Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Whatever Roosevelt had lost of actual power to shape events, he was obviously still capable of inspiring all those who did not feel threatened by him. Aside from ever-wistful Progressives, and a few furtive Republicans wondering whether he would consider returning to the GOP, with a view to running for president in 1916, there was now a growing body of military men who wished to serve under him if (as he kept predicting) the United States was compelled to abandon its policy of neutrality. He had not forgotten his dream of leading a force of super-Rough Riders into battle, and took it for granted that the War Department would allow him to do so as a major-general. The plan sounded old, even antiquated, when he spelled it out to General Frank Ross McCoy on 10 July. “My hope is, if we are to be drawn into this European war, to get Congress to authorize me to raise a Cavalry Division, which would consist of four cavalry brigades each of two regiments, and a brigade of Horse Artillery of two regiments, with a pioneer battalion or better still, two pioneer battalions, and a field battalion of signal troops in addition to a supply train and a sanitary train.”

  Roosevelt vaguely explained that he meant motor trains, “and I would also like a regiment or battalion of machine guns.” But it was obvious he still thought the quickest path to military glory was the cavalry charge—ignoring the fact that modern Maxim-gun fire had proved it to be an amazingly effective form of group suicide. And he also chose to forget that the last time he had tried to haul his heavy body onto a horse, at Sagamore Hill in May, he had ended up on the ground with two broken ribs.

  He knew nonetheless that he would prefer to die heroically in Europe rather than in Mexico. Ted could fight Pancho Villa if he liked, but none of his other sons were free to volunteer. “Whereas I should expect all four to go in if there were a serious war, and would of course go in myself.”

  THE COLONEL SPENT the second half of July on the West Coast, attending a series of events connected with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. A belated celebration of the opening of the Panama Canal, it was the biggest such show ever held, and he was saluted with a special “Roosevelt Day” on the twenty-first. His speech in response was a harsh contrast to the exuberant hymn to expansionism he had indulged in at Mechanics’ Pavilion twelve years before. Then, he had called upon Californians to look to the Orient instead of the Occident for their commercial future, and had welcomed an emergent Japan as one of the “great, civilized powers.” Now, he lectured them to look again across the Pacific, to see the consequences of China’s failure to arm against foreign predators. As a result, that opulent nation had been dismembered, province after province, “until one-half of her territory is now under Japanese, Russian, English, and French control.” If the United States was going to continue to “Chinafy” its foreign policy, at cost of preparing itself militarily against threats that might come at it any moment, from either warring hemisphere, then it might as well announce that the Panama Canal Zone was an asset it could no longer hold or defend.

  If, on the other hand, it was resolved to tolerate no more Lusitanias, it should begin at once to build an army that did not take second place to that of Argentina, and embark on a program of universal military service like Switzerland’s. Preparedness was all. “No nation ever amounted to anything if its population was composed of pacifists and poltroons, if its sons did not have the fighting edge.”

  He was listened to with respect by twenty thousand people, but they were unconvinced by his alarmism. It was the same when he repeated himself in San Diego.

  “Colonel,” somebody asked him, “are you not inciting us to war?”

  Eyes and teeth flashing, Roosevelt talked about going to Döberitz with the Kaiser. “If you had heard and seen what I saw when I was in Germany, you would feel just as I do.”

  He headed home at the beginning of August with a clearer idea of the breadth and depth of American apathy about Europe. Then, in mid-month, the New York World published the first of a series of reports of secret German activities within the United States.

  The article described plans to buy up all American plants exporting chlorine, so as to prevent France from matching the Reich’s poison-gas capability; sedition and sabotage in munitions factories; a vast secret propaganda campaign; and, most chillingly, the construction of time bombs programmed to blow up American ships. Several of the plotters were men known to Roosevelt, including Count Franz von Papen, the emissary who had brought him greetings from Wilhelm II the year before. The government at once moved to have Papen recalled to Germany. On the nineteenth, another British liner, the Arabic, was torpedoed as it sailed from Liverpool to New York. Two Americans died as it went down.

  “The time for words on the part of this nation has long passed,” Roosevelt said in a public statement. “The time for deeds has come.”

  A few days later he went upstate to visit the Plattsburg preparedness camp, where Ted, Dick Derby, Willard Straight, and a large number of friends were in their third week of military training. In egalitarian fashion, they called themselves “citizen soldiers,” but the tone of the gathering was distinctly Ivy League.

  Ted noted with approval that more than half of his 1,400 fellow trainees were Harvard graduates. “I suppose some Yale men would fight if there was a war, but it is more clear than ever that Yale is the great middle class college, and the middle classes are not naturally gallant.”

  Roosevelt was amused to see that his eldest son had only the rookie rank of “sergeant,” whereas Archie and Quentin, who had attended an earlier, five-week course for students, were graded as officer material. Ted’s clubby, pipe-puffing smugness was a running family joke. But there was no denying his will to succeed. Having entered business in a carpet mill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was now earning six figures as the coming young man at Bertron, Griscom & Co.

  Sixteen rows of tents stretched for half a mile on the grounds of an army base that beautifully overlooked Lake Champlain. Roosevelt gazed with a historian’s eye at an ancient embankment at the eastern end of the reservation, and across the water to the Green Mountains of Vermont. He had minutely described the Battle of Plattsburg in his first book, The Naval War of 1812. Then, as now, he had been an apostle of preparedness: A miserly economy in preparation may in the end involve a lavish outlay of men and money which after all comes too late to do more than partially offset the evils.

  The camp was run by Major General Leonard Wood, his fellow veteran of the Santiago campaign, and now commander of the U.S. Army’s Eastern Department. Wood, too, was a passionate preparedness man. He believed that young men of eighteen and over should be subjected to “universal, compulsory, military training … for two months a year for four years.” President Wilson did not, but had no objection if patriotic businessmen wanted to spend the hottest part of the year suffering, at their own expense, in the hands of army instructors. It was an excellent way for them to lose weight and persuade themselves that they might one day save Manhattan from the wrath of Wilhelm II.

  Roosevelt spent Wednesday, 25 August, touring the encampment and watching exercises along the lakeshore. The training program as laid out by Wood was intense, compressing four years of regular army education into four weeks of dawn-to-dusk discipline. Men of all ages were learning how to drill, shoot, and run with forty-pound bags on their shoulders, until the oldest and plumpest were half dead from fatigue. Among them were “Lieutenant” John P. Mitchel, playing hookey from his peacetime job as mayor of New York. He was flanked by his police commissioner and a platoon of the city’s finest. “Corporal” Robert Bacon, the former ambassador to France (and since Louvain, one of the most urgent interventionists in the country), marched with “Private” James D. Perry, bishop of Rhode Island; “Corporal” Dick Little, the Chicago humorist; “Sergeant” Alfred R. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania medical facility; “Private” Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair; and “Private” Richard Harding Davis, the only man present who knew what it was like to be held prisoner by German soldiers. The re
st of the regiment, divided into two battalions of eight companies apiece, consisted largely of bankers, lawyers, retailers, and former college jocks.

  Wood was an astute political operator, mindful that the Republican presidential nomination in 1916 was wide open, and that further submarine attacks on Americans abroad might well change popular attitudes to the war. As a Harvard man himself, as well as a Medal of Honor winner, Rough Rider, colonial governor, and former chief of staff, he did not lack qualifications. He knew that cartoonists around the country were mocking his trainees as “TBMs”—tired businessmen playing at being soldiers. For those reasons he had gone out of his way to make the course so rigorous that they could not think of quitting, for fear of disgrace. In time, Wood hoped, these recruits would form the core of a highly professional military reserve.

  Only the older ones could remember the days when he and Roosevelt had been among the most glamorous heroes of the Spanish-American War. Now, posing for an official photograph, they were both graying and portly, their tunics straining at every button. But they remained as physically contrasted as ever—Wood personifying his own name with a stance that might have been carved out of hickory, Roosevelt talking, smiling, and swiveling in small shoes and cavalry chaps.

  “BOTH GRAYING AND PORTLY, THEIR TUNICS STRAINING AT EVERY BUTTON.”

  TR and General Leonard Wood at Plattsburg, 25 August 1915. (photo credit i22.1)

  The Colonel was in a jovial mood. He chowed with the regiment at sunset, eating as heartily as if he had been a rookie himself. Expectations were high that he would deliver a rambunctious after-dinner speech. He did not disappoint, firing off salvos of his new favorite word, poltroon, and abusing “college sissies” and “hyphenated Americans” with tooth-snapping vigor. To general hilarity, an Airedale terrier interrupted him by rolling on the grass and displaying.

  “I like him,” Roosevelt said. “His present attitude is strictly one of neutrality.”

  It was tempting to segue to an attack on Woodrow Wilson, but he avoided any personal references, not wanting to make things difficult for Wood. The administration was in a state of high tension over the Arabic incident, and Wilson was not likely to react kindly to criticism emanating from an army-sponsored program.

  Reporters following him were not discouraged. They waited until the Colonel was just about to board his train home, and asked him directly if he supported the President. While still declining to name names, he said that any peace-loving prose stylist living in a house once inhabited by Abraham Lincoln should emigrate to China. “Let him get out of the country as quickly as possible. To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely upon high-sounding words unbacked by deeds, is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of shame.”

  JULIAN STREET, A YOUNG journalist assigned to write a profile of Roosevelt for Collier’s, had an appointment to interview him in his Manhattan office the following morning. Expecting to encounter a fierce militarist, Street was pleasantly disappointed. “As the Colonel advanced to meet me he showed his hard, white teeth, wrinkled his red, weather-beaten face, and squinted his eyes half shut behind the heavy lenses of his spectacles, in suggestion, as it seemed to me, of a large, amiable lion which comes up purring gently as though to say, ‘You needn’t be afraid. I’ve just had luncheon.’ ”

  Before they could talk, a clutch of newsmen arrived to announce that the secretary of war, Lindley M. Garrison, had telegraphed a reprimand to General Wood for allowing Roosevelt to cast aspersions on President Wilson at an army base. Street looked, fascinated, as the Colonel dictated a statement absolving Wood of responsibility.

  At first Roosevelt spoke gravely, and the faces of the reporters mirrored his sober expression. “It was not until he lapsed briefly into irony, turning on, as he did so, that highly specialized smile, that I perceived how truly those young men reflected him.… To watch their faces was like watching the faces of an audience at a play: when the hero was indignant they became indignant; when he sneered they sneered; and when he was amused they seemed to quiver with rapturous merriment.”

  Street visited with Roosevelt several more times over the course of the next few days, trying to get as much out of him as possible before he left for a three-week hunting trip to Quebec. In the event, he got a major scoop: Roosevelt flatly declared that he would not accept any party’s nomination in 1916. Then, with sublime appropriateness, he packed his guns and went north in search of a bull moose.

  During his absence, Street wrote the profile. The young man was convinced that Roosevelt was the greatest man alive. For journalistic purposes, however, he decided to go no further than to call him “the most interesting American.” The phrase leaped out as the title of his magazine piece, and also of the book that might grow out of it: a portrait of the Colonel as the prophet of preparedness and, not inconceivably, President of the United States again someday.

  That fantasy made Street worry about the consequences of publishing his “scoop.” Some momentary political situation could arise in which Roosevelt might regret disqualifying himself as a candidate in 1916. With a deadline from Collier’s looming, Street took his manuscript to Sagamore Hill to show to Edith.

  She sighed heavily at the thought of her husband being dragged into another presidential run. “It almost killed us last time!” But she said he would be home soon, and promised to ask him about withdrawing his statement.

  On 27 September she wrote Street, “The Master of the house is home, & entirely approves of the omission.”

  ROOSEVELT GOT HIS BULL MOOSE, in addition to another that caused him considerable embarrassment, because the province of Quebec had licensed him to shoot only one specimen. He had to explain, in a bizarre deposition endorsed by both of his guides, that the second moose had pursued him both in water and on land, uttering strange cries and banging its antlers against trees. It was evidently as insane as Amos Pinchot, and as unwilling to let him go. He had had to kill it before it killed him.

  Shaken by the experience, he told Charles Washburn early in October that his hunting days were over. He did not want to risk his deteriorating body on any more strenuous chases. It would be a humiliation, he said, to end up being “taken care of.”

  Washburn observed that the Colonel had aged much over the last year and a half. “This mighty human dynamo,” he noted in his diary, “is working with a somewhat diminished energy.” But so, to a greater or lesser extent, were all the Roosevelt Familiars. Their time was passing. The death on 28 September of the beautiful Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, once the presiding grace of Henry Adams’s old salon in Washington, had poleaxed the senator and caused Adams to relive the nightmare of his own wife’s suicide. “Jusserand is deeply depressed,” Sir Cecil Spring Rice wrote Roosevelt, almost incoherent with grief himself. “She is [sic] the last of … the most delightful circle of friends we have ever known—How the world changes. Poor Cabot!”

  Springy and Jules regretted more than the loss of their beloved “Nannie.” They were mourning an era when their respective countries had been proud and inviolate and not hemorrhaging youth. Now all was disorder and death. Golden Rule diplomacy had given way to a new, scientific barbarism that burned libraries, dropped bombs out of the sky, cast babies into the sea, poisoned the very air that troops breathed, and—in its latest nihilistic advance—invented a flamethrower that vaporized men on the spot. War, once movement, had become stasis. Emperors had little sway. The world’s richest and most resourceful country would do nothing to stop its rivals from damaging one another to the point that they all had to be saved. Was that what Wilson was waiting for? Or was he just, as Roosevelt complained to Edith Wharton, a “shifty, adroit, and selfish logothete,” interested only in being reelected next year?

  The man was unreachable to all of them, unreadable. In the first months of his presidency, Wilson had impressed the world at large as an inspiring new American voice, less preachy than Roosevelt, more self-confident than Taft. As James Bryce had remarked then, �
�Terse, clear and vigorous diction is extremely rare in this country.… When it is heard, and especially when it is accompanied by a certain imaginative or emotional color it produces an effect great in its proportion to its rarity.” The language was still terse, and clear when Wilson wanted it to be, but his preference for prose rather than speech, for stately notes laced with subtle qualifications and dispatched while he himself remained unseen, had vitiated his once full-bodied image. The President sounded, in short, not quite human.

  “All these letters to Germany!” Roosevelt snorted to Julian Street. “Of late I have come almost to the point of loathing a bee-you-ti-ful, pol-ished dic-tion!”

  Actually, the President’s most recent note to Count Jagow was more blunt than polished, going to the limit of diplomatic courtesy in stating that Germany’s failure, so far, to apologize and pay reparations for the Lusitania tragedy was “very unsatisfactory,” and that any further “illegal and inhuman” attack upon Americans traveling freely on the high seas would be regarded as “deliberately unfriendly.”

  On 5 October, Wilson was rewarded with a partial capitulation by Germany. Ambassador Bernstorff stated that his government was prepared to pay indemnity for the American lives “which, to its deep regret, have been lost on the Arabic,” and announced that German submarines would in future operate under orders “so stringent that the recurrence of [such] incidents … is considered out of the question.”

  Representatives of all shades of opinion hailed the news as a triumph for the President. The chorus of praise drowned out a few cautionary voices pointing out that Germany had still not atoned for the sinking of the Lusitania, nor had it abandoned its submarine strategy. Even so, Wilson had been successful in his negotiations so far—what Roosevelt scornfully called “waging peace”—and clearly deserved the support of the American people as he continued to demand guarantees of their neutrality and safety.