His taste in verse was unpredictable. One of Robert Frost’s bitterest poems, “A Servant to Servants,” with its central image of a caged, naked psychotic, spoke to him more than the popular lyrics in North of Boston. He astonished the poet by reciting some lines from it at a meeting of the Poetry Society of America. What may have appealed to him was the dogged voice of the first-person narrator, a caretaker resigned to unending, thankless responsibilities: By good rights I ought not to have so much / Put on me, but there seems no other way.
In that spirit, Roosevelt heard himself promising once again to take part in an election campaign, although this time he so disliked the ticket (vitiated by Senator Fairbanks in the number two spot) that he resented being asked. It was bad enough having to endorse Charles Evans Hughes, who had never shown any gratitude for his help in 1910, and who had developed a severe attack of amnesia when asked to testify for the defense in Barnes v. Roosevelt.
However, the prospect of four more years of Woodrow Wilson was so unthinkable that Roosevelt felt he should do whatever was necessary to put Hughes in the White House. On 26 June 1916, he announced his support for Hughes, and dined with the candidate a couple of days later. He agreed to kick off the Republican campaign with a major address in Lewiston, Maine, at the end of August, and to follow up with four or five shorter speeches at spaced intervals, on the understanding that Hughes would back him up on preparedness and a strong policy toward Mexico. More than that Roosevelt declined to do, on the unarguable ground that his forceful personality would make the candidate seem weak. Privately, he referred to Hughes as “the Bearded Lady.”
Strength would appear to be required in Mexico, since General Carranza, the de facto ruler of that country, was objecting to Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa, and as a sign of displeasure, had just killed fourteen American soldiers. He had also taken twenty-three prisoners. Clearly Pershing was going to need massive reinforcements. Roosevelt donned the imaginary uniform of a major general and cast about for recruiters. “I don’t believe this administration can be kicked into war, for Wilson seems about as much a milksop as Bryan,” he wrote Seth Bullock. “But there is, of course, the chance that he may be forced to fight. If so, are you too old to raise a squadron of cavalry in South Dakota?”
He was concerned that Kermit, who was in New York pending reassignment to another foreign branch of National City Bank, was the only one of his sons who had not had the benefit of military training at Plattsburg in 1915. General Wood was running a similar camp this summer, and the other boys were already registered for it. Kermit could try to catch up with them by joining the “TBM” program in July.
Roosevelt underestimated the President’s willingness to go to war in Mexico. “The break seems to have come,” Wilson privately concluded. But before he and his new secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, could agree on a plan of action, Carranza released the prisoners and offered to negotiate terms that would permit Pershing to continue operations.
COINCIDENTALLY, AN ENGLISH infantryman going into battle on the Somme on the first day of July used Wilson’s phrase, the break, to describe his feeling, as twenty-one thousand men fell dead around him, that what was left of the pre-war world and its values had finally split and fallen apart. Memory was not erased so much as made irrelevant, in the face of Maxim-gun fire that drilled efficiently through line after line of uniforms. Even at Verdun (where French and German soldiers were now reduced to hand-to-hand combat in caves) there had never been such butchery as this.
CARRANZA’S PEACE GESTURE did not slow Roosevelt’s drive to raise a volunteer division. When the War Department heard about it, Secretary Baker was more amused than angry. On 6 July, having received an encouraging flood of applications, the Colonel formally requested authority to proceed with recruitment. His letter to Baker was less boastful and more detailed than the one he had sent President Taft at the time of the first Mexican troubles, and he dropped none of the distinguished names, military and civilian, he had already settled on for command posts. The influence of his younger son was detectable in a proposal to create “one motor-cycle regiment with machine guns … an engineering regiment, [and] an aviation squadron.”
Baker referred his letter to the adjutant general of the army, who replied, much as Taft had done, that “in the event of war with Mexico,” the administration would consider his offer.
Roosevelt, fretful and still coughing with dry pleurisy, had said nothing about wanting to fight anywhere else in the world. But his current reading included the military memoirs of Baron Grivel in French. He also wrote an article for Collier’s Weekly entitled “Lafayettes of the Air: Young Americans Who Are Flying for France.”
ON 4 AUGUST, Miss Flora Whitney, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the owner of Metropolitan magazine, came out in Newport. In local parlance, she was the “first bud” of the debutante season. Five hundred guests danced fox-trots in the blue-and-gold ballroom of the Whitney mansion on Bellevue Avenue, and Flora, slender as a calla lily in a white dress with silver trim, twirled in the arms of her dinner partner, Mr. Quentin Roosevelt of Oyster Bay. They danced all night, then took a sunrise dip in the sea.
Quentin was on a pass from Plattsburg, and in no hurry to return. He admitted, even to his father, that he did not enjoy himself there. Ted loved it. So did Archie, who had just graduated from Harvard. Kermit was at least no gloomier there than anywhere else. Quentin found camp life a bore. He was not lazy, nor did he lack courage. But parade-ground drill bothered his back, agonizingly sometimes. His ironic sense of humor, unshared by any of his siblings except Alice, made it difficult for him to take military life seriously.
He was the same age as Flora—or would be in the fall—and he shared her eager appetite for fun. There was plenty of that available at Newport, and on the other Whitney estates in upstate New York, South Carolina, and Old Westbury, Long Island. Slick-haired, fast-driving boys like himself zoomed in on these places, their autos crammed with girls daringly dressed in the latest modes from Paris—none more daring than Flora, who was arty, if not a teensy bit affected, in her love of “modern” jewelry and fabrics that only she could mix and carry off. She smoked straw-tipped Benson & Hedges cigarettes, which she kept in a red-beaded case. Her spiffy Scripps-Booth torpedo roadster had wire wheels and a silver radiator shell. Since her mother was the famous sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a hint of la bohème was to be expected of her. Flora dreamed of being a designer one day. Her small chiseled face was more unusual than pretty, with long-lashed hazel eyes and gull’s-wing brows that made her look fiercer than she was.
“FLORA DREAMED OF BEING A DESIGNER ONE DAY.”
Flora Payne Whitney. (photo credit i24.1)
Quentin had been friendly with her for almost a year. Before going up to Harvard, he had gotten into the habit of driving out to Westbury and enjoying the society of people more entertaining than the dour Brahmins forever visiting his parents. He was not the only Roosevelt attracted to Flora. Archie had briefly paid court, and although he was a handsome youth, blond and skinny as a whippet, she had made clear her preference for his younger brother. So far, Quentin had no stronger feelings for her than affection and a mutual interest in poetry. This was just as well, from the point of view of Flora’s parents: he was just the sort of name-but-no-money college boy they wanted to protect her from. Now that she was “introduced to society,” there would be many scions of the Four Hundred seeking to add a Whitney to their portfolios.
Nevertheless, Quentin’s claims on her—should he choose to exercise them—could not be discounted. He was the son of a former President of the United States. He had his father’s charm, but none of the obsessive need to cajole and convert that was making the Colonel so difficult to take these days. Growing up in the White House had given Quentin a sense of self-worth that had little in it of vanity. He did not need to work at impressing people, being used to their deference. At Harvard he had fitted right in with the best sort. “You get a speaking acquaintance wi
th a lot of others,” he reported to Kermit, “but you don’t know them any more than the little Yids I sit next to in class.”
Flora could have found someone better looking to squire her on the night she “came out.” With his lofty forehead, Rooseveltian teeth, and furrowed brows, Quentin was not likely to improve with age. But he was tall and powerfully built and to her, adorable.
ROOSEVELT’S ARTICLE ABOUT American volunteer pilots in France (“We are all of us indebted to these young men of generous soul … proudly willing to die for their convictions”) reflected a growing popular awareness that war was no longer constrained by gravity. One “aeroplane” dispatched across no-man’s-land with a camera could survey more battleground in half an hour than a reconnaissance patrol in a month. For days before the German attack on Verdun, the French had been alerted to its imminence by a steady droning east of the Meuse.
Secretary Baker was pleased to confirm in mid-August that Congress had voted $13 million toward the reorganization and equipping of an army air arm. Aspiring fliers thrilled to the size of this appropriation, building as it did on passage of an ambitious National Defense Act. Now patriotic young men unattracted to ground or naval warfare could, if they wanted in any future emergency, serve their country in the skies. Quelle gloire!
Quentin dutifully completed his course at Plattsburg, then spent as many late-summer days as he could with Flora. He had to cram for his next semester at Harvard, having determined to pass through university in three years and then add two more at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He told Kermit he would like to be a mechanical engineer.
ON 31 AUGUST, ROOSEVELT inaugurated the Republican fall campaign as promised, with a major policy statement in Lewiston, Maine. Absentmindedly, he referred to it as “my Lusitania speech.” The verbal slip was telling. Instead of musing how he could best help Hughes as a candidate, he was still brooding over an act of war that had found Woodrow Wilson wanting fifteen months before. His speech—an unfavorable comparison of the President to Pontius Pilate—was roaringly received, and reached millions of newspaper readers in transcript. It buttressed his new image as an elder statesman of the GOP, but disturbed many undecided voters who felt that he was too pugnacious a campaigner for Hughes’s good. “Roosevelt would be a really great man,” the naturalist John Burroughs wrote in his journal, “if he could be shorn of that lock of his hair in which that strong dash of the bully resides.”
Two days later, the President effortlessly reclaimed national attention by appearing on the porch of “Shadow Lawn,” his summer cottage at Long Branch, New Jersey, and thanking a delegation of Democratic officials for renominating him to another term. Slim and laughing, natty in white slacks and a dark blazer, he looked almost young, the happiness of his remarriage radiating from him. It was difficult for reporters who had covered the Colonel in recent months to believe that Wilson, soon to be sixty, was the older man.
There was much for him to be happy about. He had just negotiated an end to a threatened railroad strike that would have paralyzed the country and damaged his candidacy. In doing so he had openly sided with labor against capital, and persuaded Congress to reduce the daily hours worked by rail union members from ten to six, with no loss of pay. The public rejoiced, and Roosevelt fumed. He wanted to boast about the time he had settled the great anthracite strike of 1902, without partiality, but thought it would hurt Hughes if he carped against a piece of progressive legislation.
The United States was prospering, with exporters reaping huge profits from war-related sales. Americans dismissed the President’s unpopularity abroad, seeing him as a patient but firm negotiator who—as his propagandists were forever trumpeting—“kept us out of war.” It even redounded to Wilson’s advantage that he no longer showed any partiality toward Great Britain. That country’s cruel crackdown on Irish unrest, and its continuing harassment of Europe-bound merchant ships, had created widespread voter anger.
Canadian air signaled the end of summer. Yachts returned to their docks. Maids stripped the linen covers from parlor furniture. Department stores stocked up with black velvet caps and the new zebra boa. Charlie Chaplin’s new movie The Count opened on Broadway. Quentin Roosevelt returned to college, beset by memories of Flora in an orange bathing suit, and realized that he had fallen in love with her.
THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE two parties cranked up. Roosevelt fretted over Hughes’s dryasdust speaking style, and in a letter to the candidate, repeated the advice he had given Henry Stimson in 1910: “What the average voter wants is not an etching, but a poster, a statement so broad and clear and in such simple language that he can thoroughly understand it.” Hughes took the advice of an old pro with good grace. In return, he politely asked Roosevelt to stay off the subject of hyphenated minorities through the election, and the Colonel just as politely agreed. Then they went their separate rhetorical ways.
Wilson chose to follow the tradition that a sitting president should not stump for himself. He remained at Shadow Lawn while Democratic orators itemized his record of progressivism, preparedness, and peace. Hughes was uncertain how to attack him on these issues without seeming reactionary in one direction and warlike in the other. Party wags suggested that the former justice had moved “from the bench to the fence.”
For the sake of solidarity, Roosevelt agreed to do the RNC a favor on 3 October, and shake hands with William Howard Taft at a reception for Hughes in the Union League Club. “It was one of those friendly affairs,” he said afterward, “where each side, before entering the meeting place, made sure its hardware was in good working order.” The clasp between the two former presidents was brief and virtually wordless. For the rest of the evening, GOP stalwarts kept them apart, as if afraid that Roosevelt might use his right fist for some other purpose. Hughes complained in mock chagrin, “I was only the side show.”
Four days later, the Woodrow Wilson College Men’s League, consisting of 2,500 bright young progressives and independents, paid court to the President at Shadow Lawn. Wilson saw an opportunity to mock the Republican Party for fielding a surrogate candidate. Without naming Roosevelt directly, he won cheers when he observed that there was only one oracle in the GOP—“a very articulate voice [that] professes opinions and purposes at which the rest in private shiver and demur.” It was a voice for war not peace, “shot through with every form of bitterness, every ugly form of hate, every debased purpose of revenge … discontented and insurgent.”
AS HE SPOKE, residents of Newport boggled at the insurgence offshore of a sea-green, 213-foot German submarine. It cruised into the inner harbor, where thirty-seven warships of the U.S. North Atlantic squadron lay at anchor, and docked as coolly as if it had been a yacht putting in for tea at the Casino. The captain emerged, a neat bearded figure with an Iron Cross on his breast, and said something to the crowd clustering the waterfront. Miss Margaret Fahnestock, a fellow debutante of Flora’s, translated for him. He identified himself as Lieutenant Hans Rose, and produced a letter for the German ambassador in Washington, Count Bernstorff. An Associated Press reporter, hardly able to believe the dimensions of his scoop, undertook to mail it. Somebody asked if the submarine was in need of supplies.
“We require nothing, thank you,” Rose said. He added, smiling, that he and his crew of thirty-three had been at sea for seventeen days. They had more than enough food and fuel to get home to Wilhelmshaven. “Maybe soon, maybe never!” Anyone who wanted was welcome to tour his vessel, the U-53.
Men, women, and children took turns clambering down its stairwell and found the interior spotless and comfortable. Six torpedoes were clearly visible. “A constant comment of those permitted on board,” the AP man noted, “was on the thorough preparedness which the vessel seemed to exhibit despite her many days at sea.” One of Newport’s hyphenated citizens presented an officer with an Irish Republican flag. This elicited some more Prussian humor.
“RESIDENTS OF NEWPORT BOGGLED AT … A SEA-GREEN, 213-FOOT GERMAN SUBMARINE.”
T
he U-53 pays a visit to America, 7 October 1916. (photo credit i24.2)
“The first British ship we sink,” the officer promised, “we will hoist this flag in honor of Ireland.”
People ashore observed that the new banner was already flying when, at 5:17 P.M., the U-53 set off again. A flotilla of pleasure craft followed it out of the harbor, but as it approached Fort Adams it settled low as an alligator and began to accelerate. The small boats hove to, rocking in its wash. It remained in sight until darkness fell, then its lights doused and it slid underwater, leaving behind nothing but a trail of moonlit foam.
Early the next morning, Sunday, SOS signals from the sea lane off Nantucket began to bombard radio receivers at Newport Naval Station. Six eastbound ships loaded with contraband had been sunk by the U-53, including a British liner carrying a large number of American citizens. All had been permitted to lower lifeboats before they were struck. Eighteen children were among the many in need of rescue.
Rear Admiral Albert Greaves, commander of the U.S. Atlantic fleet, dispatched all his available warships. Throughout the day, a crescendo of crackling in the radio office heralded the approach of Royal Navy destroyers looking for the U-53. But it was nowhere to be found. By nightfall, two hundred refugees had been brought to Newport, and were being luxuriously comforted by Beeckmans and Vanderbilts.
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