Our popular portrait that we internalize on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one of the most controversial and at the same time most popular presidents of the United States is that of the kind and resolute old man in a wheelchair. With his cigarette holder, smile and glasses as props, the kindly grandfather led his country through the darkness of Pearl Harbor to the brink of victory over the Axis powers. What is foreign to us is a vibrant and physically energetic young FDR, who vaulted over fences and chased secretaries. This young man brought passion to the US Navy and was its defacto civilian boss for more than 7 years from March 17, 1913- August 26, 1920.
Roosevelt’s Navy by James Tertitus de Kay
This young energetic man is the subject of Roosevelt’s Navy: The Education of a Warrior President by James Tertius de Kay. This new book by Mr. de Kay shows how history may have very well been different. Born into a well-connected east coast family (Franklin’s cousin was Teddy Roosevelt and became President when FDR was but a teenager), the young man grew up with a love of the navy. De Kay explains and illustrates that FDR kept two copies of The Naval War of 1812 with him nearby for most of his life. He sailed his family’s 51-foot yacht offshore every chance he had. At age 15, the budding naval historian would debate from his well-worn copy of Admiral Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History and was striving for admission to Annapolis to begin a naval career.
The Navy under Roosevelt
The author details the weaving path our hero took from his childhood home to Harvard at familial insistence to the beginnings of his political career as a State Senator for New York and a foe of the Tammany political machine. Upon his appointment by newly elected President Woodrow Wilson to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy position at age 31 in 1913, Roosevelt spread his wings. Under the detested landlubber Josephus Daniels, a Secretary of the Navy who insisted on banning the Rum Ration, ordering that no prostitution be permitted within five miles of a naval installation, and even suggesting that nautical terms such as port and starboard be simply called left and right, Roosevelt was well liked and very influential.
Accomplishments as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy
De Kay continues to relate how Roosevelt insisted the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s Swimming Cup to promote swimming on naval ships, championed a large, big-gunned navy, established the US Navy Reserve, as we know it today and led budget negotiations. During the Great War in 1917-18, he was a quiet player in engineering US strategic ship movements and was the driving force behind the North Sea Barrage, which is credited with being the final nail in the U-Boat coffin in World War 1.
The book goes on to portray the young assistants inspection missions to a war-torn Europe in 1918 where a somber man’s eyes were opened to the horrors of modern conflict to strive to know peace. It was after the peace in 1919 that Roosevelt was still hard at work behind the scenes in preventing the wholesale mothball of the entire US-fleet and preserving the navy that he would again have under him in 1933 when he became president during the great depression.
In August 1921, after a failed bid for Vice-President in a failing Democratic party and less than year after leaving the Navy Department, Roosevelt contracted polio and the rest his history. Author James Tertius de Kay makes sure that you know the rest of the story.
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