In the Time of the Americans Read online

  The Democrats, a minority party since before the Civil War, nominated their candidate knowing that Taft and TR would split the Republican vote, guaranteeing a freak Democratic victory. At the party’s national convention in Baltimore in June 1912, William Jennings Bryan, who had lost three uphill races for the presidency, unexpectedly blocked the seemingly inevitable nomination of his follower Champ Clark by throwing his support to a minority candidate—a newcomer to national politics, New Jersey’s first-term governor, Thomas Woodrow Wilson. As Bryan must have known, he was giving Wilson enough votes to stop Clark but not enough votes to win.

  Bryan thereby deadlocked the convention, making it possible for the delegates to turn to him. But the delegates knew it was a year when they could win the presidency at last—unless they threw it away. Nominating three-time loser Bryan would risk throwing it away. Since Bryan kept them from nominating Champ Clark, and they were not going to nominate Bryan himself, weary delegates on the forty-sixth ballot nominated the candidate Bryan seemed to prefer: Wilson of New Jersey.

  The Baltimore convention of 1912 proved to be one of those seminal occasions when new actors make their debuts on the stage, and when people who are going to know each other all their working lives meet for the first time. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt agreed, sight unseen, to share the rental of a house in Baltimore during the convention with two other couples. One of the other couples turned out to be Mr. and Mrs. James F. Byrnes. The first-term New York state senator and the first-term South Carolina congressman formed a lasting political association.

  Franklin Roosevelt, a leader of the Wilson faction of the New York delegation, also met Bryan’s ally Josephus Daniels and made a powerful impression on him. Daniels was to play a major role at the convention and in the eventual nomination of Wilson.

  Wilson himself was a new face. Like younger men such as Byrnes and Roosevelt, he had been in politics for only two years. He made a much more attractive candidate than Bryan, in the sense of being more fresh; though when the votes were counted, it was possible to argue that Bryan might have drawn greater support. Wilson had gone on to win the elections, but with only 6.3 million votes—fewer than Bryan had carried in losing the 1896, 1900, and 1908 elections—as against a combined total of 7.7 million for TR and Taft.

  TR was the moving force in the 1912 elections; without him, Taft might not have sought renomination, Wilson might not have been nominated, and Wilson would probably not have won the election. Moreover TR, by helping the Progressives to break down the two-party system, had introduced a new fluidity into American politics. Young people coming into their own in the TR years were shown new possibilities and offered new choices; it was nearly two decades after the 1912 elections before the new alignments in American politics solidified. For many Americans it was not until the 1932 elections, when a kinsman of TR’s ran for the presidency, that political loyalties once again became fixed.

  TR spoke to and for a rising generation of Americans—even, in many cases, those who voted for his opponents. Whether or not they endorsed his program or shared his views, they were drawn to his personal belief that life should be lived at a high level of achievement: that a human being always should try to reach beyond what seems possible. To some extent, TR may have been expressing a current of feeling that was already in the air, but certainly he expounded it, exemplified it, and won converts to it.

  He challenged, but also flattered, young Americans by setting high goals for them to achieve. It was the right time for TR to throw down his challenge; this was a generation that, for reasons of its own, wanted to meet challenges. Many measured themselves against fathers who had fought in the Civil War, and wanted in their turn to prove themselves. Others were excited by the seemingly limitless possibilities that transition from the nineteenth- to the twentieth-century world would open up for them. It was a generation of young Americans who were looking for a mission in life, and who therefore responded with especial enthusiasm to TR’s call to greatness.

  One day in January 1902 a visiting thirty-four-year-old New York lawyer, Henry L. Stimson, was on horseback in a park in Washington when he was sighted by his former employer, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and the President himself, grouped with others on the far side of a rain-swollen creek. Jesting, TR and Root ordered Stimson to jump the creek and join them—and felt sudden guilt when Stimson took them at their word, attempted the jump, fell into the swift-flowing water, disappeared underwater, and was swept downstream. Eventually Stimson and his mount were able to come ashore and join TR, who protested that he had never thought Stimson would attempt the jump, that he had assumed Stimson would understand that the order was given in jest because he could see for himself it was impossible.

  “Mr. President,” said Stimson proudly, “when a soldier hears an order like that, it isn’t his business to see that it is impossible.”

  The episode became one of Stimson’s treasured memories, and it typified the attitude of the younger men who were inspired by TR. They wanted to be called upon to do high deeds. They felt that they and their country had matured to the point where they were ready to play a great role in the world. They awaited the call.

  4

  AMERICAN LIVES

  FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT WAS NOT, as he longed to be, close to TR. TR in fact was his kinsman, but a distant one from a more illustrious branch of the family. When he was fourteen years old, Franklin bought a pince-nez in imitation of TR. At twenty-one he engaged to marry TR’s favorite niece, Eleanor; and after their marriage he received invitations as the husband of TR’s niece that he would not have received on his own. At the end of his honeymoon trip to Europe in the summer of 1905, he heard his wife applauded when it was pointed out that “Mrs. Roosevelt”—she, and not he—“had a connection with the President”; and he wrote from London to his mother that “everyone is talking about Cousin Theodore,” and that they were saying that TR “is the most prominent figure of present day history.” As for himself, he admired his famous fifth cousin more than anyone else on earth. He also found his relationship to TR useful. For the first decade or more of his political career, he lived off the capital of his cousin’s name; indeed, he would never have been launched in politics without it.

  But his doting mother, the former Sara Delano, claimed him for her own: he was “a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all,” she said. Her family—they were French Huguenots, and the name originally had been de la Noye—was an even older one in the New World than was that of the Dutchman Claes Van Rosenvelt. Sara’s father had gone out to Canton (1833–46) and made a fortune in the China trade, which essentially was the opium business; when he later lost his money in the stock market crash of 1857, he went back into the narcotics trade, this time in Hong Kong, and made a second fortune. His family came out to live with him both in Canton and in Hong Kong; so that while Sara did not discuss or acknowledge the source of her father’s wealth, a connection with China loomed large in the background of her family, as of many American families.

  Sara was only about half the age of James Roosevelt, the wealthy widower she married. The difference in age may have been one reason that she was so much closer than he was to their son. Franklin was born January 30, 1882, at his family’s country estate a few miles north of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the tree-lined Hudson River valley. It was a long and overdue childbirth, and mother and son nearly died in it. Historians later were to see in it the psychic roots of the intense relationship, overshadowing all others, between Sara and her only child. In response to her stifling possessiveness, he fabricated an inner mask for himself. What later was to chill his wife and his close associates, and to baffle politicians and biographers alike, was that he never took off the mask: he was unwilling or unable to open himself up to intimacy. Decades later one of his White House aides—Rexford Tugwell—was to remark that “Franklin himself did not possess the key to his own unconscious reticences.…”

  When he was young, his contemporaries believed that there was nothi
ng behind the mask. His cousins thought that Roosevelt was “superficial.” They described him as “terribly self-conscious” and “without convictions.”

  Roosevelt was brought up in the society of adults, not children, and was off-puttingly polite from an early age. Seeking to make himself agreeable, he told people what they wanted to hear: conduct that he must have regarded as mannerly but others regarded as deceitful. Like a nephew hoping to inherit, he was too eager to please, and gave the impression of spending an unnatural amount of his time in the company of old ladies. Though he grew to be a handsome, slender, long-muscled six feet one, he did not entirely lose his air of tea party prissiness. TR’s family called him “Miss Nancy” when he tried his hand at tennis, and one of TR’s nieces said that she and her friends had called him “the feather duster.” TR’s daughter Alice said he was “a good little mother’s boy whose friends were dull, who belonged to the minor clubs and who was never at the really gay parties.” She and her friends took no interest in him. She later said: “The joke was on us.”

  Roosevelt, biding his time, tamely allowed his mother to supervise his life until he was of age, and then—immediately—made a dash for freedom by seeking out someone with whom he could engage to marry. Roosevelts frequently married their cousins, and his eventual selection was artful; TR’s favorite niece, despite shortcomings, could not be put down as unsuitable. Of course, Roosevelt’s mother was right in saying that at twenty-one he was much too young to marry, but that position, no matter how well defended, was intrinsically temporary, allowing her to do no more than fight a delaying action.

  Roosevelt obtained his mother’s reluctant consent—for she thought politics to be degrading—and TR’s approval before making his next move toward independence: he ran for the State Senate in 1910 on the Democratic ticket* and won, with the Roosevelt name and the votes of his normally Republican family, friends, and neighbors. He did not become an outstanding state senator; but because of his name, his words and deeds were publicized by reporters in search of a story, while his sense of his importance as a Roosevelt led him to fight loose of party bosses, earning him a popular reputation for independence.

  His mother would have preferred him to live in gentlemanly ease, devoting himself to a fine existence. But the next stop on Franklin’s personal timetable was to be Washington, to follow in the path that TR had pioneered.

  IN COLONIAL DAYS, when there were no great accumulations of wealth in the United States, an upbringing like Roosevelt’s would have been inconceivable; and even in his own time, it was far removed from the experience of ordinary people. From infancy until adolescence, he had spent much if not most of his time in Europe, for his parents normally spent much of the year in England, France, or Germany. He spoke several foreign languages. He had been schooled by a succession of private tutors, many of them foreign, and was as familiar with the Luxembourg Gardens and the Eiffel Tower as with the trees and flowers of the Hudson Valley. He had little daily contact with the common run of Americans. Within the United States his family traveled in his father’s private railroad car, the Monon. They were as little inclined to dine in restaurants—that is to say, in public eating places—as to employ public transport.

  It was an upbringing like that of the landed British aristocracy; and it was something new in Roosevelt’s United States, and that of his father, that Americans could live like that. His serious education, too—his boarding school years at Groton (for he took little interest in the schooling that followed at Harvard College,† or at Columbia Law School, from which he did not graduate)—was of a sort that was unavailable in America before his time, and it, too, was modeled on what was done in England.

  Groton was the creation of the Reverend Endicott Peabody, son of a London-based Morgan partner, who had been so inspired by his own British education and by the Church of England that he gave up his family’s Unitarian faith to become an Anglican clergyman and to found the equivalent of a British public school—an Eton or Harrow or Rugby—in the United States. Such was Groton School, in a tiny Massachusetts town west of Boston, in which Roosevelt was enrolled even before its physical foundations had been dug.

  Peabody aimed at imbuing his students—the sons of the wealthiest and most prominent in the land—with a sense of obligation. He urged them to enter the public service of their country and to bring ideals into politics. He formed their character and guided their faith into channels explicitly Episcopalian, implicitly Anglophile, and consciously patriotic.

  Roosevelt was of the first generation of Americans to receive such an education. So, a decade or so later, were W. Averell Harriman and Dean Acheson. They learned to live in six-by-nine cubicles and to awaken at 5:45 a.m. to cold showers.

  As a child of E. H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon, William Averell Harriman (born November 15, 1891) grew to manhood in the shadow of what was reputed to be one of the world’s great fortunes. His childhood playmates were the children of domestics employed at his father’s palatial estates, and he grew accustomed to assume that those around him were his servants. He was destined, he knew, to play a role in commanding a vast business empire, and he felt the need to prove himself worthy. Slow but persistent, he thought it important to win all games, taking them seriously and recalling that his father “could not imagine doing anything just for fun.” Robert Lovett, four years younger, son of E. H. Harriman’s general counsel, found that Averell was not only better at games but tried harder.

  On his family’s private lake a tutor had taught Harriman to row, so that when, at Groton, he offered rowing advice to Dean Acheson, a younger boy, he was able to be more coach than colleague. Later, after Harriman had studied crew technique in England, he was to coach Acheson on his college team. Acheson (born April 11, 1893) needed the help, not merely because he was two years younger, but because at school he found himself beaten at everything: he was a poor student and bad at sports, and was, besides, rebellious. The son of an Episcopal clergyman, he was kept on at Groton only because of the clerical connection; and in the end he graduated at the very bottom of his class, twenty-fourth out of twenty-four. But the school had its effect on him; a classmate later recalled that at Groton “the idea of service, so strong with Dean, was first instilled.”

  Reverend Peabody wrote that “if … Groton boys do not enter political life and do something for our land, it won’t be because they have not been urged.” The teachings of Peabody were much like those of his friend TR, whom he had once asked to teach at Groton and who proved to be a popular speaker at the Groton chapel. Peabody’s school had begun to impart to the country’s privileged youth at the end of the nineteenth century a sense of mission such as that which TR attempted to instill in Americans as a whole.

  It was a proud day in the Groton career of Franklin Roosevelt when cousin TR came to school to regale the boys with tales of his crime-busting experiences in New York’s police department. The boys were enthralled. It was not Roosevelt alone who took TR for a model; so did his entire generation.

  THE OUTWARD CIRCUMSTANCES of his early life were so different from those of Franklin Roosevelt, his sixth cousin once removed, that Douglas MacArthur might as well have grown up in another time or a different country.

  MacArthur was born on January 26, 1880, at an army camp in Arkansas, the son of a professional soldier. A half-year later the family moved to a new posting, at Fort Wingate in the wilds of the New Mexico Territory, which was an enormous but sparsely populated land of mountain ranges, canyons, and high plateaus. Built in the shadow of mountain peaks that reached to 11,000 feet, the fort was tiny. Quarters were cramped in the fort’s primitive adobe structures; living facilities were crude; and it was a long way to Albuquerque, the nearest real town, about a hundred miles to the east. This was outlaw country, and the handful of soldiers were expected to help bring some sort of law and order to it. Shortly after the MacArthurs arrived, the most famous of the desperadoes, William Bonney (“Billy the Kid”), was in fact captured in their vicin
ity.

  MacArthur’s father had known some of the famous figures of the frontier, among them James (“Wild Bill”) Hickok, the scout and lawman who had pacified some of the toughest towns in the West, and William F. Cody, “Buffalo Bill,” the hunter and Indian fighter. So stories as well as scenes of the Wild West surrounded MacArthur in the first years of his life.

  The 900-mile Santa Fe Trail, the oldest of the great wagon trails westward still in use, and the one that had seen the most Indian fighting, remained in service until the year the MacArthurs arrived in New Mexico. The era of wagon trains and stagecoaches was coming to an end, and one of the army’s assignments was to protect the crews building the railroads that were replacing ox-drawn and horse-drawn transport.

  The Indian wars were then in their last phase; and in northern New Mexico, where Fort Wingate was located, another of the army’s tasks was to keep the Navajo on their reservation and to keep hostile Apaches off it.

  When MacArthur was four years old, he was brought along on the monthlong march southward from Fort Wingate to his father’s new post at Fort Selden on the Rio Grande, a distance of 300 miles. Historians doubt that he “trudged,” as he later claimed, “at the head of the column” of his father’s troopers for any sustained period of time, but there is no doubt that he was exposed to hardships and hazards. Lurking nearby were Geronimo’s Apaches, then on the warpath, who terrorized the region until their surrender two years later.