That same day, Secretary Lansing informed Senator Frank Kellogg of Minnesota, who had presented the first expulsion petition to the Senate, that there was no record that former Secretary of State Bryan knew ammunition was aboard the Lusitania. Lansing had telephoned Bryan, who said he did not find out about the ammunition until three or four days after the sinking. Bryan made a statement to the press corroborating this claim. The administration was now indubitably involved in trying to destroy La Follette.
On October 5, the New York Times reported that the Senate’s Privileges and Elections Subcommittee was going to study the evidence while Congress was in recess and hold public hearings on the senator’s possible expulsion in December. Federal Judge Charles F. Amidon of North Dakota wrote to the senator: “It is a time when all the spirits of evil are turned loose. The Kaisers of high finance . . . see this opportunity to turn war patriotism into an engine of attack. They are using it everywhere.” He urged La Follette to somehow keep his spirit “unclouded by hatred.”53
La Follette needed this advice. On the last day of the Senate’s session, he defended himself in a three-hour speech, quoting excerpts from famous statesmen who had spoken out against wars in their time—including Prime Minister David Lloyd George, a fierce critic of the Boer War. Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas answered him in a speech that filled five pages of the Congressional Record. He came down the aisle and shouted insults in La Follette’s face. Robinson told La Follette to apply to the kaiser for a seat in the Reichstag, implied that the senator had taken German propaganda money, and declared there were “only two sides to this conflict—Germanism and Americanism; the Kaiser or the President.”54
XV
In another part of the war, John J. Pershing was making good on his promise to Theodore Roosevelt to bring his sons to France. No slouch at the political side of his job, when Pershing said farewell to Secretary of War Baker, the general asked how he would react if Pershing cabled a request for the two older boys, Ted and Archie. Baker did the handsome thing and replied that not only did he have no objections, but the two young men should serve as officers. The secretary made Ted a major and Archie a lieutenant.
Pershing passed the word to TR, and the Roosevelts went to work on wangling a berth on a transport. They sailed for France on June 20 aboard a lumbering French ship named, for some unknown reason, Chicago. The family came from all directions for a festive farewell party. TR was, of course, the centerpiece. Young Ted’s wife, Eleanor, was more than a little upset when the former president announced in his ebullient way that he expected at least one of his sons to be wounded and possibly killed in France.55
Escorted by a French destroyer, Chicago reached Bordeaux without mishap. The two Roosevelts were besieged by Frenchmen asking how many more Americans would arrive soon. The French were crestfallen when they learned the brothers were “not the vanguard of an enormous army which would follow without interruption,” ted told his father. The scene was repeated when they shared a compartment with a group of French soldiers on the trip to Paris.
Pershing assigned the brothers to the First Division, which was training in Lorraine, and Ted was given command of a battalion in the Twenty-Sixth Infantry. Archie soon managed to get himself seconded to the same battalion. Their father thought this was a very bad idea, but they ignored his advice. They both went to work on turning the ragtag collection of discards and raw volunteers into fighting soldiers.
The second oldest Roosevelt son, Kermit, had only spent a few days at the Plattsburgh training camp, not enough to win a commission in the U.S. Army. He decided to volunteer for the British army. His father asked Ambassador Cecil Spring Rice, a close friend, to arrange for Kermit to enlist in Canada. Soon the young man was en route to England to pick up his commission and report to the general in command of the British army fighting the Turks in Mesopotamia. One suspects that Spring Rice had something to do with this assignment. British army lieutenants on the Western Front tended to have very brief careers.
Kermit was the son to whom Roosevelt was closest—and who worried him most. A heavy drinker, given to bouts of the blackest gloom, he had traveled to Africa with his father to shoot lions and later survived a horrendous trip with TR down the River of Doubt, a tributary of the Amazon. Kermit was the only one who could tell his father he had little enthusiasm for the war. He would much prefer to stay home with his wife and newborn son. “The only way I would have been really enthusiastic about going would have been with you,” he wrote later.56
XVI
Roosevelt’s youngest son, twenty-year-old Quentin, was as ebullient as Kermit was melancholy. Everyone agreed he was the one who most resembled his father. A gifted writer, he had published surprisingly mature poems and stories in the Groton School magazine. He had the same omnivorous interest in history, literature, languages and politics. Another gift baffled the entire family: Quentin seemed to have an uncommon talent for dealing with machines—to the point of majoring in mechanical engineering at Harvard.
This fondness for technology led him to take a very different path to the war. He joined the U.S. Army Air Service and began flight training at Mineola on Long Island not far from Sagamore Hill, the family home in Oyster Bay. He regularly buzzed the big house to waggle his wings at his father. Another target was the mansion of Harry Payne and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in nearby Old Westbury. There lived the love of Quentin’s life, beautiful Flora Payne Whitney, heiress to an immense fortune.
These two privileged young people had slowly, warily, fallen in love over the previous two years. They were both aware of the social distance between them. Flora’s father and mother regarded Theodore Roosevelt as a political revolutionary. Quentin’s father had an even lower opinion of “the dull purblind folly of the very rich . . . their greed and arrogance.” when Quentin proposed in the spring of 1917, he added in a note: “I haven’t yet seen my family. I wonder if they’ll approve.”57
He soon discovered their parents were only part of their problems. Quentin’s proposal produced a crisis in Flora’s mind and heart. She revealed for the first time how much Quentin intimidated her with his quotes from Dostoyevsky, his insider’s political observations, his literary gifts. Flora feared she was “too ordinary” for him. Quentin responded with the timeless philosophy of lovers:“If two people really love each other nothing else matters. . . . I might be a Mormon and you an Abyssinian polyandrist and everything would be all right because you can’t get beyond love.”58
By the end of May, Quentin had the answer he was seeking, and it was his turn to be intimidated.“I don’t yet see how you can love me,” he wrote. “I feel as if it were all a dream from which I shall wake . . . with nothing left to me but the memory of the beauty and the wonder of it all. You see I know how very ordinary I am and how wonderful you are.”59
Meanwhile Quentin was learning to fly in cumbersome Curtiss Jenny aircraft that could barely make sixty miles per hour. Nevertheless there was a tremendous thrill in conquering the sky. Quentin had had to overcome some rather serious physical disabilities to get into the air. His eyesight was terrible; he had been forced to memorize the eye chart in advance. He had also managed to conceal a bad back, injured in a fall from a horse during an Arizona camping trip the previous summer. Between them, these limitations made him a less than first-class pilot. His landings were clumsy and his takeoffs often hair-raising. But there was no doubt that he would graduate from Mineola’s rudimentary training school. The U.S. Army Air Service had a grand total of thirty-five pilots and was inclined to give a commission to anyone who could get a plane off the ground and keep it in the air for a while.60
Quentin and Flora mutually dedicated themselves to persuading their families to accept them as a couple. In a matter of weeks, Flora had utterly charmed Theodore Roosevelt and defrosted much of the chill in his far more disapproving wife, Edith. A glimpse of his mother’s attitude is visible in a note Quentin wrote to Edith, remarking he was glad she liked Flora, now that she “
had got past the fact that she was a Whitney and powdered her nose.”61
With an absolute minimum of thought, the War Department decided that Quentin and his group of ten barely trained fliers would go to Europe as an advanced guard of what Secretary of War Newton Baker called “an army of the air.” For Quentin and Flora, the decision meant the most painful word in love’s vocabulary, separation. In mid-July 1917, a week before he sailed, Quentin brought Flora to dinner at Sagamore Hill and confided to his parents that they were engaged. They did not perform a similar ritual in Old Westbury. There the secret remained unspoken, while Flora struggled to find the courage to tell her parents.
On July 23, 1917, Flora joined Edith and TR at the Hudson River pier where Quentin’s troopship was docked. When the sailing was delayed, the elder Roosevelts tactfully went home, leaving the lovers alone. They walked up and down for hours, waiting for the cry of All Aboard. Finally, Quentin sent Flora home to her family’s mansion at 871 Fifth Avenue. There, she told Quentin,“the accumulated sea of tears” became a great gulf in her throat. Still she did not weep. She had decided it would be unworthy of their love.62
In Quentin’s pocket when the troopship sailed was a letter from Flora, written on July 19. “All I do from now on will be for you,” she wrote.“I will do something—wait and see—so when you do come back I will be more what you want—more of a real person and a better companion and you will care for me as much as I care for you.”63
Quentin confessed to his parents that he felt down after Flora went home. He tried to cheer up them and himself by confidently predicting he would be “back sometime within a year.” to Flora he admitted his hopes were tinged with darkness:“If I am not killed, there will be a time when I shall draw [sail] into New York again, and you will be there on the pier, just as you were when I left, and there will be no parting for us for a long time to come.”64
XVII
While the Roosevelts headed for the war, their cousin Franklin continued to do his utmost to unseat his boss, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels. The assistant secretary invited the well-known American historical novelist Winston Churchill, an Annapolis graduate, to do a study of the navy’s efficiency and morale. The writer found many faults and sent to the president (a personal friend) a confidential report that gave Daniels some hard knocks for “dilatoriness.” At one point, Churchill opined that the secretary’s slow-motion style threatened to “paralyze the activities of the naval service.” But Wilson made no move to reprimand much less fire Daniels, and Franklin glumly concluded in a letter to Eleanor that it would “take lots more of the Churchill type of attack.”65
Franklin’s rumor-mongering assistant, Louis Howe, was still hard at work trying to crank up such an assault in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. This campaign came to an abrupt stop when George Creel appeared in Franklin’s office and “let [Howe] have it right between the eyes.” Creel was an ardent Daniels backer and had helped quash calls to replace him during the 1916 presidential campaign. He had gotten Admiral George Dewey, the hero of Manila Bay, to issue a glowing encomium of the secretary. As head of the CPI, Creel had put tracers on the “old canards” about Daniels’s inefficiency and unpopularity that were sprouting in various newspapers. The tracers led straight to Howe, who spluttered that he was actually trying to defend Daniels. Creel replied that if he heard any more of his “phony explanations” he would tell the whole story to President Wilson,“who had a very precise idea of what constituted loyalty.”66
Franklin may have been able to bear his aborted ambition with equanimity for a very personal, extremely private reason. He was in love. The object of his passionate affection was twenty-six-year-old Lucy Mercer, a willowy, brown-haired descendant of one of the first families of Maryland, whose alcoholic father had dissipated not only himself but also his wife’s fortune.
Eleanor hired Lucy as her private secretary in 1914, when she was feeling overwhelmed by raising five children and playing Washington hostess. Her tender heart was undoubtedly touched by Lucy’s sad family story and its similarity to her tormented childhood with her own alcoholic father, Elliott Roosevelt. The charming Miss Mercer soon became a member of the family, often invited to fill out dinner parties and join the Roosevelts on Potomac cruises about the Navy yacht Sylph. She even impressed Franklin’s formidable mother as “sweet and adorable.”
When Lucy and Franklin became lovers is uncertain, but there is little doubt that they were deeply involved by the summer of 1917—and Eleanor was uneasily suspecting the worst. She terminated Lucy’s employment, but the charming Miss Mercer immediately enlisted in the navy and was—surprise surprise—assigned to duties in the State, War and Navy Building.67
When the time came for Eleanor to take the children to their summer home on Campobello Island in Passamaquoddy Bay, just off the Maine coast, she resisted and delayed and finally accused Franklin of trying to get rid of her. Franklin called her a “goosey girl” and finally persuaded her and their brood to depart. He was soon writing her soothing letters about how much he missed her and “hated the thought” of their childless Washington house. He casually mentioned in his letters more cruises on the Potomac and other outings that included Lucy and Nigel Law, a young British diplomat who was acting as his complaisant beard. As for coming to Campobello, Franklin suddenly found the press of navy business overwhelming and canceled several departure dates.
Gossip began swirling through Washington while Eleanor’s uneasiness mounted. Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter Alice, married to Congressman Nicholas Longworth, himself a notorious womanizer, saw Franklin and Lucy tooling along a Maryland lane in an open car and sent him a sly note. Alice promptly invited the couple to a dinner party.“He deserved a good time,” Alice reportedly said.“He was married to Eleanor.”68
When Franklin came down with a sore throat and high fever, Eleanor rushed to Washington to nurse him. Before she left him on August 14, they apparently had a major argument about just when he was coming to Campobello. The next day she wrote with uncharacteristic sternness: “I count on seeing you the 26th [of August]. My threat was no idle one.” Had she threatened to discuss her suspicions with his mother, who held the family purse strings? This time Franklin showed up and stayed long enough to restore Eleanor’s confidence in his affection.69
That fall, after Eleanor and her children had returned to Washington, with no warning Lucy Mercer was discharged from the service “by special order of the Secretary of the Navy.” the ostensible reason was the illness and death of her father, but at least one Roosevelt biographer has opined that rumors of her affair with Franklin had reached Josephus Daniels’s ears. A deeply religious man, he did not consider adultery a mere peccadillo.
If Daniels or Eleanor thought the assistant secretary would be discouraged by threats or veiled rebukes, they soon discovered how wrong they were. The lovers continued to see each other in the Maryland or Virginia countryside, and wrote passionate letters celebrating their trysts.70
XVIII
Other things were on the Roosevelts’ minds—and on the minds of many other Americans—in the summer and fall of 1917. “General Wood has been here,” Eleanor wrote a friend. “& F. has been fearfully depressed by what he tells. Hopeless incompetence seems to surround us in high places.” Leonard Wood was doing his utmost to repay Woodrow Wilson for refusing to appoint him commander of the AEF. He knew that Theodore Roosevelt’s cousin would be more than willing to listen to his horror stories about the Wilson war effort.71
In May, the War Department abruptly transferred Wood from Governor’s Island, where he was in command of the Eastern Department and had access to dozens of reporters as well as Theodore Roosevelt. Sent to Charleston to command the Southeast Department, Wood told a friend: “I . . . shall set the South on fire.” He did exactly that. In Charleston, Atlanta and other Southern cities, he was welcomed with parades and speeches. Spotting a small Confederate flag in an old man’s hand, Wood said,“That is an honorable flag. Men have
died for it.” thereafter he could do no wrong in Dixie.72
Wood toured the many new camps in the South and was dismayed by what he found.“Old broken-down colonels ” were in command, without a clue about how to train a new generation of officers.“Their lack of energy . . . acts like a brake on all progress.” wood saw the oldsters as another illustration of the War Department’s “dead cold hand of inefficiency.”
Everywhere, the general made speeches emphasizing “the little done, the undone vast,” an all-but-explicit criticism of the Wilson administration. In a July letter to TR, Wood wrote: “They are beginning to ask why isn’t something being done. They cannot be much longer fooled by throwing dust in the air and shouting ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’”73
Again, with no warning, the War Department transferred Wood to Kansas. This was a blunder. Wilson had said he was keeping Wood home the way the British had retained their biggest hero, Lord Kitchener, in England, to train troops. Southern papers fulminated at the president’s hypocrisy and accused him of mixing politics with the battlefield. A friend assured Wood,“You have got the East and South ablaze, and God knows what you will do with the Middle West.”74
In command of the new Eighty-Ninth Division at Camp Funston in Kansas, Wood told a friend on September 6, 1917,“Our men are coming in and we are without arms, without artillery and pretty much everything we need, including uniforms, and there is not much prospect of them in the near future.” He sardonically wondered how a nation “of our numerical and financial strength” could have watched a great war come nearer and nearer and now found itself, five months after war was declared, unable to equip the small number of troops called to the colors so far.
The Illusion of Victory Page 19