With all this going on, Tommy would have been hard pressed to be thoroughly bored. However, all he could do was watch, and that palled after a while. Hence, when in late December the Minnesota was ordered to the Philadelphia Navy Yard for replacement of her 8-inch and 12-inch guns, he was pleased.
This movement meant another dull period, the only redeeming factor being that there was frequent opportunity to see his wife and young family. Caroline had moved into her parents’ big house at 1751 N Street, in Washington, so Tommy spent what weekends he could with them. When there, he found himself swept up in the round of dinners, plays, dances, and other entertainments that was so much a part of the Brownsons’ life and with which he had become familiar five years before. By February the refit was complete, and the Minnesota sailed to the Caribbean for gunnery and torpedo practice. That Hart loved. Engine trouble, however, forced a return to Philadelphia, where the ship remained until the early summer of 1915. Tommy’s birthday found him in that port, gloomily contemplating his present and his future. At thirty-eight, he was thinking often of old age and even considering himself a man of advanced years. “I realize,” he wrote in his diary, “that I’ve about reached—or perhaps have passed—the zenith of my powers, mental, physical, nerves and all that, and must in the near future perceive the down-hill tendency. . . .”20 This may have just been a bad time or an early midlife crisis, but it is indicative of the Tommy Hart who will appear again and again in the pages of his diary. Gone is the fun-loving, harum-scarum cadet; here is a somewhat sober, critical man confronting the problems of the world. The humor is still there, but it has been overlaid with a thick veneer of mature sobriety. By and large, the diary is filled with the serious reflections of a man who sees the world as a less than perfect place.
The rest of 1915 was spent in a variety of activities, including a leave at the Adirondack League Club on Little Moose Lake, in upstate New York. The countryside and the activities reminded Hart of his boyhood home in Michigan. There were fishing, tennis, and long tramps through the woods, and he thought if he could stay all summer “it would renew my long lost youth.”21 Neither a whole summer on leave nor a regained youth was possible, though. Fall meant putting Isabella and Roswell in school, so the Brownsons’ home in Washington again became their home, too. This might not have been the most satisfactory arrangement, as Admiral Brownson had not yet fully accepted Tommy into the bosom of the family, but it was convenient for Caroline and since Tommy should be going to sea soon, it seemed practical.
In November, while the Minnesota was at Hampton Roads, Virginia, preparing to be put through full-power trials with her newly reworked engines, reports began to come in from Flint suggesting that Tommy’s father was dying. He did not feel he should go to Flint until he heard something definite regarding his father’s condition because, he said, he often denied his men leave unless their relative’s death were imminent.
On 4 December John Hart died. Absorbing this blow, coupled with the guilty realization that he had been imprudent in not going home immediately, put Hart in a very low state of mind. “I haven’t seen my father in the past ten months of his life and he has undoubtedly known that he was on his death bed and would have liked to see his only child before he went over the great divide,” Hart wrote. “I’ve never been a very good son and I’ve failed lamentably in the end.”22 “My father,” he went on, “was in many respects much more of a man than his son will ever be. He had only a common school education and was never of keen mentality. What he got came by hard work. He was positively determined, never ‘quit’ and never spared himself. All who knew him trusted him implicitly and respected his many excellent qualities. Yet he was always unlucky and his last few years were unhappy ones.” He had lost what funds he had through unwise—“they were more than that, they really were foolish”—investments, and died almost penniless. Hart sent him some money, small amounts, but now he felt terribly guilty that he had not done more to make his father’s last years easier.
When he arrived in Flint he found the family had already gathered and most arrangements had been made. The weather was bitter on the day of the funeral, with dark clouds and blowing snow. John Hart’s friends from the Grand Army of the Republic managed the ceremony, which saw him laid to rest in a woodland cemetery outside of Davison where Tommy’s mother was buried. “It was oh so cold bleak and dreary,” Hart wrote. But finally the casket was lowered into the frozen ground.
The next two days he spent with his stepmother and her daughter’s family, trying to get his father’s affairs straightened out. As anyone who has been through this routine knows, it is sad under the best of circumstances. In this case, where there were few comforts or financial reserves to fall back on, it was especially poignant. He resolved to do what he could to assist the two women financially and provided what emotional support he could muster. Everything seemed so rough and barren compared with the life he had made for himself. The contrasts between Michigan and the East Coast were striking, between his new family and his old, between his luck and his father’s lack of it.
It was with a sense of relief that on 10 December he boarded a train bound for Washington. He arrived home to find everyone thriving. With his father’s death, he realized that he was “down to Caroline and the babies” but “no man, no matter how good he is, deserves more than that.”23 It must have made him even more guilty or at least apprehensive to see how blessed he was because he wrote in the next sentence, “This good luck of mine is due for an awful change.” Whereas it seems somewhat unusual for a man to be referring to his good luck a week after his father has died, the pessimism is vintage Hart.
The relationship between a father and a son is obviously very important in determining the character of the son. In Hart’s case, the slight contact there had been makes it extremely difficult to estimate what influences were exerted; however, certain reasonable suggestions can be made. There is often a feeling of guilt between children and parents and there surely was a measure of that here. On the other hand, there is an avoidance of responsibility evident in Tommy’s attribution of “bad luck” as the cause of his father’s poor showing in life. It is as though Tommy were denying that anyone, not his father, not himself, was responsible for the unhappy way things turned out. Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the relative lack of contact between these two people was the most important factor in their relationship. Away for long periods when Tommy was a child, distant and taciturn even when present, seldom visited or visiting during Tommy’s years at Annapolis or after, John Hart had a slight impact on his son’s life. Part of Tommy’s immediate sadness may well have arisen from the recognition of opportunities missed and now lost forever. Whatever the case, it does not appear that he mourned for long.
Christmas was spent at the Brownsons’ where a spirit of old-fashioned festivity prevailed, but it was becoming increasingly clear, as 1915 gave way to 1916, that world events might soon impinge on Hart’s domestic preoccupation. On land the struggle for Verdun would begin within weeks, and eventually hundreds of thousands of men would be poured into the maw of battle. At sea a tenuous truce was being maintained following the sinking of the Arabic. Brilliant, committed young Americans were joining the Allied forces as volunteers and Teddy Roosevelt was stimulating the preparedness movement in the United States. Wilson was to run for president again in the fall, pointing with pride at his success in keeping America out of war. Yet the signs were ominous. Could the Allies hold on without aid from the United States? Did Americans have a “right” to travel where they wished on the high seas? Would the Germans really restrain their U-boats?
And what of America’s submarines? Even after innumerable modifications as well as considerable help from the British, who were the leaders in the field, American boats continued to have trouble. On 25 March 1915 the F-4 sank off Hawaii, with the loss of twenty-one lives, the first submarine disaster in the history of the U.S. Navy. Complicating the issue, the U.S. Navy’s torpedoes were not performing properly. No one was quite certain whether the root of the difficulties rested with the submarines, the weapons, or the officers in command. One solution was to replace the three remaining F-boats at Pearl with four new K-boats; another was to assign