Theodore had hoped to win over progressive Democrats, but most were happy with Wilson. And when several important Republicans decided to remain loyal to their party and not join the Progressives, the Colonel felt his campaign was doomed.
Nonetheless, as he had done when he ran in the three-way race for mayor of New York in 1886, Theodore fought gamely. He portrayed both Taft and Wilson as puppets of political bosses and corporate tycoons. As always, the ex-president attracted big crowds—throngs of westerners stood for hours in the hot sun at train stops just to hear him speak for a few minutes as he traveled cross country. In Los Angeles, he drew a crowd of some two hundred thousand.
The campaign was cut short in Milwaukee on October 14 when a would-be assassin shot Theodore. With a bullet lodged in his chest, the candidate gave a remarkable hour-long speech to the crowd that was waiting at a nearby auditorium to hear him. Then aides rushed Theodore to the hospital. The chest wound was not life-threatening, but it was serious enough to keep him hospitalized for nearly a week and at Sagamore Hill for the last two weeks before the election.
On November 5, 1912, Woodrow Wilson won the election with 6.3 million votes; Theodore received 4.1 million; Taft received 3.5 million; and the socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs received 900,000 votes. “Well, we have gone down in smashing defeat,” Theodore said. “I had expected defeat, but I had expected that we would make a better showing.”
That winter at Sagamore Hill, as Theodore began to write a serialized autobiography for The Outlook, he felt “unspeakably lonesome.” Was he finished with politics? “When it is evident,” he noted, “that a leader’s day is past the one service he can do is step aside and leave the ground clear for the development of a successor.” But he had said he was through with politics back in 1883 after his first term in the New York Assembly. And he said it again in 1884 when he went west to raise cattle, and again in 1887 after he married Edith.
11
IN THE SUMMER of 1914, World War I, or the Great War as it was called then, began. While the conflict had roots in earlier quarrels between the great European nations, the spark that ignited the war was the assassination in June of Austria’s Archduke Frances Ferdinand.
The main combatants were the Allied Powers of Great Britain, France, and Belgium and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. Before it ended, the war involved thirty-two nations and 65 million servicemen, of whom 20 million were wounded and 10 million killed. President Woodrow Wilson kept the United States officially neutral for three years, but German submarines kept sinking American cargo ships and killing American citizens, forcing the president to declare war on the Central Powers in April 1917.
One of Wilson’s biggest critics was at Sagamore Hill writing magazine articles and a weekly newspaper column. Ever since he had written his book The Naval War of 1812, Theodore had stressed the importance of military preparedness, and he severely criticized Wilson for not adequately preparing the United States for World War I. He also criticized the president for not responding aggressively to Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914, or to the German submarine attack a year later that sank the passenger ship Lusitania and killed 1,198 people, including 128 Americans. “I despise Wilson,” Theodore told Bamie. And in another letter he said the Democratic president represented a “cult of cowardice.”
The colonel, despite being fifty-nine years old, was eager to get into the fighting on the front lines in France. “I so strongly believe that where physical conditions will permit,” he wrote to Kermit, “it is the old, the men whose life is behind them and who have drained the cup of joy and sorrow, of achievement and failure, who should be in the danger line, for the little sooner or the little later matters little to them.”
Just as he had done in the Spanish-American War nearly twenty years earlier, Theodore wanted to recruit his own troops and lead them into battle. “I would literally, and gladly give my life to command a brigade of regulars under Pershing,” he told a friend. “I could have raised four divisions (or eight divisions—200,000 men) of the finest fighting men and could have got them into the fighting line at the earliest moment.” But Theodore didn’t get the official approval he needed from President Wilson. Wars weren’t fought that way anymore, he was told. For the first time the United States relied on a national draft to supply millions of soldiers.
While Theodore couldn’t fight, his children could. “It’s rather up to us to practice what Father preaches,” Quentin told Owen Wister, the novelist and family friend. Ethel and her husband, a surgeon named Dick Derby, had already volunteered to go to Europe. In late 1914 they had left their toddler son with Theodore and Edith while they both went to Neuilly, France, to care for wounded Allied soldiers. And Ted’s wife Eleanor volunteered to work with the YMCA providing rest and recreation services for Allied soldiers near the battlefield. With their encouragement, Theodore had pulled strings in Washington to get his sons good assignments. Ted and Archie got officers’ commissions in General John Pershing’s 1st Division, so they would be among the first American soldiers to see action. Kermit wanted to get into the fight even sooner. After his father appealed to British prime minister David Lloyd George, the British army gave Kermit a commission as a captain and sent him to Mesopotamia—which later became modern-day Iraq—to fight the Turks in a motorized machine-gun unit. Quentin, who was nineteen, had trouble with his eyes, so he memorized an eye examination chart to pass the physical exam and be accepted as a pilot in the Army Air Corps.
“It is a very hard thing on you four to go,” Theodore explained to Archie. “It would be infinitely harder not to go, not to have risen level to the supreme crisis in the world’s history, not to have won the right to stand with the mighty men of the mighty days.” On Edith and Theodore’s front porch a red-and-white service flag with five blue stars, one for each son or daughter serving the country, fluttered in the breeze.
Theodore felt the nation needed a leader stronger than Wilson, and he wanted to be the Republican presidential nominee in 1916. He knew he couldn’t win the presidency on a third-party ticket. Rejoining the Republicans was the only way. But the Old Guard wasn’t ready to forgive the Colonel for deserting the party in 1912, so the Republicans nominated former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes to run against the Democrat incumbent. Hoping to mend fences and perhaps win the nomination in 1920, Theodore campaigned for Hughes. He didn’t give twenty speeches a day as he had in 1912, but he still drew big crowds wherever he spoke. But he had mixed feelings about returning to the Republican Party. “The Republicans are a sordid crowd!” TR wrote to Corinne. “They are a trifle better than the corrupt and lunatic wild asses of the desert who seem most influential in Democratic counsels, under the lead of that astute, unprincipled and physically cowardly demagogue Wilson; but they are a sorry lot.”
The Republicans narrowly lost the 1916 election. One reason the Democrats won was that many of the progressive reforms Theodore had advocated for during the campaign of 1912—such as a lower protective tariff, an income tax, regulations to stabilize the nation’s banking system, and laws regulating corporations—were enacted during the first Wilson administration. In fact, the Wilson administration had been doing quite well until the war in Europe intruded.
After the president declared war, Theodore turned his attention to getting “the American people to think about its position and face its responsibilities.” One observer called him “The Bugle That Woke America.” He toured the country urging people to support the Red Cross and to buy Liberty Bonds, which were special bonds sold to the public to pay for the enormous cost of the war. Theodore himself bought some $60,000 worth of bonds.
In his zeal the Colonel often went overboard insisting on “one hundred percent Americanism” and complaining about “hyphenated Americans,” as in German-Americans. “In this war either a man is a good American,” Theodore declared, “and therefore against Germany, and in favor of the allies of America, or he is not an American at all.” And he denounced
German and other foreign-language newspapers published in immigrant communities. “We must have one language,” he insisted, “the language of the Declaration of Independence.”
In many of his articles, Theodore attacked Wilson with such harsh language that friends warned him to button up. While he rarely cursed, one observer noticed he could say “pacifist” or “Woodrow Wilson” in tones that “would make the Recording Angel shudder.” In the White House there was talk of bringing charges against Theodore under the 1918 Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about … the United States.” But President Wilson said the best punishment was to ignore Theodore.
A mutual hatred of Wilson reunited Taft and Theodore. After the two ex-presidents had resumed corresponding, they ran into each other in a Chicago hotel and had a friendly half-hour talk. Theodore was no doubt impressed to hear that Taft’s only son Charlie, who had been called Taffy as a child, had refused a commission, going instead to the front as an army private.
The Colonel often thought about his own sons. “I wake up in the middle of the night wondering if the boys are all right,” Theodore said, “and thinking how I could tell their mother if anything happened.” In a letter to Kermit he explained, “I am so very proud of the part that you boys have played. I should like to see all of you come home, and watch Mother’s face as she greets you, and see you with your darling little wives and blessed babies.”
In the summer of 1918, not long after receiving a letter from Archie saying that General William Sherman’s famous pronouncement, “war is hell,” was a “gross understatement,” Theodore and Edith learned he had been severely wounded. Archie was awarded France’s highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre, before being sent back to the States to heal. We have “a hero in the family,” his father wrote to his wounded son. “You don’t know how proud we are of you, how our hearts go out to you.” Not long afterward, Ted was also wounded and awarded two military honors, the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star.
Theodore and Edith probably assumed they had a third hero in the making when they read in the newspaper that Quentin had shot down his first German plane. Theodore wrote Ethel that he was “immensely excited by the press reports of Quentin’s feat.” The next news about their youngest son came from a newspaper reporter who told them Quentin had gotten separated from his squad, attacked by seven German Fokkers, and went down behind enemy lines. No one knew if he had been captured or killed. Several days later the Germans reported he was dead.
Theodore attempted to appear brave. No “man could have died in finer or more gallant fashion,” he told Kermit, “and our pride equals our sorrow.” He tried to keep busy dictating letters despite, his secretary later related, “his voice choking with emotion … and the tears streaming down his face.” Theodore would mumble “Poor Quinikins” to himself when he thought no one could hear.
Quentin’s death saddened him as much as Alice’s had thirty-four years earlier. But back then Theodore had been young and resilient. Now he wasn’t. “I feel as though I were a hundred years old,” he complained, “and had never been young.”
Nonetheless, the Colonel still wanted to be president again. After voters rebuffed President Wilson and the Democrats in the November 1918 midterm elections by sending Republican majorities to both houses of Congress, party leaders wanted to know if Theodore would accept the presidential nomination in 1920. If “I am the man the people want,” he responded, “I don’t see how I could refuse to run.” But it was not to be.
The American soldiers pouring into France had tipped the balance of power in favor of the Allies. On “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918” the Allies and Germany signed an armistice, ending the fighting in Europe. That same day, Theodore went into the hospital. “Father is flat on his back with gout,” Edith reported to Ted. “He is having a horrid suffering time.” He stayed in the hospital seven weeks, returning home just before Christmas.
On January 5, 1919, Theodore worked eleven hours finishing up a newspaper column and proofreading one of his magazine articles. Late in the day while watching the “dancing of the waves” on Long Island Sound, Edith said he “spoke of the happiness of being home” and asked, “I wonder if you will ever know how I love Sagamore Hill.”
That evening, after reading a bit and making notes to himself about things to do the next day, Theodore said to his valet, “James, will you please put out the light.” He died early the next morning of a coronary embolism. Archie’s cable to Ted and Kermit in Europe simply stated, “The old lion is dead.”
A tribute Theodore had written for Quentin applies to the “old lion” just as well: “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die. And none are fit to die who have shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are parts of the same Great Adventure.”
The story of Theodore Roosevelt didn’t end with his death. His legacy survives in our national parks and forests. It survives in a strong federal government that serves and protects all Americans. It survives in the power of every U.S. president to shape events at home and around the world. And it survives atop Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where the granite sculptures of four of our greatest presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt—gaze out over the nation they served so well.
Mount Rushmore near completion, 1941.
SOURCE NOTES
INTRODUCTION
“As I did …”: Brands, T.R., 721.
“Stand back …” and “Don’t hurt that…”: Miller, A Life, 530.
“Friends I shall …” and “There is a …”: Brands, T.R., 721.
CHAPTER 1
“I owe everything …”: Dalton, Strenuous, 50.
“He was interested …”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 9.
“nobody seemed to …”: Dalton, Strenuous, 35.
“I could breathe …”: Morris, The Rise, 11.
“have the mind …”: Brands, T.R., 26.
“got my first …”: Morris, The Rise, 34.
“he had done …” and “every other feeling …”: Dalton, Strenuous, 27.
“If you offered …”: Miller, A Life, 42.
“Worshipped Little Men …” and “girls’ stories”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 14.
“great admiration for …”: Brands, T.R., 28.
“the very best …” and “manliness, decency, and …”: Brands, T.R., 27.
“he swore like …”: Harbaugh, Power, 10.
“cordially hated”: Brands, T.R., 25.
“The young man …”: Brands, T.R., 49.
“Roosevelt of New York”: Miller, A Life, 66.
“Out-of-doors natural history”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 25.
“That seal filled …”: Miller, A Life, 39.
“utterly ignored the …”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 26.
“I felt as …”: Brands, T.R., 81.
“The one I …”: Brands, T.R., 82.
“I almost feel …” and “as distinctly as…”: McCullough, Mornings, 187.
“With the help …”: Brands, T.R., 81.
“I wonder who …”: McCullough, Mornings, 191.
“I care for …”: Dalton, Strenuous, 79.
“My happiness is …”: Morris, The Rise, 113.
“a kind of club-room”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 58.
“deplorable lack of …”: Brands, T.R., 144.
“rough and brutal …”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 57.
“be of the …”: Roosevelt, Autobiography, 57.
CHAPTER 2
“Suddenly our eyes …” and “His hair was…”: Morris, The Rise, 144.
“Society man and …” and “kid glove, scented …”: Dalton, Strenuous Life, 81.
“huge, fleshy, unutterably …”: Brands, T.R., 150.
“By God if …”: Morris, The Rise, 149.
“Won’t Mama’
s boy …” and “knocked him down …”: Morris, The Rise, 149.
“either dumb or …”: McCullough, Mornings, 255.
“a stupid, sodden …”: Morris, The Rise, 145.
“an average balloon” and “entirely unprincipled, with …”: Brands, T.R., 131.
“an ungreased squeak”: McCullough, Mornings, 160.
“mister spee-kar …”: Morris, The Rise, 153.
“wasn’t anything cool …”: Miller, A Life, 136.
“a trait of …”: McCullough, Mornings, 276.
“would come into …”: Brands, T.R., 141.
“the Cyclone Assemblyman”: Morris, The Rise,163.
“willing to go …”: Miller, A Life, 132.
“sharks” and “swindlers” and “men whose financial …”: Miller, A Life, 133.
“of vital importance …” “like the bursting …” and “a dead silence …”: Pringle, Theodore, 50.
“I have drawn …”: Miller, A Life, 135.
“a boldness that …”: Brands, T.R., 137.
“Mr. Roosevelt accomplished …”: Pringle, Theodore, 52.
“has a most …” and “a splendid career”: Miller, A Life, 134.
“evil and heart …”: Brands, T.R., 133.
“leave politics” “with the right …” “control others and …” and “the first glimpse …”: Morris, The Rise,158.
“ideal … We hailed …”: Morris, The Rise, 162.
CHAPTER 3
“I have become …”: Morris, The Rise, 138.
“the teachings of …”: Brands, T.R., 125.
“I felt as …”: Miller, A Life, 145.
“wealthy criminal class”: Morris, The Rise, 177.
“the arch thief …”: Harbaugh, Power, 20.
“rose like a rocket”: Miller, A Life, 140.
Michael L. Cooper Page 10