Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  In addition to which, he now had a claim to their personal good wishes. On the day after the German concession, Wilson announced that he was engaged to Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt.

  “I AM GIVING CERTAIN finishing touches to a book which Scribners will publish next spring,” Roosevelt wrote Quentin on 18 October. Outside his study window, the trees of Sagamore Hill were at their peak of fall brilliancy. “I shall dedicate it to you and Archie,” he went on, “as the opening chapters are those I wrote about our Arizona trip.”

  Quentin had joined his brother at Harvard, and the diaspora of the Roosevelt children was now complete. Dispersed, too, were any present hopes that the Colonel may have entertained of prevailing in his campaign to warn Americans of their folly in supporting a President too proud to fight. It was obvious to all political observers that Wilson would run for, and probably win, reelection next year on the merits of a foreign policy that seemed to gratify 90 percent of the country—“waging peace.” Once again Roosevelt found himself shouting into a wind that bore his words back at him, mostly unheard.

  And once again he turned to writing for solace. Quentin (who had already stocked his bookcase in Cambridge with copies of George Canning’s Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, Austen Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains, and a life of Genghis Khan) was to be his literary correspondent, just as Kermit had once been the recipient of his presidential posterity letters. Roosevelt had been pleased to discover, during Quentin’s last year at Groton, that the boy was something of a scribe himself, the author of some imaginative prose pieces in the school magazine. “He is maturing rapidly, and is really a very successful person.”

  As a token of their camaraderie as men of the pen, Roosevelt confided that Charles Scribner had declined first serial rights on two chapters of the new book “which I thought were the best.” He now had eleven chapters nearly ready. Many were pieces he had published as periodical articles, and since they all dealt with nature or literature in varying degrees, he decided to group them under the ungainly title, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. He lavished particular care on an account of his visit to the Breton bird sanctuary last June. The result was the most eloquent of all his writings on conservation.

  The extermination of the passenger-pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Reims. And to lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm, or a flight of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset; or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.

  “A FLIGHT OF PELICANS WINGING THEIR WAY HOMEWARD.”

  Bird life on Breton Island, Louisiana, photographed during TR’s visit. (photo credit i22.2)

  CHAPTER 23

  The Man Against the Sky

  The shadow fades, the light arrives,

  And ills that were concealed are seen.

  IN THE NEW YEAR of 1916 the one journalist in America who knew Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson equally well tried to sum up their essential differences. “With T.R.,” Ray Stannard Baker wrote, “the executive spirit comes first. The temptation for Wilson is to think and express too much—that of T.R. to act too much. Wilson works with ideas, T.R. directly with men.”

  Expanding his comparison, Baker observed that whereas Wilson the rationalist sought to persuade by argument, Roosevelt “like an angry boy” wanted to shout down all those who disagreed with him. “In the present crisis T.R. is appealing to every kind of emotion … anything to stampede the nation into terror of war and great armaments.”

  Baker worried that Germany’s continuing reluctance to atone for the Lusitania incident, combined with the arrogance of the British in searching and seizing American freighters destined for any ports but their own, had brought the freedom-of-the-seas issue to a head—and with it, such divisive questions as preparedness and military intervention, sure to be debated in the coming presidential campaign. Like most of his countrymen, Baker was opposed to any thought of going to war overseas, and hoped that Wilson was too. Offensive strategy was not the President’s forte: his disastrous overreaction against Mexico in 1914 had demonstrated that. It would be fatal if he yielded now to Roosevelt’s constant taunts of cowardice.

  “I can understand how a man like T.R. might hate and despise a man like Wilson,” Baker wrote, “thinking him a mere academic theorist with no ‘red blood,’ but, in my judgment, the future lies with the Wilsons.”

  Roosevelt was regretfully of the same opinion. He believed that during his own presidency, he could have aroused Americans to whatever degree of righteous anger a foreign provocation might justify. But they seemed to have lost their moral fiber under the administrations of Taft and Wilson—so much so, they were prepared to forget about Belgium and the Lusitania. He confessed to Kermit that during the last year he had begun to feel like a locomotive in a snowstorm. “I have accumulated so much snow on the cow catcher that it has brought me to a halt.… The majority of our people are bound now that I shall not come back into public life.”

  He would not mind that, if only they would listen to him and not insult him by thinking he cared only for war. “I’m a domestic man,” he told Julian Street. “I have always wanted to be with Mrs. Roosevelt and my children, and now with my grandchildren. I’m not a brawler. I detest war. But if war came I’d have to go, and my four boys would go, too, because we have ideals in this family.”

  It was quite natural, he said, that men whose patriotism had atrophied would allow a soothsayer like Wilson to furnish them an excuse to stay home. But he still believed that his own, much more direct appeals to the national sense of honor would prevail in the end—even if he shouted away the last remnants of his former presidential dignity.

  Street, an unabashed hero-worshipper, asked him if he thought he had genius.

  “Most certainly not. I’m no orator, and in writing I’m afraid I’m not gifted at all.…” Roosevelt pondered the question further, then said with a smile, “If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership.”

  TRUE TO HIS vow to keep crusading, he wrote another war volume while still checking the proofs of A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. It consisted largely of diatribes against the administration that he had already published in Metropolitan magazine, updated and notched several tones higher on the shrillness scale. The opening chapter was new, and carried criticism of Woodrow Wilson to the verge of personal insult. He entitled it “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (a quote from George Borrow), and tried some hot passages out at a conference of the National Americanization Committee in Philadelphia on 20 January. The choice of location was deliberate: Wilson had made his infamous “too proud to fight” address in that city, before another immigration-minded audience. Roosevelt was evidently setting himself as the President’s ideological foil, just as Republicans and Progressives were negotiating the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate in the spring.

  If by doing so he meant to signal his own availability, he could not have more effectively encouraged isolationists, pacifists, hyphenated Americans, and other interest groups to unite behind someone else. Even those of his hearers who did fear God might have wondered if the Colonel’s personal deity was not Mars. He advocated military training in the nation’s high schools, followed by compulsory field service; a chain of new, federally financed munitions plants, located inland so as to be safe from seaboard attack; an accelerated naval construction program; and enlargement of the current seventy-four-thousand-man army to a force of a quarter of a million. As always when reading from a typescript, he improvised freely, hurling regular insults at all persons lacking manly qualities.

  The Washington Post awarded him four of its seven front-page lead columns the next morning (the other stories being a declaration by the King of Greece that nobody could win in Euro
pe, a report of hand-to-hand fighting between Russians and Austrians on the Bessarabian front, and a rumor that vigilantes employed by William Randolph Hearst had captured Pancho Villa). Some of Roosevelt’s latest thunderings were featured in a special box, along with the text of a letter that he had sent to the National Security League, currently meeting in Washington. This document, read to the League by his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, was even more contemptuous of administration policies than his speech had been. The Post reported that it had been applauded by an audience of manufacturers, merchants, lawyers, and not a few fire-breathing women.

  Wilson remained impassive. “The way to treat an adversary like Roosevelt,” he said, “is to gaze at the stars over his head.”

  THE COLONEL LIKED his rabble-rousing chapter title so much that he decided to apply it to his whole war book. Fear God and Take Your Own Part was rushed to press in advance of A Book-Lover’s Holidays. Its main theme, preparedness, had become the issue of the hour.

  For as long as Britain and France had seemed to be holding their own in Europe, the great majority of Americans who were pro-Allies had winked at Wilson’s policy of being “neutral in fact as well as in name.” They realized that, with Bryan gone, the word neutral implied a prejudice toward Germany on the part of the administration that stopped just short of provocation. Ominously, though, the winter so far had been a season of triumph for the Central Powers, now buttressed by Turkey. British forces were routed at Gallipoli, besieged in Mesopotamia, and outmaneuvered in East Africa. The Western Front was impregnably defended by Germany, and Serbia and Bosnia lay helpless in the grip of Austria-Hungary. At latest count, France had lost two and a half million men. Eight Russian armies were beaten back in the East, while Bolshevism smoldered like an underground fire beneath the palaces of St. Petersburg—or Petrograd, as that city now called itself. The Japanese were allies—of sorts—to Britain and France in the Far East, but since seizing Kiaochow had shown themselves to be rapacious for territory and natural resources. Roosevelt warned that their sophisticated new battleships posed a long-term threat to the U.S. Navy.

  Almost to his disbelief, he found that an appreciable minority of Americans were beginning to listen to him. With the phrase world war replacing European war in everyday speech, he no longer sounded like the lonely saber-rattler of last May. Even pacifists had to agree that the globe was smaller and more dangerous, now that two oceans were mixing at Panama, and Zeppelins floating across the English Channel to bomb Londoners. Day by day, paper by paper, America’s editorial writers acknowledged the wisdom of taking at least some of the defense precautions shouted for by the Colonel.

  And not only him: over the past half-year, several of Roosevelt’s literary friends had issued alarums as urgent as his own. Frederic Louis Huidekoper’s scholarly history, Military Unpreparedness, was the bible of the Plattsburg movement. Owen Wister’s bestselling The Pentecost of Calamity, an anguished dirge to the death of German liberalism, compared the obliteration of the University of Louvain to the fate awaiting democracy itself, if Prussians in jackboots were to despoil the rest of Europe. Edith Wharton’s Fighting France testified to the willingness of millions of poilus to die for the culture enshrined at Reims and Chartres.

  Hearing these voices, Woodrow Wilson became a reluctant convert to the cause of preparedness. His enthusiasm for men in uniform remained slight, but he acknowledged the need for increased defense spending, if only to reassure Americans that he would keep the country secure. The moment had come, he announced at a dinner of railroad executives in New York on 27 January, for decisive action. “Does anybody understand the time?”

  Wilson paused for effect. A gigantic Stars and Stripes hung tentlike over his head, covering the entire ceiling of the Waldorf ballroom. His new wife watched adoringly from an upper gallery. “Perhaps when you learned,” the President said, “that I was expecting to address you on the subject of preparedness, you recalled the address which I made to Congress something more than a year ago, in which I said that this question of military preparedness was not a pressing question. But more than a year has gone by since then, and I would be ashamed if I had not learned something in fourteen months.”

  He was applauded for his willingness to admit fault. Fourteen months was about the length of Roosevelt’s campaign to make him a more interventionist figure in world affairs. Wilson did not indicate who, or what, had taught him his new defense philosophy. But he said he was for the immediate recruitment of a five-hundred-thousand-man “Continental” army, which would be voluntary, federally controlled, and supplementary to the National Guard. He also wanted “a proper and reasonable program for the increase of the navy.”

  Wilson proceeded westward in his first campaign swing since 1912. He ventured with considerable courage into the heartland of isolationism, via pro-German Milwaukee to Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, the two most antiwar cities in the country. Graceful, smiling, elegant, and humorous, he demonstrated over and again a mastery of persuasive oratory. His sentences seemed to flow as if unpremeditated, but journalists transcribing them noticed his wizardry in qualifying every phrase likely to thrill interventionists with another that reaffirmed his love of peace. “You have laid upon me,” he would tell a crowd, “this double obligation: ‘We are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep us out of this war, but we are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the nation unstained.’ ” In St. Louis, he said, “I don’t want to command a great army,” before vowing to build up “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”

  Roosevelt marveled at Wilson’s Bach-like ability to combine every theme with its own inversion. He was an equivocator himself, but this kind of skill mocked his clumsy habit of balancing one thing against the other. Half in awe, he analyzed fifteen presidential policy statements through 10 February, and found that Wilson had taken forty-one different positions on preparedness. “Each of these 41 positions contradicted from 1 to 6 of the others. In many of the speeches, the weasel words of one portion took all the meaning out of the words used in another portion, and those latter words themselves had a weasel significance as regards yet other words.”

  Hitherto, Roosevelt had made free with epithets like “skunk” and “prize jackass” in his private references to Wilson. But he had avoided calling him names in public. The temptation became overwhelming to do so now, with an insult that sounded slanderous, but which no lawyer with a large dictionary could find actionable. He chose the splendid noun logothete, which he had recently tried out on Edith Wharton. It had vague connotations of word-spinning, but in fact meant little more than a bureaucrat, or petty accountant in ancient Constantinople. That gave him an ideal qualifier. When Fear God and Take Your Own Part came out in the second week of February, it contained Roosevelt’s latest and funniest contribution to political invective. He wrote that the President’s self-justifications in alternately trying to cow and cuddle up to bandits south of the border were “worthy of a Byzantine logothete.”

  The publication of Fear God coincided with the first anniversary of Wilson’s demand for “strict accountability” from Germany for any armed action hurtful to the United States. Roosevelt did not fail to mention this in his opening pages. He added the names of seven ships, other than the Lusitania, that had been sunk in the interim, with some two hundred Americans aboard. “If any individual finds satisfaction in saying that nevertheless this was ‘peace’ and not ‘war,’ it is hardly worth while arguing with him.”

  ON 11 FEBRUARY, he and Edith sailed for the West Indies on a little steamer, the Guiana. Caribbean waters were not immune to U-boat attacks, but Roosevelt was in need of sunshine and rest. The ideological temper he had worked himself up into in recent months, combined with several sharp attacks of “jungle fever,” had jaded him. Besides, he wanted to get away from a biennial pest he could not seem to shake: swarms of importuners begging him to reenter party politics, either as a candidate or a campaigner.

  The difference this time
was that some of the supplicants were coming from conservative quarters. It had been observed on Wall Street that Roosevelt the Metropolitan columnist was no longer the progressive ideologue he had been in his early days at The Outlook. His attitudes toward corporatism and inherited wealth had definitely inched rightward since he became aware, around the time of Plattsburg, that many bankers and industrialists (above all arms manufacturers, raking in mountains of Allied money) were as keen on intervention as he was.

  Roosevelt still talked about federal control of competition, sounding like one of his shellac discs from 1912. But the kind of restraints he now spelled out in print were so pro-business they could have been—and possibly were—dictated by George W. Perkins. Government commissions, he now held, would ensure “ample profit” for industrial investors and greater efficiency “along German lines.” If certain corporations engaged in foreign trade were “Americanized” (a euphemism for nationalized), their earnings would increase, and they would be more responsive when their resources were urgently called for.

  Another sign of Rooseveltian recidivism was the Colonel’s new willingness to treat the new-money crowd with respect. Through Metropolitan magazine, he had made friends with Harry Payne Whitney, the kind of sporty millionaire he once despised. He allowed Judge Elbert H. Gary of U.S. Steel and seventeen fellow plutocrats to fete him privately in New York, and was also guest of honor at a secretive luncheon at the Harvard Club, hosted by the publishing magnate Robert Collier. Downtown rumors alleged that “Teddy” was being groomed for another presidential run, this time as a Republican.