Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “Don’t you do it if you expect me to pussy-foot on any single issue I have raised,” Roosevelt said, adding yet another phrase to the dictionary of American political slang.

  AT THIS JUNCTURE, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated once more that he was a political operator without peer.

  The attack on the Sussex had typically caused him to go into seclusion, while he deliberated how to respond and waited for an authoritative statement that it had indeed been torpedoed by a U-boat. Meanwhile there had been such a surge of national anger at the loss of American lives aboard, combined with frustration over General Pershing’s inability to track down Pancho Villa, that Wilson saw he must address it, or risk having the anger translate into a general conviction that his foreign policy had failed. On 18 April, he ordered Joseph Tumulty to go to Capitol Hill at 4:30 P.M. sharp, and inform the leaders of Congress that the President had “important affairs” to communicate to both Houses at 1 P.M. the following afternoon. The White House simultaneously announced that Wilson had written a new note to Germany, unprecedented in its harshness, which was ready for dispatch the moment he finished his address.

  These drumrolls, so precisely timed for effect, created such suspense that Roosevelt sounded peevish when he complained that Wilson wanted to hold a “town meeting” rather than act like a commander in chief.

  When the hour came for the President to appear, Congress was more excited than at any time since it had awaited William McKinley’s request for war against Spain in 1898. Wilson entered looking like a man with his mind made up, and the applause that greeted him as he made his way to the lectern was subdued but prolonged. All he said by way of preamble was, “Gentlemen of the Congress, a situation has arisen in the foreign relations of the country of which it is my plain duty to inform you very frankly.”

  He reviewed his diplomatic communications with the Wilhelmstrasse since February 1915, stressing the good faith of the United States in consistently believing Germany’s protestations that it would moderate its submarine offensive against the Allies. Despite a strong warning by the State Department at the beginning of this offensive, and much patience on his own part, “the commanders of German undersea vessels have attacked merchant ships with greater and greater activity, not only upon the high seas surrounding Great Britain and Ireland but wherever they could encounter them, in a way that has grown more and more ruthless, more and more indiscriminate as the months have gone by.”

  Greater and greater, more and more. Throughout his fifteen-minute address, the President kept pounding out repetitive qualifiers, stressing the incremental nature of the tests Germany had put on America’s patience. “Tragedy has followed tragedy.… Great liners like the Lusitania and the Arabic, and mere ferryboats like the Sussex, have been attacked without a moment’s warning … and the roll of Americans who have lost their lives on ships thus attacked and destroyed has grown month by month, until the ominous toll has mounted into the hundreds.” Nevertheless, he had been willing to wait until evidence of Germany’s deliberate intent to keep the United States at bay with false promises could be tolerated no longer.

  That time had now come, Wilson said. “The government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue, and that unless the Imperial German government should immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, this government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the government of the German Empire altogether.”

  He made clear that he was not asking, but expecting all legislators present to approve a decision which could well lead to war. He managed to do this with a winning combination of self-confidence and chagrin. As he folded up his script he caught the grave expression of William J. Stone, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and said, “I hope you do not feel as sad as I feel.”

  The applause that accompanied his exit from the chamber was noticeably louder than that which had greeted him.

  ROOSEVELT WAS ONE of the minority of Americans who did not admire the President’s masterly address. Even if Germany backed down, he said, it would only prove that Wilson should have forced the issue fourteen months before, thus saving the lives of many women and children, and making imperative a national preparedness program.

  He seemed to realize that however the Wilhelmstrasse reacted, he had lost a lot of his rhetorical ground as a proponent of forceful policymaking. Which meant, he wrote his sister Bamie, “there is in my judgment hardly any chance that the Republican convention will turn to me.” He was not going to declare himself a candidate: his only message now was preparedness. There was a danger that even that theme had been co-opted by the wily President. “Mere outside preaching and prophecy tend after a while to degenerate into a scream … and I am within measurable distance of that point.”

  On 4 May, just three days before the Lusitania anniversary, Count Jagow replied to the President’s ultimatum with a promise that German submarine commanders would henceforth honor the rights of all noncombatants at sea. In return, he expected America to insist that Great Britain show an equal respect for international maritime law. Secretary Lansing replied that the United States “could not for a moment entertain” such a presumption on its relations with another country. Helpless, Jagow lapsed into silence. Wilson’s triumph was complete. An early move among isolationist Democrats to oppose his renomination with Champ Clark faded.

  And so, much more slowly, did the Progressive/Republican boom for Roosevelt. He took a flying trip to Detroit to assail Henry Ford’s pacifism, and at the end of May traveled to Kansas City to deliver a Memorial Day address apparently designed to antagonize every hyphenated citizen in the country. “I have been enthusiastically received,” he wrote Fanny Parsons, “—save for one playful Latin-American gentleman who threw a knife at me.”

  Ray Stannard Baker visited Wilson in the White House and asked him directly whom he would prefer to campaign against in the fall—Roosevelt or Hughes.

  “It matters very little,” said the President, serene as ever. “Roosevelt deals in personalities and does not argue upon facts and conditions. One does not need to meet him at all. Hughes is of a different type. If he is nominated he will have to be met.”

  Wilson’s major address of the month, before the League to Enforce Peace, took up the theme Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Andrew Carnegie, Roosevelt, Taft, and many other oracles had sounded in their differing ways over the past six years: that of a new international organization with power to prevent all future wars. Such a body, he said, should respect the right of all members, small and large, to determine their own destiny, while remaining inviolate for one another. “So sincerely do we believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America when I say that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objections.”

  If it was the mind and wish of Americans to reelect Woodrow Wilson in November, he was doubtless hinting at the long-term goal of his presidency.

  ON THE NIGHT of Thursday, 8 June, ten leaders of the Progressive and Republican parties, convening in Chicago, met to explore the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate. Roosevelt was neither present nor near at hand: his non-candidacy required him to be at home in Sagamore Hill, pretending not to be interested in incoming long-distance telephone calls.

  It was soon obvious that George Perkins’s delegation was willing to trade away almost every plank of the old Bull Moose platform, on condition that Theodore Roosevelt was nominated by the GOP. Members of the Republican delegation, including Winthrop Murray Crane and Nicholas Murray Butler, the antiwar president of Columbia University, made it equally clear that they would as soon vote for Senator Charles W. Fairbanks of Indiana, the most un-charismatic politician in America.

  Sir Cecil Spring Rice, observing both conventions on behalf of Sir Edward Grey, was struck by t
he ambivalence of the Republican delegates who had traveled with him from Washington. “All were united in asseverating that they hated Teddy like hell and wanted to get back at him,” he wrote his wife, “but [felt] that he was the only man who could save the country.”

  From what, the ambassador did not say. Possibly from international contempt: the United States was a pariah at the moment, with Mexico resentful of Pershing’s mission, Britain and France furious at a suggestion by Wilson that no parties to the world war were free of responsibility for its outbreak, and Germany seething at the haughty tone of his last note. The European situation was desperate. Ten thousand shells a day were falling on Verdun, and still troops were horded in from east and west to die, with no resolution in sight after three and a half months: Stellungskrieg, standing war, motionless mortality. General Falkenhayn’s announced intention was to bleed France white. The Battle of Jutland had been not so much a victory for Britain as a strategic retreat by the German navy. Russia was resurgent against Austria on the southwestern front. The British minister of war, Lord Kitchener—he whom Roosevelt had once taunted with a reference to Shakespeare’s “vasty deep”—had gone down at sea with all his aides, victims of a German-laid mine. Meanwhile, petty politicians in Chicago were still squabbling over Roosevelt’s bolt in 1912.

  “They believed,” Spring Rice said of his travel companions, “that if he turned up at Chicago [today] he would carry the whole place with him. On the other hand Cabot thought if he only kept away he might have a dog’s chance, but that if he came he would spoil everything.”

  Long ago, Henry Adams had observed that the only rock on Roosevelt’s coast was the senator from Massachusetts. “We all look for inevitable shipwreck there.” None of their friends had ever been able to understand the mutual attraction of two such contrary souls. Lodge was overtly for Roosevelt, covertly for Hughes, but in the suspicion of many delegates, not averse to being nominated himself.

  “THE ONLY ROCK ON ROOSEVELT’S COAST.”

  Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. (photo credit i23.1)

  The bipartisan conference adjourned without result and on the following day, Friday, the Republican convention took its first ballot. Hughes led with 253½ votes; five other candidates, including Lodge, scored ahead of Roosevelt, who got only 65. A second ballot increased his total to 81, but Hughes’s mushroomed to 328½.

  By nine o’clock that evening it was clear that the justice was going to be nominated—without enthusiasm—unless the Progressive convention could suggest another candidate acceptable to both parties. A second conference began just before midnight, with constant calls going back to Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt, aghast at the prospect of a campaign pitting Charles the Baptist against the Byzantine Logothete, got on the line and asked Nicholas Murray Butler if he had any chance to win on a future ballot. Butler said no. The Republican leadership would prefer to choose between Elihu Root, Philander Chase Knox, and Senator Fairbanks. Roosevelt said none were congenial to his Progressive supporters. Instead of himself, he suggested Leonard Wood or Henry Cabot Lodge.

  At the mention of the last name, Butler showed some interest. When the two parties reassembled on Saturday morning, 10 June, a telegram from the Colonel urged both of them to support Lodge as a man of “the broadest national spirit.” Perkins’s communication of this news to the Progressives provoked anguished cries of “No.” The protests swelled and transformed into such passion for Roosevelt that at 12:37 P.M., Perkins was unable to delay his nomination. That was three minutes too late to influence Republicans voting a few blocks away in Convention Hall. They had already decided on Hughes.

  It remained only for Roosevelt to make his final break with the Progressive rank and file. He did so with another telegram declining their nomination “at this time.” Its brusque tone was no more shocking than his demand that his “conditional refusal” be referred to George Perkins’s National Committee to accept as absolute. “If they are not satisfied they can … confer with me and then determine on whatever action we may severally deem appropriate to meet the needs of the country.”

  Oswald Garrison Villard, editor of the New York Evening Post, watched as the import of these words sank in on the delegates. Roosevelt was not only rejecting them (in the very hall where he had once vowed to battle for the Lord) but, with the silky-smooth collusion of George Perkins, making it impossible for them to nominate anybody else who might damage the Republican Party’s choice. “Around me,” Villard reported, “men of the frontier type could not keep back their tears at this self-revelation of their idol’s selfishness, the smashing of their illusions about their peerless leader.”

  ROOSEVELT’S BRUSQUENESS masked considerable hurt. Against all his instincts, he had allowed himself to believe that the miracle might happen, that the Republican nomination he had always wanted (in preference to that of 1912) was coming to him just as Americans realized that he, of all the men in the world, was probably the best equipped to arrest the general breakdown of civilization. If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership. But leadership once again, and probably forever now, was denied him. The future of America was in the hands of two aloof and cagey deliberators. Wilson and Hughes were men who waited for events to happen and then reacted. They lacked his ability to see events coming and act accordingly, faster than anyone else on the political scene. Since Belgium, he had known in his bones that the United States must go to war, as he had known the same after the Maine blew up in ’98. Now he could only wait until whichever nominee faced up to telling the American people this disagreeable fact.

  “Theodore,” Corinne Robinson said, bursting in on him as he sat brooding in his library, “the people wanted you.” She had attended both conventions in Chicago.

  He smiled at her. “If they had wanted me hard enough, they could have had me.”

  With other family and friends he affected his usual good humor, and joked that the country obviously “wasn’t in a heroic mood.” Wheezing with a sudden attack of dry pleurisy (which he blamed on the bullet in his chest), he admitted, in an off-the-record interview with John J. Leary, that he was deeply disappointed. To the newspaperman’s surprise, he quoted the prophet Micah—What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God—taking apparent comfort in the kind of biblical text William Jennings Bryan was always spouting.

  His secretary interrupted to ask if he wanted to comment on a news flash that the President had called out the National Guard to help secure the Mexican border.

  “No,” Roosevelt said. Then, with a click of teeth: “Let Hughes talk—it’s his fight.”

  There were spasms of anger in subsequent days, along with coughing fits so violent he pulled some tendons. Pride in Kermit, who had come north from Argentina with Belle to present Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., age five months, for inspection, and in Ted, Archie, and Quentin, re-registered at Plattsburg, prompted him to rage at the offspring of some of his friends. “If they were mine I’d want to choke them—pretty boys who know all the latest tango steps and the small talk, and the latest things in socks and ties—tame cats, mollycoddles.”

  At such times, only Edith Roosevelt could hush him. “Now, Theodore. That is just one of those remarks that make it so difficult sometimes for your friends to defend you.”

  “Why, Edie!”

  * “I see that Madame Guy is crying. So is Madame Roosevelt, and I feel tears coming myself. This is impressive.”

  * “I too have a German bullet in my back [sic]. The assassin who shot me was a German.”

  * “You offer us a rare, almost unique, example of a political person who is not a politician, of a man of action who is at the same time a man of thought; of a public speaker who does not speak unless he has something to say; of a writer who knows how to fight and a warrior who knows how to write. And all this with a frank gaiety, a lack of pomposity that seduces the humblest and impresses the most powerful. There is in you something of our Cyrano de Be
rgerac, who risked his life for an idea; who fought without fear of danger for his belief, but between battles set aside his armor and his sword to read Lucretius and expound Plato.”

  * Eternity.

  CHAPTER 24

  Shadows of Lofty Words

  Far journeys and hard wandering

  Await him in whose crude surmise

  Peace, like a mask, hides everything

  That is and has been from his eyes.

  AS A BOY, ROOSEVELT USED TO PLAY a running game with his siblings and friends, called “stagecoach.” It involved bursts of motion, interrupted by imaginary collisions that caused all passengers aboard to fly off in various directions.

  In recent years, he had suffered similar feelings of acceleration and ejection, often enough to wonder if the game had not been a forecast of his future. He lay now amid the dust of yet another political crash, feeling no particular desire to get back on the road. Reading The Man Against the Sky had revived his interest in poets and poetry. “A poet,” he liked to say, “can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.” He devoured Spoon River Anthology and invited Edgar Lee Masters to visit him at Sagamore Hill. Hearing that the nature bards Bliss Carman and Madison Cawein were in financial straits, he quietly raised funds for them.