Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

Over the next few days, Sagamore Hill became something of a military personnel center as the Colonel prepared his four sons for postings. Frontline service in the new army was what they all wanted: none would sit behind a steel desk. Ted and Archie, with two terms at Plattsburg apiece, were sure of being commissioned as infantry officers. Quentin might have trouble passing the aviation section physical, but if so, he was willing to go north and see if the less fussy Canadians would take him.

  Kermit remained—as ever—a man difficult to place. Aside from being only half trained, he was temperamentally unsuited to the static warfare in Europe. His father understood that. They had the bond that came of killing lions and elephants together, and of enduring months of green hell in Brazil. The same fever lurked in their respective systems, and something of the same wanderlust. Kermit’s war, Roosevelt felt, should be far-ranging, profiting from his restlessness and flair for languages. Perhaps the British could use him in Mesopotamia, where Sir Frederick Maude had just brilliantly captured Baghdad.

  In the small hours of Good Friday, 6 April, the House of Representatives declared war on Germany, 373 to 50 (Miss Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, sobbing as she called “no”). Even Wilson was surprised at how rapidly the majority mood on Capitol Hill had changed from isolationism to intervention. At 1:11 P.M., he interrupted his lunch to sign the resolution, proclaiming: “A state of war between the United States and the Imperial German government, which has been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared.” Mobilization telegrams flashed to every army post in the country, and cables to all American ships at sea.

  Roosevelt stayed home that Easter weekend, composing an editorial for Metropolitan magazine in praise of Wilson’s change of heart. He did not apologize for the insults he had showered on the President in the past, saying only, “Of course, when war is on, all minor considerations, including all partisan considerations, vanish at once.”

  On Monday, 9 April, he decided to go south and call again at the White House. He did not telephone ahead and ask Wilson to receive him. “I’ll take chances on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”

  Joseph Tumulty heard he was coming nevertheless. When, at eleven the following morning, Alice dropped her father off, the secretary was waiting, wreathed in smiles. Roosevelt disappeared into the Red Room and emerged forty-five minutes later, looking pleased but not triumphant. A couple of dozen reporters waited to hear what he had to say. Beyond, in Pennsylvania Avenue, sightseers pressed against the railings. A little group of suffragettes jiggled yellow pickets.

  “The President received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” Roosevelt told the newsmen. But when it came to repeating the substance of their conversation, he became uncharacteristically cagey. Turning to Tumulty, who remained at his elbow, he joked, “If I say anything I shouldn’t, be sure to censor it.”

  Uninhibited, he might have announced that he and Wilson had chatted easily, swapped anecdotes, and in short, gotten on as well as they had in May 1914. And he could have repeated his tension-relieving remark: “Mr. President, what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street if we can make your message good.” Instead, he dictated a terse statement to the effect that he had asked for authority to raise a division of volunteer soldiers, many of them already trained and available—“such a division to be sent as part of any expeditionary force to France at an early moment.” The President, he said, had neither accepted nor rejected his request, and would come to a decision “in his own good time.”

  Meanwhile, Roosevelt wanted it understood that his proposed division would not conflict with Wilson’s call for a universal, obligatory draft. The volunteers he sought would either be over twenty-five or excluded from regular conscription by the War Department. “I have been in communication with Secretary Baker, but do not intend to call on him.”

  Baker took the hint—or rather, yielded to an even heavier one from Franklin D. Roosevelt—that the Colonel would be receiving visitors that evening in Representative Longworth’s townhouse on M Street. When he arrived he found the place mobbed. Roosevelt had been holding court all afternoon. The British, French, and Japanese ambassadors and a long list of legislators and policymakers, including the chairmen of the House and Senate military committees and officers of the National Defense Council, were being briefed on the Roosevelt Division in such detail that it might already be en route to Brest. Its chief recruiter came out in high spirits, thrust an arm through Baker’s, and led him upstairs to a private room.

  “I am aware,” Roosevelt said with winning frankness, “that I have not had enough experience to lead a division myself.” He had sensed that was one of Wilson’s doubts about his request. “But I have selected the most experienced officers from the regular army for my staff.” He was willing to serve under whatever commander the President might appoint, as well as the commander of the entire expeditionary force.

  Baker felt himself being strongarmed, and would only say, as he had in their correspondence, that he was taking the proposal under advisement. The Colonel must appreciate that mobilization was a hugely complex process that could not be swayed by personal considerations.

  Roosevelt returned to New York unencouraged. He tried to make the best of his interviews, saying to John Leary, “I had a good talk with Baker—I could twist him about my finger, could I have him about for a while.” As for the President, “He seemed to take it well, but—remember, I was talking to Mr. Wilson.”

  ON 12 APRIL, having heard nothing from the administration, Roosevelt decided to appeal directly to Congress for legislation permitting volunteer soldiers to serve on the Western Front. He understood that a general deployment of Baker’s draft army was unlikely until the spring of 1918. But it was plain that the Allies were desperate for reinforcements. Britain had already announced that it was sending a high-level mission to Washington, headed by Arthur Balfour, in an effort to speed up the dispatch of American war aid.

  In an urgent letter to George Chamberlain (D., Oregon), chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Roosevelt wrote:

  Let us use volunteer forces, in connection with a portion of the regular army, in order at the earliest possible moment, within a few months, to put our flag on the firing line. We owe this to humanity. We owe it to the small nations who have suffered such dreadful wrong from Germany. Most of all we owe it to ourselves, to our national honor and self-respect. For the sake of our own souls, for the sake of the memories of the great Americans of the past, we must show that we do not intend to make this merely a dollar war. Let us pay with our bodies for our soul’s desire.

  With, that he left for Boston, and Archie’s rushed-up wedding in Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

  THE ROOSEVELTS KNEW that this was probably the last time they would assemble as a complete family before war tore them apart. Their celebration on Saturday, 14 April, was muted. Quentin, serving as best man, waited with Archie in the chancel, which was draped with the national and state flags. Ted, Kermit, and Dick Derby served as ushers. Theodore and Edith sat with Alice and Nick, Ethel and Belle, and several Roosevelt cousins. Saltonstalls, Aspin-walls, Websters, and Peabodys sprinkled both sides of the aisle. At noon, Grace Lockwood—sharp-featured and skinny in white satin—came down the aisle on the arm of her father. She was a graduate of the Navy League’s “female Plattsburg” in Chevy Chase, Maryland, so the patriotic bunting was quite to her taste, as were the glittering uniforms of many attendees from the Harvard Officers’ Reserve Corps.

  Grace understood the necessity of a postponed honeymoon. For the next few weeks, Archie would have to remain close to home, pending assignment to active duty.

  A DISPATCH TO The New York Times on the day after the wedding reported that a long-exiled Russian Communist leader, “Nikolai” Lenin, was en route to Petrograd from Switzerland. He had been given safe conduct across German railroads. Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviki were for univ
ersal peace, so they could accomplish their design to co-opt the Russian revolution.

  This news (and the hasty departure from New York City of Leon Trotsky) complicated the efforts of Count Ilya Tolstoy to drum up American support for Prince Lvov’s provisional government. The son of the famous novelist was in the United States on a propaganda tour. He hoped that Theodore Roosevelt might be named head of an advisory commission that President Wilson planned to send to his country. The Colonel was otherwise preoccupied, but dictated a message for Tolstoy to take home: “Through you I send my most hearty congratulations and good wishes to the men who have led the Russian people in this great movement for democratic freedom.”

  Describing himself as “a fellow radical,” he cautioned the Duma majority against the danger of “unbalanced extremists” who sought to go beyond democracy. “See that the light of the torch is not dimmed by any unwise and extreme action, and above all not by any of those sinister and dreadful deeds which a century and a quarter ago in France produced the Red Terror, and then by reaction the White Terror.”

  Privately, he told John Leary that Russia’s flimsy new republic might soon fall apart. If the Bolsheviks managed to win or steal power in Petrograd, they would probably negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, so as to be able to consolidate themselves at home. That would leave the Reich, in turn, free to deploy all its Eastern armor along the Western Front.

  “If we do not wake up,” Roosevelt fretted, “Germany will have won this war, and then we will be in it.”

  ON 15 APRIL HE heard from Secretary Baker that his request to serve as a volunteer commander in the war was denied for “purely military” reasons. The War College Division of the General Staff had recommended that no American troops be sent to Europe until they were sufficiently numerous, equipped, and trained. “This policy,” Baker wrote, “… does not undertake to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would attach to a representation of the United States in France by a former President of the United States.” It was possible that pressure from the Allies might prompt the early dispatch of an American expeditionary force, but in that case, command positions would be given to regular officers “who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters, and have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war.”

  Baker could not have made it clearer that he and Wilson considered Roosevelt to be an amateur soldier from the last century. The shock was enough to reduce the hero of San Juan Heights to temporary silence. He brooded for a week, then replied with an eighteen-page letter, rejecting Baker’s rejection. “My dear sir, you forget that I have commanded troops in action in the most important battle fought by the United States army during the last half century.” He noted that field assignments were being showered on division and brigade commanders who did not have “one tenth” of his experience. Moving on to direct criticism, he ascribed the War Department’s current need for an emergency training program to its failure to initiate preparedness two and a half years before. If back then the Springfield munitions factory had been cranked into instant high gear, “we would now be a million rifles to the good.” Baker’s current advisers in formulating mobilization policy were “well-meaning men, of the red-tape and pipe-clay school … hidebound in the pedantry of that kind of wooden militarism which is only one degree worse than its extreme opposite, the folly which believes that an army can be improvised between sunrise and sunset.”

  Baker mercifully did not reply, in words he already shared with a friend, that he wished to avoid “a repetition of the San Juan Hill affair, with the commander rushing his men into a situation from which only luck extricated them.” As gently as he could, he wrote, “For obvious reasons, I cannot allow myself to be drawn into a discussion of your personal experience and qualifications.” Nor would he discuss those of his consultants, except to say that they were patriotic and high-minded officers. “The war in Europe is confessedly stern, steady, and relentless. It is a contest between the morale of two great contending forces.” Should the United States jump into the struggle with a division of “hastily summoned and unprofessional” volunteers, the Allies would be depressed and disillusioned, “deeming it an evidence of our lack of seriousness about the nature of the enterprise.”

  Senator Chamberlain had similar doubts about sponsoring the Colonel’s amendment to the draft bill. Pressed by Henry Cabot Lodge, he allowed it to go forward under the name of Senator Warren Harding of Ohio. This move surprised political observers who remembered Harding as chairman of the 1916 Republican convention, disdainfully (with eagle profile) maneuvering to block Roosevelt’s nomination. But the eagle was far-sighted, and looking ahead, saw no other likely nominee on the GOP’s horizon for 1920—unless it be himself. He was happy to do whatever was necessary to keep Party seniors happy.

  On 24 April, Harding expanded the amendment to empower the President of the United States to appoint as many as four volunteer divisions of men not subject to conscription. The measure was optimistic in assuming that Wilson would override the policy of his own War Department. It did not name Roosevelt as a potential commander, but the ensuing agitated debate was as much about him as about the incompatibility of voluntary and drafted service. Lodge threw all his own prestige, as ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, into the fray on behalf of the Colonel.

  “He is known in Europe as is no other American. His presence there would be a help and an encouragement to the soldiers of the allied nations.… For Heaven’s sake, is there any reason why he should not be given an opportunity, if he desires, to give his life for what he regards as the most sacred of all causes?”

  While the debate continued—postponing, to the relief of many congressmen, a proposal to prohibit liquor consumption in the Capitol—Roosevelt worked to ensure the fastest possible dispatch of his sons to the war. He asked Spring Rice to find out if British army regulations would permit Kermit to enlist without compromising his American citizenship. And he fattened Newton D. Baker’s already bulky “Roosevelt” file with a request to help Quentin get into the army flying school at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

  “It will give me pleasure,” Baker replied, “to think that your boy is there and a part of our establishment.”

  The secretary’s pleasure was sincere. He had not enjoyed hurting a great man who was, palpably, aging but still full of ardor. Nor did he discount the power of the Roosevelt lobby on Capitol Hill. The passions unleashed in the Senate over the Harding amendment indicated that a vengeful Lodge could hinder the administration in its attempt to get the draft bill passed. Balfour’s British mission had arrived in Washington on 22 April, and a French one dominated by Marshal Joseph Joffre was due any day. Both statesmen were known to admire Roosevelt profoundly. It would be an embarrassment for Baker if a quarrel with him slowed the pace of American mobilization.

  Quentin was summoned to Washington for examination as a candidate for flight training in the signal corps. Doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital poured hot and cold water into his ears, dropped belladonna into his eyes, made him hop along blindfolded, and then, conveniently ignoring his shortsightedness, declared him fit for service. He was billeted, not to Fort Monroe, but to Hazelhurst Field, Mineola, Long Island, an easy motorcycle spin from Sagamore Hill.

  BY THE FIRST WEEK of May, Roosevelt was receiving two thousand volunteer applications a day. Meanwhile, the administration’s draft bill passed both houses of Congress, but the Harding amendment was still so hot an issue it had to be settled by a House-Senate conference. The principal argument against letting Roosevelt have his division was that crackpot militiamen across the country might organize and demand that Wilson send them abroad too.

  The leaders of the Allied missions were not encouraged by this discordance, judging from their looks and demeanor. Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of an antiwar congressman from Texas, wrote a description of Arthur Balfour in her journal: “All the lines of him were drooping except his mouth, where
there lingered a shadow of the usual British sneer at all things American, although somewhat chastened by their present desperate need for our help. His trousers drooped because they didn’t fit, each corner of his long-tailed coat seemed to have a weight in it, his arrow string tie was limp, and his turned-down collar so low that he might have worn a locket.”

  The foreign secretary certainly was desperate, more so than Mrs. Slayden knew. His government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would soon have to beg Washington for relief. Over the last six months its American debt, swollen by borrowing on Wall Street to keep the sterling-dollar exchange rate stable, had become an overdraft of $358 million. So much of what the Allies had bought in the way of food was being sent to the bottom by U-boats that a famine in Great Britain was no more than six weeks away. What London needed, even more than extra men, was extra credit. Touched as Balfour was to see Roosevelt rounding up volunteers willing to fight and die alongside Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s troops in Flanders, he had to accept the verdict of his chief military adviser, Lieutenant General George Bridges, that conditions there were “too serious … for untrained men or amateurs of any sort.” They agreed, in other words, with Baker, and Bridges telegraphed London to warn of the inadvisability of “any form of volunteer group from America.” Britain would have to wait—and bleed—until the U.S. Army was ready to send over an expeditionary force of regular soldiers.

  “THE FOREIGN SECRETARY CERTAINLY WAS DESPERATE.”

  Arthur Balfour (right) with René Viviani in Washington, April 1917. (photo credit i25.1)

  Baker accordingly resisted Marshal Joffre’s pleadings for a Roosevelt division to be attached to his troops further south. Last month’s disastrous French offensive in the Soissons-Reims sector had cost 120,000 casualties and caused dozens of divisions to mutiny. Although this shameful news was being kept secret, Joffre had replaced his commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, with General Henri-Philippe Pétain.