Josephus Daniels: The Man Who Banned Whiskey from the Navy

The house that stood near this spot in Raleigh belonged to one of the more consequential and underappreciated figures in American history, a North Carolina newspaper editor who became Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Navy and reshaped an institution in ways that still echo today.

Josephus Daniels was born in Washington, North Carolina, in eighteen sixty-two, and came to Raleigh as a young man to build the News and Observer into the state's most powerful Democratic newspaper. His editorials were pugnacious and influential, and they brought him to Wilson's attention. In nineteen thirteen, Wilson appointed him Secretary of the Navy, a civilian editor put in charge of the world's second-largest fleet.

Daniels immediately did what editors do: he rewrote the rules. His most famous order banned alcohol from all Navy ships and stations on July first, nineteen fourteen, the day after the order took effect, officers throughout the fleet were left drinking coffee at their wardroom tables. Navy coffee became strong because it needed to be a substitute for something. The expression for strong black coffee, a cup of Joe, is often said to honor Daniels, though naval historians debate the etymology.

But Daniels did far more than ban liquor. He established schools aboard naval vessels to educate enlisted men who had never finished their formal schooling. He pushed to integrate women into the Navy as yeomanettes during World War One, the first time women served officially in the United States military in a non-nursing capacity. And he pressed for a young assistant secretary named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose career he mentored through the war years.

Daniels returned to the News and Observer in nineteen twenty-one, then served as Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to Mexico. He died in Raleigh in nineteen forty-eight, still writing editorials in his eighties. The house has since been demolished, but his mark on the Navy, and on American politics, is not easily erased.