Conflict With Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt
Promoted to captain in September 1918, he was assigned to head the Division of Enlisted Personnel of the Bureau of Navigation. Aware of the inadequacies of manpower from his experience in the fleet during World War I, in 1920, he was embroiled in a publicized dispute with Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt and testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Navy Affairs regarding the personnel shortage in the Navy, stating that navy department heads had failed "to take adequate steps to provide personnel necessary for the proper conduct of the navy during the war." For his outspoken views, Taussig earned the lifetime enmity of Roosevelt, who was in a political fight with the Republican Party over his nomination as Vice President, and wrote a sharp letter to the navy subcommittee denying Taussig's charges.
Taussig candidly maintained that, "the Navy was far from being ready for War... and the enlisted personnel was entirely inadequate for the proper manning of our already completed ships on a peace time basis, and was dangerously inadequate should we suddenly be thrown into war." Secretary Josephus Daniels was angered by Taussig's dissent and denied publication of Taussig's prize-winning essay on naval personnel in the Naval Institute press.
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