Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt told the truth about the meetings to his latest confidant, John J. Leary, Jr., of the New York Tribune, on the understanding that he not be named as a source. “Behind it all, I believe, was a desire of these men—all Americans, men who have done things and are doing big things, men who have a stake in the country—to take counsel together on the big problem of national preparedness.” Far from asking or accepting their political support, he had told them that if the GOP in 1916 adopted a “hyphenated” platform, or nominated a candidate on the strength of “mongrel” promises, he, Theodore Roosevelt, would campaign for the reelection of President Wilson. “And, by Godfrey, I mean it!”

  Leary understood the Colonel’s adjectives to refer to anything or anyone that compromised America’s duty to defend democracy around the world. Wilson at least half-recognized that duty now. “I dislike his policies almost to the point of hate,” Roosevelt said, “but I am too good an American to stand by and see him beaten by a mongrel American.”

  IF EDITH HOPED that a seven-week cruise would take her husband’s mind off Europe, she forgot that most of the islands of the Lesser Antilles belonged to Britain or France, and were therefore as obsessed with the war as he was. As the Guiana steamed south, it frequently encountered armored cruisers of the Royal and French navies. A constant guard was being maintained against reincarnations of the German raider Karlsruhe, which had terrorized the entire Caribbean in 1914, before blowing up mysteriously off Barbados.

  When Roosevelt stepped ashore on Martinique on 22 February, he found himself on French soil. The island was a département of the Republic and, in local opinion, indistinguishable from it. Fort-de-France had just been advised, by cable, of a German attack on the city of Verdun that was going beyond all previous extremes of military violence. The governor of Martinique welcomed Roosevelt with commensurate solemnity, and thanked him for his long crusade for the Allied cause. Not to be outdone, the mayor of Fort-de-France recalled that President Roosevelt had been the first head of state to rush aid to Martinique in 1902, after the catastrophic eruption of Mont Pelée.

  Roaring cheers and cannon fire shook the air as the distinguished visitors rode through town in an open automobile. House façades displayed the tricolors of France and the United States. At every stop, Roosevelt received full honors, as he had six years before in Paris. He asked to see something of the island, and was taken to the ridge of Vert-Pré, with its double view of the Atlantic and the Mer des Antilles. Northward, the ocean stretched blue and white-capped all the way to Brittany. To the west, the calm shallows of the New World lolled.

  At 5 P.M. the Roosevelts returned to Fort-de-France for a military review. Bugles sounded in the city square, and a double file of troops presented arms. Roosevelt inspected both ranks with the governor at his side. Then he joined Edith on the reviewing stand while the whole company saluted them en défilé.

  Most of the marchers were youths of Quentin’s age, conscripted for service in Europe and only a month or two in uniform. But the effect of France’s preparedness program—even more intense, apparently, than that administered by General Wood at Plattsburg—was evident in their machine-like drill. A cavalry charge ensued. Then the entire island company, officers and youths, stamped to a halt in front of the Roosevelts and inclined the French flag at their feet.

  Edith, who had always considered herself partly French, began to weep. So did another woman on the stand. Roosevelt turned to the governor and, courteously abandoning his own language, said, “Je vois que Madame Guy pleure. Madame Roosevelt pleure aussi, et moi, je sens les larmes me monter aux yeux: c’est impressionnant.”*

  Later he was asked to present the Croix de Guerre to a wounded corporal, and said companionably, “Moi aussi j’ai une balle allemande au dos. L’assassin qui me l’a tiré était un Allemand.”*

  Edith excused herself from a grand banquet in the Chamber of Commerce garden that night. She thus missed a unique opportunity to hear her husband compared to Cyrano de Bergerac. Speaking with considerable emotion, the governor recalled being present at the Sorbonne in April 1910, when Roosevelt had delivered his famous address exhorting Frenchmen to gird themselves for moral battle. Now the hour of blood and dust had come, and the students he had inspired were fighting for their country.

  In youth, “l’ardent colonel des Rough-Riders” had fought likewise. More recently, as everybody in Martinique knew, he had been a lonely American oracle, shouting that democracy must be protected against barbarism—unlike certain of his countrymen who took refuge in “une neutralité prudente.” Turning to Roosevelt, the governor accorded him one of the most moving tributes he had ever heard:

  Vous nous donnez l’exemple rare, presque unique, d’un homme politique qui n’est pas un politicien, d’un homme d’action qui est en même temps un homme de pensée; d’un parlementaire qui ne parle que s’il a quelque chose à dire; d’un écrivain qui sait se battre et d’un soldat qui sait écrire. Et tout cela avec une gaîté franche, une absence de morgue qui séduit les plus humbles et qui en impose aux plus puissants. Il y a en vous quelque chose de notre Cyrano de Bergerac qui risque sa vie pour une idée; qui lutte sans souci des dangers pour son idéal, mais qui entre deux combats dépose sa cuirasse et son épée pour lire Lucrèce et commenter Platon.*

  AFTER VISITING THE New York Zoological Society’s tropical research station in British Guiana, maintained by Charles William Beebe, Roosevelt proceeded to Trinidad. He arrived there on 3 March, and received a disquieting batch of cablegrams from New York. They informed him that prospective delegates to the Republican and Progressive conventions (scheduled to run simultaneously in Chicago, in early June) were already pledging themselves to him, as an expected bipartisan candidate for president. John McGrath had announced that the Colonel had no political ambitions, but the pledges would not stop. No less a GOP stalwart than Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts was now calling himself a “Roosevelt Republican.”

  Roosevelt remained silent while he went birding in the Trinidadian interior with an entomologist and mycologist, two of the inexhaustible list of friends he seemed able to call on wherever he traveled. They spent an afternoon in a cave stranger than anything dreamed by Hieronymus Bosch. It concealed itself high in the mountains, behind a gush of clear water. Scrabbling through into pitch darkness, Roosevelt heard all around him a weird flapping and fluttering, combined with metallic clacks, growls, pipes, and wails. As torches lit up the gloom, he saw slabs and ledges slathered two feet deep with guano. Obese, naked guacharo chicks sat in this nitrous clay, peering blindly out of cup-shaped hollows, while overhead their parent birds sat guard like nighthawks. Bats furred the ceiling. Roosevelt was amazed to see slender fungi growing out of the guano, although there was no light to feed them.

  That night he slept with his companions in the humid hut of a black coconut farmer. His clothes from the cave were still wet the next morning when he rode back to Port of Spain.

  From there, on 9 March, he cabled a long statement to New York, for immediate release to all newspapers:

  I MUST REQUEST AND I NOW DO REQUEST AND INSIST THAT MY NAME BE NOT BROUGHT INTO THE MASSACHUSETTS PRIMARIES AND I EMPHATICALLY DECLINE TO BE A CANDIDATE IN THE PRIMARIES OF THAT OR ANY OTHER STATE.…

  I DO NOT WISH THE NOMINATION. I AM NOT IN THE LEAST INTERESTED IN THE POLITICAL FORTUNES EITHER OF MYSELF OR ANY OTHER MAN. I AM INTERESTED IN AWAKENING MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN TO THE NEED OF FACING UNPLEASANT FACTS.…

  I WILL NOT ENTER ANY FIGHT FOR THE NOMINATION.… INDEED, I WILL GO FURTHER AND SAY IT WOULD BE A MISTAKE TO NOMINATE ME UNLESS THE COUNTRY HAD IN ITS MOOD SOMETHING OF THE HEROIC.

  He did not say what the “facts” were that Americans had to face. Nor did he directly mention the war. But he did refer to “tremendous national and international problems” confronting Woodrow Wilson’s “unmanly” administration, and cited Washington and Lincoln as two presidents who had not sought to escape action “behind clouds of fine words.” He went on at tremendous le
ngth, trying the patience of Trinidad’s wartime censor, who was required to check every word transmitted out of the island. Late that evening the cable went off. On 10 March, The New York Times published it under the headline ROOSEVELT’S HAT AGAIN IN THE RING.

  WHEN HE RETURNED home a fortnight later, he found two booms for the Republican presidential nomination under way. One—perhaps more of a discreet, offstage rumble than a boom—was in behalf of Justice Charles Evans Hughes, and represented the wishes of Party stalwarts who had supported Taft for reelection in 1912. Few of them were enthusiastic about their choice, but Hughes had the supreme virtue of being so colorless and closemouthed as to be virtually attack-proof. A joke went around that “no one wanted Hughes, but everyone was for him.”

  The other boom was for the author of Fear God and Take Your Own Part. Roosevelt’s book had become a surprise bestseller. Two biographical sketches of him were out, both frankly adoring: Julian Street’s The Most Interesting American, and a memoir by Charles G. Washburn, Theodore Roosevelt: The Logic of His Career. Quite apart from his literary celebrity, he appeared to have inspired scores of Progressive and Republican campaign planners with a desire for “something of the heroric.”

  They thought he was talking about political heroism. He meant the soldierly kind. Whatever desire for power still burned in Roosevelt related solely to the war—manifesting itself in fantasies of how he, last spring, would have handed the German ambassador his passports and made him sail home on the Lusitania. He did not see his boom lasting through the convention. Recriminations over the great bolt of 1912 were still too fierce to admit any real possibility that he could reunite both wings of the GOP. Nor was he deceived by the sales of his book into thinking that a majority of Americans believed in preparedness—much less overseas military action. As Robert Bacon wrote to a friend in France, “In America there are fifty thousand people who understand the necessity of the United States entering the war immediately on your side. But there are a hundred million Americans who have not even thought of it. Our task is to see that the figures are reversed.”

  Roosevelt had seen Hughes’s candidacy coming for a long time. Typically, the justice would neither confirm nor deny a desire to be nominated. But he had much to recommend him. Hughes was progressive without being Progressive, a man of icy brilliance, enrobed now with all the majesty of a seat on the Supreme Court. The only virtue he lacked, in abundance, was charm. But Grover Cleveland had managed to do without it and serve two distinguished terms in the White House, to say nothing of George Washington.

  What, though, would a President Hughes do about such recent provocations as Britain’s rejection of Secretary Lansing’s proposal to classify armed merchantmen as warships? And Pancho Villa’s cross-border raid on Columbus, New Mexico, killing eight civilians and seven U.S. troopers? And Germany’s torpedoing of the Channel ferry Sussex, with four Americans aboard? Roosevelt had no evidence to go on, but suspected that the justice would prove to be “another Wilson with whiskers.”

  JOVIAL AND RED-BROWN from the Caribbean sun, Roosevelt returned to Sagamore Hill and found a book of poems in the mass of mail awaiting his attention. It was entitled The Man Against the Sky, and had been sent to him by Edwin Arlington Robinson, strangest of all the literary figures he had patronized. Robinson had done little over the past twenty-seven years but write austere, elliptical poetry and try to keep from starving. When inspiration failed, he would try without success to drink himself to death. There was too much blood in his sunsets and aching regret in his love lyrics for most magazine editors to read, let alone print anything by him. What books he had managed to publish were either self-financed or commercial failures. In 1905, Roosevelt had had to exercise the power of the presidency to persuade Scribners to reissue The Children of the Night, simultaneously awarding Robinson a no-show government job. As the poet, forever grateful, wrote Kermit: “I don’t know where I would be without your astonishing father. He fished me out of hell by the hair of the head, and so enabled me to get my last book together and in all probability to get it published.”

  That had been The Town Down the River, which came out in 1910 and ended in an enigmatic ode entitled “The Revealer—Roosevelt.” Except for some haunting verses here and there, it showed an attrition of his gifts, indicating that Robinson would have been better off left in hell. He seemed to write best when he was nearest to suicide.

  The Roosevelts had seen him only once or twice since then: a mousy, half-deaf little man who had come to Sagamore Hill in 1913 and remained almost mute—not that any of the Colonel’s guests ever had much opportunity to speak. Now Robinson repaid their hospitality with a book of such original power as to justify the belief, among a few cognoscenti, that he was the finest poet in America. He confessed in an accompanying note that he had recently emerged from one of his depressive slumps.

  “Your letter deeply touches me,” Roosevelt wrote on 27 March. “There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us.… It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.”

  He was referring to a terrifying poem in the book, describing Robinson’s Döppelganger-like experience of having witnessed his own death in a house full of demonic shadows. Roosevelt responded more to the poet’s feeling of rebirth—After that, from everywhere, / Singing life will find him—than to whatever agonies Robinson may have suffered before a door mysteriously opened and let him out.

  He did not elaborate on his own periods of melancholy, or say if he had ever felt overmastered by them. Robinson had long ago, with sly word play in “The Revealer,” implied that Roosevelt was too happily constituted to suffer real despair. Theodoros in Greek connoted a man gifted by the gods with equal quantities of positivity and personal courage—someone who was, in a later simile, sweeter than honey and stronger than a lion. Had he not killed his share of lions in Africa, and come home purged and purified, to shout out his message that a life of total engagement was the only one worth living? Then and now, Robinson perceived him to be much more than “biceps and sunshine.”

  The title poem in The Man Against the Sky was not, as some might think, another portrait of Roosevelt. It did celebrate his anti-materialistic philosophy. Robinson’s extraordinary imagery, at once elusive and allusive, was pitched to fly right past the Colonel’s ears. But the central metaphor of a giant figure reaching the top of a black hill, gazing with inscrutable emotion at a world on fire beyond, then descending by slow stages out of sight (whether to Elysian fields or some unseen doom), was there for any Roosevelt-watcher to ponder.

  ON THE LAST DAY of March, Roosevelt made his first overt move toward a return to the GOP by lunching with Elihu Root. Four years had passed since their estrangement at the last Republican National Convention—years in which Root had felt no annoyance at Roosevelt calling him a “thief,” only regret that someone he loved could be so unable to accept that his rulings as chairman might have been fair.

  They met in New York, at Robert Bacon’s town house on Park Avenue. Henry Cabot Lodge and Leonard Wood attended. All five men found themselves linked by their dislike of the President. To Roosevelt’s sardonic amusement, Root and Lodge also had bitter things to say about Taft. But it was no time to upbraid them for supporting an un-reelectable President. The prime purpose of the lunch was to let the press and Progressive Party know that Athos and D’Artagnan had reconciled. Wood wrote with satisfaction in his diary, “Roosevelt and Root seemed to be glad to be together again, really so.”

  The New York Times and The Washington Post treated the lunch as front-page news, on a par with dispatches describing “the greatest of conflicts” ongoing at Verdun. Political commentators were agreed that Roosevelt was making himself available as a candidate for nomination by both the Progressive and Republican parties. Supporters of the President felt qualms. Wilson did not look strong. Pancho Villa’s raid had been a severe embarrassment to him, and a four-thousand-man punitive Amer
ican expedition, headed by Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, had so far failed to raise much more than a cloud of alkali dust. Lindley Garrison had resigned as secretary of war, in protest against the President’s feeling that an enlarged, all-white National Guard was preferable to a segregated Continental Army. The first anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania loomed in six weeks’ time, and Germany had still not yet acknowledged her “strict accountability” for that outrage.

  A mild irony of the lunch at Bacon’s house was that, despite its appearance of solidarity, every guest felt ambivalent about the Roosevelt boom. Root and Wood aspired to the presidency themselves, and Lodge was secretly for Hughes. Roosevelt himself wished he was not still the last hope of die-hard Progressives. Having re-embraced the party of William Howard Taft and Boies Penrose (not to mention William Barnes, Jr.), he felt he could not in good faith allow his Bull Moose followers to nominate him again. That would signal a belief that the Progressive movement was still viable, whereas he had long ago told Kermit that it had “vanished into the Ewigkeit.”*

  But his boom would not stop. George von Lengerke Meyer created a Roosevelt Republican Committee, and funds flowed in. To the fury of the brothers Pinchot, George Perkins discreetly aided this organization. A Theodore Roosevelt Non-Partisan League worked hand in hand with a Women’s Roosevelt League. Catholic bishops and Detroit auto executives pondered convention strategy. The old cry, “We want Teddy!” was heard in Maine and Minnesota. Advertisements ran in newspapers and magazines. “Campaign” headquarters opened in New York, Boston, and Chicago, even though the Colonel insisted he would not contest a single primary. “What I am really trying to do,” he wrote Hiram Johnson (another presidential hopeful), “is … get the Republicans and Progressives together for someone whom we can elect and whom it will be worth while electing.” Although his head told him that person was Justice Hughes, his heart could not help beginning to throb with seasonal ambition. By 5 April he was ready to take seriously the teasing threat of a delegate-elect to the Republican convention, “You know, Colonel, I may make up my mind that we will have to nominate you.”