Thus Daniels’s day-­ to-­ day business would be overwhelmingly dominated by foreign affairs, including overseeing Wilson’s own version of gunboat diplomacy. One of Daniels’s first major acts after taking office in March 1913 was to choose an assistant secretary. In those days of leaner bureaucracy, the navy secretary had only one civilian assistant, so the choice was crucial. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the rich Harvard alumnus Daniels chose, possessed a Splendid Little Wars 248 famous name, a well-­ stocked family treasury, and a forceful personality, all of which destined him to fill a position of leadership in American public life. There is little doubt, however, that Daniels greatly facilitated FDR’s route to the pinnacle of American politics. When Daniels offered the assistant secretary post to the thirty-­one-­year-­old FDR, the two had only known each other for a few months. At the time, FDR was in the process of modeling his own career on that of his cousin Theodore, the former president and recent presidential candidate. TR offered a good, though ambitious, model for a young, patrician politician. There is no shortageof biographical information on FDR.4 His leadership during the Great Depression and World War II, while he coped with the ravages of polio, elevated him to the pantheon of history’s greatest statesmen. FDR himself, never much given to sharing the limelight, rightfully credited Daniels for a good portion of his subsequent success.5 The only child of an aged but kindly patrician father and a loving but authoritarian mother, FDR inherited a large fortune that originated in international trade.6 On his father’s side, a great-­ grandfather descended from Dutch traders made the Roosevelt fortune in the New World in the eighteenth-­ century sugar trade. On his mother’s side, the de la Noyes were French Protestants. His mother’s father, Warren Delano, who took the anglicized version of the family name, made his fortune in, among other things, the opium trade. FDR himself was the product of the Hudson Valley (Whig and, later, Democratic) branch of the Roosevelt family, as opposed to the Oyster Bay (and Republican) branch that yielded TR. (The respective branches of the family had split in the eighteenth century.) Educated at Groton and Harvard , FDR was a mediocre student who tried perhaps a bit too hard to fit in among America’s social elite. Raised in the insular world of his parents’ estate, the boy developed a glib and ingratiating manner that made him more popular with adults than with his adolescent peers. Physically active though not a great athlete in competitive sports, FDR fit in well enough but did not excel at either of the elite schools he attended. Living off his family’s wealth and at loose ends as a young man, he entered New York state politics . When he first met Josephus Daniels at the 1912 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, FDR held the office of state senator. Contrary to Daniels’s subsequent protestations in his memoirs, written at the height of FDR’s...