Except for Herbert Hoover, who had knocked around mining camps in China and Australia, and William Howard Taft, who had been governor-general of the Philippines, Franklin Roosevelt knew more about the world of the Pacific than any of his predecessors in the White House, although he knew a good deal less than he let on, and many of his notions were out of date. His ideas were formed by his unique family background, his early imperialist bent, and career aspirations that placed a premium on posturing against foreign devils, like Mexicans and Japanese. The slaughter he witnessed during World War I in France sobered his outlook.

FDR's speech writers routinely inserted local references in his scripts to demonstrate his familiarity and sympathy with the concerns of his audiences, but it seems likely that the tasteless remark about the cleanliness and neatness of Hawaiian households delivered from the balcony of Iolani Palace was his own contribution, reflecting his surprise at not finding Oriental hovels in the Islands. For him, condescension came naturally. Weren't his family Hudson valley squires, as close to aristocrats as could be found in America! FDR enjoyed tracing his paternal pedigree back to the Dutch patroons, and he was equally well endowed on the distaff side, where a Delano seems to have actually landed on Plymouth Rock. FDR wasn't in awe of the British aristocracy his parents visited in England, and positively disliked the upper-class Germans he met at the spas. People like Dean Acheson and Ernest King were put off by his attitude toward the help.
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Sara Delano's dearest wish for the son she bore with some difficulty in January 1882 might have been that he would live as a country gentleman on the "lordly Hudson," insulated from vulgar politicians. But the family ties that should have confirmed him in squirehood made it impossible for him to rusticate. For, out of another branch of the Roosevelts,  cousin Theodore  rocketed to the presidency. Nothing in America was quite the same after Theodore Roosevelt, and it wasn't the same for young Franklin either. He grew up in the shadow of the formidable Theodore, and was to spend a good part of his life trying to emulate him. Teddy even upstaged Franklin at his wedding when he took as his bride Eleanor Roosevelt, another distant cousin.(1)

Theodore Roosevelt had risen to the presidency by way of service as assistant secretary of the navy and his heroics during the War with Spain, in which he and his Navy performed with great éclat. The American Navy was new, yet hadn't been built with any particular enemy in mind. But the European powers had been acquiring colonies in far places and a section of the public felt that America should exercise more influence abroad. What was known as the "Large Policy." It hardly needed the "Apostle of Sea Power" Alfred Thayer Mahan to make the point that for a Large Policy a large navy would be helpful. Both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were ardent disciples of Mahan.

The Navy had traditionally kept a squadron in Far Eastern waters, and in the 1850s Commodore Perry  had forced the Japanese to open the country to western commerce. The two Roosevelts were destined to spend a good deal of their presidencies wrestling with the Japan that modernized itself after Perry's wake-up call, but at the turn of the century when the United States was sailing along on good terms with all foreign capitals, no capital was friendlier than Tokyo. As much as anyone thought about them, the Japanese were favorably regarded as providing a useful check on the pretensions of Czarist Russia.They had cooperated in furnishing labor for the Hawaiian cane fields. In fact no one predicted what was to happen. The United States had no sooner stuck its neck out--in the contemporary words of a British admiral--compromised its continental "unattackableness" by annexing the Philippines after the Spanish War, than Japan loomed as a real threat.(2)

Tokyo had certainly proved to be  a check on the Russians, taking one of their squadrons by surprise and besting them in a war that began in 1904. Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation of a treaty between the belligerents, but he also reaped the hostility of Japanese extremists who believed that he had double-crossed them. The long and short of it was that afterwards Washington faced a cocky and truculent neighbor, the strongest power in the Far East--in a position to conquer the Philippines and jeopardize the Open Door Policy that aimed at equal access for Americans to the markets of China. Another and more dangerous issue was Japanese immigration. The Hawaiian planters had begun importing Japanese labor in the eighties and didn't quit until Japanese comprised almost half the population of the Islands. Then the laborers began showing up on the West Coast where they encountered the most determined opposition, particularly from the Californians. In fact, Theodore Roosevelt showed at his best when he persuaded the sensitive Japanese government to suspend emigration while he calmed down California. There remained an ugly legacy, and recurrent Japanese war scares, driving home the realization that the Philippines were at the mercy of Japan. The Americans were soon calling alerts against their erstwhile friends.

No matter that the wave of Japanese immigrants turned out in the end to be more like a trickle; they never amounted to more than three percent of the population in California. But by the time FDR entered the administration of Woodrow Wilson in 1913 the Japanese problem had been blown out of all proportion. West Coast labor and politicians were rabid on the issue. The Navy used it to pry funds out of Congress. Shirttail geopoliticians such as the eccentric Homer Lea warned that Imperial Japanese forces could use their kinsmen in Hawaii to stab the American garrison in the back. Then invade the United States, possibly through Mexico, and drive the Americans east of the Rockies! Early in 1942 Stimson thought this scenario quite possible. In 1912 there was a scare over a mythical Japanese scheme for a base at Magdalena Bay on the Mexican Coast. The Taft administration was skeptical, but the Senate passed a resolution extending the Monroe Doctrine by warning Asian nations against trying to establish colonies in the New World. Japanese fishermen caused the Navy to worry about its Pacific bases and the safety of the Panama Canal. The extent of Japanese influence in Mexico was exaggerated by Americans with interests there, some of whom were open about wishing to annex additional  parts of the southern neighbor. After 1911, there was the hard fact of revolution in Mexico. Even the Germans got into the act when the Kaiser deliberately planted rumors about Japanese soldiers drilling in Mexico. He hoped to focus Americans' attention to the south, instead of Europe where he feared they might make common cause with England.(3).

FDR took the Japanese threat seriously during his early years, and never got it entirely out of his system. He heard about a Japanese design for a huge Pacific empire to include the Philippines, China, Australasia and Indonesia while he was still a student at Harvard. He readily admitted that he had a sentimental attachment to China based on his mother's tales about her childhood in her father's house in China.  He had a nodding acquaintance with Pacific affairs from schoolboy debates at Groton, where he took the negative on annexing Hawaii, arguing that it was unnecessary because the United States already had a lease on the Pearl River lagoon. When he took his cousin Eleanor on their honeymoon cruise in the summer of 1905, she was surprised how much time he spent trying to communicate with a group of Japanese naval officers on their way to check on new warships being built for them in English yards.(4)

During a subsequent stint at a Wall Street law firm, an employment he found boring, FDR regaled his fellow attorneys with his plans for gaining the White House. Use the magical Roosevelt name and follow the path blazed by his cousin-- New York politics, followed by the Navy Department, and somewhere along the way a martial exploit. So when Wilson gave him the post he craved, assistant secretary of the navy, he entered on the job as a self-confessed man on the make. From his office in the gingerbread State, War, and Navy building he could look across the backside of the White House and gaze with anticipation at the mansion. The first time his boss Josephus Daniels left him on his own, he archly reminded the press of what had happened when Cousin Theodore had been left in charge, when he sent George Dewey word to get ready to sail to the Philippines. But on his first day FDR had to be content with signing official papers and welcoming a delegation of French scientists consulting on the perennial problem of the width of the Atlantic. There is substantial agreement about FDR at this stage of his career: a lightweight; a "feather duster," says his wife. A party animal, a man about Washington. A golfing enthusiast, whether on the barbered greens of Chevy Chase or the converted cow pastures of the Naval Academy.(5)

April 1913 brought the first crisis of the Wilson administration, a crisis that threatened to stampede Wilson into war with Japan. The trouble started in the California legislature which passed an alien land act that drew a protest from Japan. On reading this, Admiral Bradley Fiske decided war was in the offing, and proposed moving some small warships out of Chinese waters. The president and the navy secretary believed the move was unnecessary and possibly inflammatory. The Joint Board insisted and someone leaked their recommendations to the press. Wilson flew into a rage and threatened to abolish the Board. Years later, Josephus Daniels' son Jonathan concluded from his studies that FDR was the leaker. At any rate,  he was enjoying himself during the brief war scare as the mouthpiece of the hawkish admirals.(6)  FDR threatened to get out of hand a year later, when he happened to be on the West Coast when Wilson decided to seize the Vera Cruz customs house to prevent a shipment of arms from Germany from reaching one of the parties in the Mexican civil war. FDR feverishly mobilized the local resources of the Navy,  hoping  to direct them in a campaign down the west coast of Mexico.He stated publicly that the time had come to annex the whole of Mexico.(7)

When the European war broke out in September 1914, the inevitable  result was a rapid rise in the power of Japan. The British had been formally allied with Japan since 1903 and suggested that Tokyo could fulfill its treaty obligations merely by cooperating with the Royal Navy. Instead, the Japanese proceeded to seize all the German holdings in the Pacific they could lay hands on. It was far too late when Admiral Mahan wrote FDR telling him that Wilson must persuade the British to get the Japanese to give up the German islands between Hawaii and the Philippines. The British had already promised them to Japan.They became "mandates" under the League of Nations and, as stepping stones across the Pacific, battlegrounds for a later generation.  FDR never forgot the matter.  When he met the British Prime Minister Churchill off Newfoundland in 1941, the first thing he ordered Sumner Welles to do was to find out if the British had made any secret commitments to any of their allies

 

When the Japanese subsequently subjected China to a humiliating twenty-one Demands, some Americans began thinking in terms of a two-ocean navy to settle matters in the Orient. The European war turned the Pacific into a Japanese lake. The British navy practically disappeared, and in 1916 the Japanese had to be called on to land sailors at Singapore  to put down a mutiny of  Indian troops. The alarm bells had sounded in Washington the previous year. A Japanese squadron showed up at Turtle Bay on the Mexican coast only four hundred miles south of San Diego.What was it up to? Establishing a base? Actually the squadron had been searching for German warships prowling the Pacific, and managed to run a cruiser aground at the deserted anchorage. Nevertheless Wilson, his cabinet, the Navy Department and the newspapers monitored the proceedings with great suspicion until the embarrassed Japanese refloated the warship and departed. Such tensions were downplayed when Japan and the United states became ‘allied' after April 1917.(8)

 

For months FDR had gone around saying that the United States had to get into.the European war. When it happened in 1917 he made himself so useful in Washington that he neglected to get into uniform, as his cousin Theodore advised him to. He finally fixed on a lieutenant commander's commission with a naval railway battery in France, but he was too late. But he visited the trenches and was permanently affected by what he saw. His antiwar sentiments were deep and long-lasting. Still, among the final efforts of the lame-duck Wilson administration was a proposal for a huge naval building program which would have swamped the navies of Britain and Japan. It died on the vine amid the meltdown of all things Wilsonian that set in after 1918, a meltdown  that blasted FDR's  hopes for immediate political advancement. FDR never forgot how Wilson had allowed himself to get ahead of American opinion. When he ran for vice-president in 1920 FDR was buried in a Republican landslide. The next summer he contracted the polio that crippled his legs and would've writ finis to the career of a less determined man.

The years in Washington almost write finis to FDR's marriage. After she discovered his affair with her secretary Lucy Mercer, his wife discontinued marital relations.  A lonely FDR had to find solace elsewhere.(9)

FDR shared the social prejudices of people in his station in life. But his feelings were  undetectable during his breezy, genial conduct of business. He was optimistic, confident, friendly, inclined to jokes--even bad jokes-- poker, and horseplay, He inspired loyalty from his associates. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly called FDR's a "first class temperament." No ideologue, he wasn't even markedly intellectual. But he couldn't help being a WASP. As a professional politician he had to be careful of the feelings of those who would later be called ethnics, but as a member of  the Democratic party with its powerful Southern wing he was uninterested in black civil rights. He could joke privately about the hapless black officials in Haiti, where the Marines sent in by Wilson were imposing a brutal regime. But he was polite to them. During the 1920 campaign he boasted that he had written the Haitian constitution, an untruth, and a demeaning remark. He was comfortable with American imperialism in Latin America, and suspicious of interlopers, especially if they were Japanese. His remarks about the Haitian constitution were tossed off on a campaign swing through Montana where some among the audience may have thought they were listening to Theodore Roosevelt. "You know I have had something to do with running a couple of little republics. The facts are that I wrote the Haiti constitution myself; and if I do say so, I think it is a pretty good constitution." He denied saying it, but a good many listeners remembered him saying it.

Wilson's administration ended its days in a state of tension with Japan which  it was freely predicted would lead to war. But in 1921, war was, to say the least, unpopular. So unpopular that Harding's Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes was able to convene an arms limitation conference at the ornate Pan-American palace in Washington, hardly a bow shot from the ugly ‘temporary' buildings that housed the Army and Navy, where he electrified the delegates by proclaiming that the way to disarm was to disarm. The treaties that emerged stabilized the Pacific. A moderate business-oriented regime governed in Tokyo, and neither Japan, Britain nor America was left with enough navy to make an aggressive move, singlehanded, against the others.(10)

Absent from the national political picture while he struggled to regain the use of his legs, FDR nevertheless pontificated on the issues of the day. In 1923, with much editorial help, he wrote an astonishing article for the periodical Asia --astonishing in that it repudiated some of his earlier ideas. He titled it, "Shall We Trust Japan?" In it he endorsed Hughes' naval limitation treaties and argued that the Japanese were no menace to California. He blew out of the water the contention that Germany or Japan seriously considered bases in Mexico. He demonstrated that they would be of no practical use. He was certainly in tune with the current pacifist mood, and perhaps venting his anger at being allowed by the Navy professionals to take the blame for a wartime scandal involving homosexuals.  But he continued to tax his former associates in an article he wrote for the prestigious Foreign Affairs in 1928. "Only the most excited of the admirals will seriously consider the possibility of an invasion either of the United States or Japan by sea."

Arguing that Japan wasn't much of a menace and that the United States should pursue a conciliatory policy in the Pacific didn't mean that Roosevelt liked the Japanese. He didn't. His Asia article worried about "racial purity." Two years later he wrote a series of columns for the Macon, Georgia, Daily Telegraph, a paper owned by one of his partners in the Warm Springs spa where he struggled to regain the use of his legs. Agreeing with the Californians that the Japanese were unassimilable, he expressed convictions he would hold to the end of his days. The year before, Congress had passed an act barring Japanese from immigrating to the United States, an act that commanded considerable popular support across America.  FDR defended shutting off immigration until America could "digest" the latest batch of newcomers. But even when digestion was complete, he would still keep Asiatics out. He hadn't traveled in the Far East. But he had no hesitation in declaring: "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results."He claimed to know "a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese" who agreed with him in opposing intermarriage between the races.(11)

But by the time he had beaten Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election, much had changed in the world. In Tokyo, militarists had displaced businessmen. The Pacific was a dangerous place. When the possibility of a war with Japan was mentioned at one of his first cabinet meetings, FDR put on a bravura performance, with a monologue on the course such a conflict would take. Showing off, confided Secretary Ickes to his diary.

The U.S. would initially lose the Philippines, but eventually bring Japan to its knees with a blockade!