Books: Daniels to the Defense

THE WILSON ERA: YEARS OF WAR AND AFTER (654 pp.)—Josephus Daniels—University of North Carolina Press ($4).

Josephus Daniels, of North Carolina and the Navy, is 84. He still loves a good scrap and the old Democratic Party, still hates booze, wicked women and the late Admiral William S. Sims. He has been working away at his memoirs for years. Tar Heel Editor (TIME, Dec. 25, 1939) was Vol. I of the series. Vol. IV. The Wilson Era: Years of War and After, covers the period from 1917 to 1923.

All told, the volumes make a wonderfully cranky, talky, valuable record, as honest as daylight, as native as Congress gaiters and a black string tie. The latest installment is probably the crankiest and talkiest of the lot: a huge collection of clips, quotes, yarns, letters, anecdotes, poor jokes, explanations and refutations. The arrangement is roughly chronological, pointed up with oldtime editorial subheads (“A Doubting Thomas Converted,” “Are Dreadnaughts Doomed?”), illustrated with practically a national gallery of photographs and political cartoons.

“I wrote with my own hand,” recalls the ex-Secretary of the Navy, “the policy of the Department with reference to the safety of ships carrying troops to France” in 1917. “And not one soldier was lost en route on our ships!” With his own hand, too, the Secretary saved his sailors from the sins of Chicago. “I took time out to investigate . . . and obtained from all the hotelkeepers in Chicago a promise to organize their employes in anti-liquor squads and see that rooms assigned to men in the service were not accessible to immoral women.” With his own eye he selected a young man named Franklin Roosevelt as his Assistant Secretary; the young man’s “appealing quality” had “enabled him all unconsciously to win my heart.”

Europe in the Spring. “The first King and Queen with whom I broke bread abroad,” he goes on, remembering the trip to the Peace Conference in 1919, “were King George and Queen Mary.” The King made a little quip; the Queen “was not greatly amused”; they all had a nice lunch. While in Paris for the Peace Conference, the Secretary went to the opera with Admiral W. S. Benson, U.S. Naval Adviser. Benson was “shocked at the near nakedness of the actresses and the risque remarks,” and wanted to walk out. Says Daniels: “I quite shared his feelings but told him that as we were the guests of the French Government” it would be impolite to leave. The opera: Saint-Saens’ Henry VIII.

At Paris, too, Secretary Daniels saw the beginnings of the “sabotaging [of] world peace” by Wilson’s opponents. Intensely loyal to his old chief (“the easiest man to comprehend . . . utterly frank and genuine”), he bowls over Wilson’s opponents and disaffected friends one by one, from Henry Cabot Lodge and George Harvey to Secretary of State Lansing and the mysterious Colonel House. Said Wilson once: “I have reached the conclusion that [Ambassador] Walter [Hines] Page is the damndest fool we ever appointed. Don’t you agree?” His Navy Secretary shook his head. “No I do not. I am committed to Admiral Sims.”

The Daniels motto is calmly Virgilian: “These things I saw and part of them I was.” The Daniels spirit is that of an Old Covenanter, with a long memory, Methodist leanings and the light of battle in his eye.