A conversation with Lee A. Craig
Author of Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times
Published May 1, 2013
$35.00 cloth, 978-1-4696-0695-8
Q: Josephus Daniels (1862-1948) helped revolutionize the newspaper industry; he led the white
supremacy movement in the North Carolina (1898-1900); he served as secretary of the navy during
World War I (1913-1921); and he was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico (1933-1942).
As an expert in economic history, when did you first become interested in Daniels and how does
your field lend itself to a biography of such an influential politician?
A: I first became interested in Daniels while I was in graduate school in the 1980s. Initially, he attracted
my attention through his actions as secretary of the navy. The world’s leading navies were undergoing a
technological revolution during Daniels’s tenure as head of the U.S. Navy. The submarine and the
battleship were new technologies, and I was curious about how he managed that transition. In addition, as
the head of the U.S. Marine Corps, which was controlled by the Navy Department, he oversaw a dramatic
expansion of U.S. gunboat diplomacy. I was fascinated by this near-pacifist who was also a leading
gunboat diplomatist.
As for the question about how economic history contributes to our understanding of Daniels’s life, it is
important to recall that he was first and foremost a businessman and a capitalist. He would never have
described himself as a politician. He was a newspaper publisher during a period in which that industry,
largely thanks to men like Daniels, underwent tremendous change. Without some background in
economics, finance, and accounting, it would have been difficult to understand the most important part of
his public life.
Q: Your prologue refers to Josephus Daniels as a near-pacifist who “created one of history’s
greatest war machines” [i.e. the modern U.S. Navy] and a “staunch anti-imperialist [who] oversaw
… a gunboat empire.” How does your book explain these contradictions?
A: The short answer is “political expediency.” Daniels did not foresee World War I. After the war began,
he did not foresee U.S. entry into it. So, before the United States became entangled in the war, he saw the
navy as primarily a means by which its men could be elevated to be more productive citizens once they
left the service. “Every ship should be a school,” was one of his mottos. However, once war came, and he
saw how the British dominated the Germans in the war at sea, he realized the only way the United States
could prevent being dominated in future conflicts was to build the world’s largest and most powerful
navy.
As for his exercise of gunboat diplomacy, partly his intervention came from following orders from the
president, Woodrow Wilson, who possessed a more idealistic view of the country’s foreign policy than
Daniels did. (Wilson summarized his views on the matter with: “I am going to teach the South American
republics to elect good men.” Daniels did not think that possible.) Daniels did not like the policy, but
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Wilson was a political winner, and Daniels backed him. Once war came, however, Daniels actively
intervened in Mexico and Haiti to prevent the Germans from establishing bases or otherwise exercising
influence in those countries.
Q: Josephus Daniels took over his first newspaper, the Wilson Advance, at the age of eighteen. Can
you describe how “the least academically gifted of the Daniels boys,” without a penny to his name,
more than doubled the circulation of a weekly newspaper in just five years?
A: Hard work. There was no magic fairy dust. Daniels worked from sun up to well past sun down, except
on Sundays, nearly every day of his life from early boyhood until the week he died. To expand the
circulation of his early papers he knocked on doors signing up subscribers and advertisers. Three of his
four sons eventually went to work for the Raleigh News and Observer, and each started in the collection
department.
Q: Your book offers a behind-the-scenes look at Daniels’s role as the leader of the white supremacy
movement in North Carolina early in his career. What are some of the things you discovered in
regard to this that weren’t known previously?
A: I don’t claim to have “discovered” anything, but I will say the emphasis in most of earlier literature is
on race; whereas, my interpretation of Daniels’s actions emphasizes politics. Daniels used race as means
to an end; rather than as an end in itself. He exploited the racism of a majority of the state’s voters to
obtain political power for the Democratic Party at the expense of black voters, who at that time voted
overwhelmingly Republican.
This is not to excuse his behavior, which was clearly racist. But, as I quote another writer in the prologue,
“It is easy to condemn the villains of the past and hard to understand the world that made them.” In the
book I strive to help the reader understand Daniels’s world and his actions.
Q: During his tenure as secretary of the navy, Daniels became famous (or notorious) for banning
the use of alcohol onboard navy vessels, associating himself with the increased consumption of
coffee. The drink came to be known as “a cup of Josephus Daniels” and was allegedly shortened to
“cup-a-Joe.” Most people don’t realize that Daniels also significantly impacted the navy’s
organizational structure and started a major dreadnought building program. In what area did he
make the biggest impact to the navy as it was known then and today?
A: It would not be possible to overstate Daniels’s influence on the navy. He essentially created the twoocean navy. When he left office, the navy had plans for nearly two thousand ships, and it was the most
powerful in the world. Only a generation earlier it had not even been in the top ten. The German defeat in
World War I was, in Daniels’s view, largely the result of the German navy’s failure to break the British
blockade of the continent. Daniels was no Anglophile. He thought in the future, the British, who had
possessed the world’s most powerful navy for over a century, were as likely to be our enemy as our allies.
If it came to another world-wide conflict, then he wanted to control the largest possible navy in that fight.
Q: From 1933 to 1941, Daniels was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambassador to Mexico, but you say that
Daniels “coveted a return to the Navy Department.” How did he view this transition so late in his
career?
A: Phlegmatically. He wanted the navy post, but it was not that important to him. He was seventy years
old and enjoying running the News and Observer with his sons. He was willing to serve, and, if given a
choice would have chosen the navy, but another high-ranking appointment was acceptable, and no
appointment would have been as well.
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Q: In your prologue, you talk about having been “both served and hindered by [Daniels’s]
voluminous written record.” Can you describe your research in these archives and how they gave
you a better understanding of Josephus Daniels as a person, not just another prominent politician?
A: I could go on at length in response to this question; however, just to give you a concise feel for the
more lengthy answer, let me give one example. In public and in his post-war biography of Wilson,
Daniels gave the impression that he and Wilson saw eye-to-eye on the administration’s main policies.
However, in his diaries and other correspondence, he revealed large and important differences between
them.
For example, Daniels thought Wilson’s neutrality policies were excessively pro-British (Daniels was
correct); he thought the president botched the post-war peace by first being too hard on the defeated
Germans (Daniels was correct), and by then refusing to compromise on the peace treaty, which was
eventually defeated in the Senate (Daniels was probably correct here, as well). On a personal level,
Daniels thought Wilson too often mingled his religious views with his pursuit of public policies.
Q: Were there any aspects of Daniels’s life that were more challenging to get information about? If
so, what were they?
A: Daniels left a voluminous paper trail (nearly 400,000 pieces of correspondence), but the paper trail
increased as he aged. Not surprisingly, I can find a lot more about his life in 1942 than I could in 1872.
So, without question, the early years of his life were the hardest to reconstruct. I had to rely on his
memoirs and other secondary sources more than I would have liked.
Q: Daniels wrote several books, including his five-volume memoirs published between 1939 and
1947. Can you tell us about what these books reveal about Daniels and why such a prominent voice
and influence in the newspaper industry decided to write books?
A: Broadly speaking, there are two reasons: one was setting the record straight, from his viewpoint,
concerning the Wilson administration’s prosecution of World War I. This resulted in his first two postwar volumes: Our Navy at War (published in 1922) and a biography of Wilson (1924). The biography of
Wilson is a hagiography, which focuses on justifying Wilson’s policies. Our Navy at War focuses
specifically on Daniels’s management of the Navy Department. As I note in the book, during the last two
years of the Wilson administration, the combination of Republican control of Congress and Wilson’s poor
health resulted in the administration achieving very little while being subjected to much criticism. These
two volumes are Daniels’s answer to that criticism.
The second reason he wrote later books, which led to his memoirs, all 2,000-plus pages of them, was to
set the record straight for his entire life! He wanted to tell his story. By the way, Daniels was a much
better newspaper editorialist than he was as an author.
Q: Has your view of Daniels changed during the process of researching and writing this book? If so,
how?
A: I once heard a sermon in which the minister said, in effect, when the Bible contradicts itself,
seemingly offering two versions of the truth, then one should believe both versions. As a scholar, this was
not a very satisfying message, but in researching Daniels’s life and times I’ve become comfortable with
the contradictions of the man. He was a political progressive, a warm-hearted family man, a man who
genuinely cared about the country’s less-fortunate and down-trodden, at least as he defined them. Yet at
the same time, he was a white supremacist, who used the coercive powers of the state to keep blacks in a
socially and economically inferior state for generations. He was a near-pacifist who tried to keep the
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United States out of the world’s worst war to date; yet, he was gunboat diplomatist. He was a capitalist;
yet, he sought extensive government regulation of private capital.
Taken together, his life reveals what I once heard described as “the sometimes smallness of great men.”
In short, just as we have to confront the fact that the author of the Declaration of Independence was a
slaveholder, I had to confront the fact that the most consistently progressive American political leader
between the Civil War and the Cold War was also the father of Jim Crow. In the book, I try to explain this
contradiction.
###
This interview may be reprinted in part or in its entirety with the following credit: Lee A. Craig, author of
Josephus Daniels: His Life and Times, (University of North Carolina Press, Spring 2013). The text of
this interview is available at www.ibiblio.org/uncp/media/craig/.
PUBLISHING DETAILS
ISBN 978-1-4696-0695-8 $35.00 cloth
Publication date: May 1, 2013
512 pp., 26 halftones, notes, bibl., index
For more information: http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/10225.html
The University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.unc.edu
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