Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  28 swamping even, on 15 August The Washington Post, e.g., put the canal opening on page 10. The Syracuse Herald gave it a slender column on page 2, beneath a banner headline: STUPENDOUS BATTLE BETWEEN GERMANS AND THE ALLIED FORCES IS NEAR AT HAND.

  29 Diaghilev’s dancers At the Theatro Municipale in Rio on 22 Oct. 1913.

  30 “It must indeed be” Baker, notebook III.74 (14 Aug. 1914 [RSB]).

  31 On 19 August The New York Times, 28 Oct. 1913; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.43–44. WW’s phrase “impartial in thought” is often misquoted as “neutral in thought.”

  32 Boredom gave way Richard Harding Davis, “The Germans in Brussels,” Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1914. Davis’s first version of this account, which is less rich in detail, appeared in the New York Tribune on 24 Aug. 1914. The final version was published in his book With the Allies (New York, 1914), 21–28.

  33 onslaught on the Sullivan, Our Times, 5.26.

  34 the Italian word fasci From the Latin fasces, evoking a bundle of rods, unbreakable because bound, irresistible when rammed. Fascism did not attain the status of a national political party until after World War I. But in Aug. 1914, Mussolini was rapidly converting his personal ideology from pacific socialism to aggressive, interventionist activism, in favor of an all-powerful nation-state. Three months later, he founded a revolutionary newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which bore banner quotes from Louis Blanqui and Napoleon: “He who has steel, has bread,” and “Revolution is an idea that has found bayonets.” On 24 Nov. he formed a pro-war fasci di azione rivoluzionaria (power group for revolutionary action) that quickly grew and claimed 5,000 members by the year’s end.

  35 Roosevelt had been confidentially See 146.

  36 “If the Franco-British” TR, Letters, 7.810–11. In his long-term scenario, TR included a prophecy that came true after World War II: “If Germany is smashed, it is perfectly possible that later she will have to be supported as a bulwark against the Slav by the nations of Western Europe.” Ibid., 812.

  37 The same prospect Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 345–46; Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (New York, 2007), 7–11.

  38 “The Prussian” Gerard, Face to Face with Kaiserism, 131.

  39 It was all Davis, With the Allies, 90–95. See also Brand Whitlock, Belgium: A Personal Narrative (New York, 1919), chap. 26.

  40 The imperial embassy Sullivan, Our Times, 5.58.

  41 “I am an ex-President” TR, Letters, 7.812.

  42 “If you have” TR to Frederick H. Allen, 31 Aug. 1914 (TRC).

  43 Belle had fallen EKR diary, 16 July 1914 and passim (TRC).

  44 “Ted and Eleanor” TR, Letters, 7.816.

  45 In a crescendo of carnage The ecstasy affected even Calvinist intellectuals. “This war is great and wonderful beyond all expectations,” Max Weber wrote a friend. The New York Review of Books, 18 Feb. 1988.

  46 “The fire-ants” TR, Works, 6.113–14.

  47 Elsewhere in Brazil TR, Works, 6.142; Strachan, The First World War, 55.

  48 Masses, slaves, arise Eugène Pottier (1816–1887). Author’s translation of French original. The text varies in later Russian, British, and American versions.

  49 The government of Gerard, My Four Years in Germany, 91; Tuchman, The Proud Tower, 419. On the eve of Germany’s declaration of war against Russia, Sir Edward Grey had passionately burst out, “It is the greatest step toward Socialism that could possibly have been made. We shall have Labour Governments in every country after this.” Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.239–40.

  50 When Wilson thought “I find the President singularly lacking in appreciation of the importance of this European crisis,” Colonel House wrote on 28 Sept. 1914. “I find it difficult to get his attention centered upon the one big question.” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.35.

  51 “I gather” Cecil Spring Rice to TR, 18 Sept. 1914 (CSR).

  52 Before Roosevelt TR, Letters, 8.862.

  Biographical Note: Earlier in the year, TR had resisted a suggestion that he should encourage Progressives to support Wilson, rather than allow them to drift back into a Republican Party dominated by the likes of Boies Penrose. He agreed, however, that “permanently, there is only room for two national parties in this country, and one of these must be the opposition.” (TR to Alex Moore, 10 July 1914 [TRC].) Interviewing TR on 14 Aug. 1914, Ray Stannard Baker heard him “express doubt as to whether the American people really know what they [were] doing” in voting for his philosophy of government. “I do not believe,” Baker concluded, “that T. R. has ever really believed in people. He has led people, he has advertised popular measures, but he has never really believed that the people must rule. His idea of leadership has been domination rather than education & service. He has done great good as a publicist, as a political revivalist, but by George, I can’t help feeling that his time has passed.” Notebook III.73 (RSB).

  53 “He is most” O’Laughlin to his wife, 6 Sept. 1914 (OL).

  54 “there should be” Ibid. See 47.

  55 hurricane of steel See 301.

  56 The war had wrought The New York Times, 26 Sept. 1914; EKR diary, 27 Sept. 1914, misdated 14 Sept. (TRC). As things transpired, a security scare diverted the ship to Glasgow.

  57 Edith said goodbye EKR to ERD, 5 Oct. 1914 (ERDP); TR to KR, 17 Jan. 1915 (TRC).

  58 I have something special Trevelyan to TR, 1 Sept. 1914 (TRP).

  59 Your mode of thought For recent analyses of TR’s foreign policy toward Britain and Europe, see William N. Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study in Presidential Statecraft (New York, 1997), and Serge Ricard, Théodore Roosevelt: principes et pratique d’une politique étrangère (Aix-en-Provence, 1991). Howard K. Beale’s massive Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore, 1956) remains the most comprehensive overall survey, and Frederick W. Marks’s elegant Velvet on Iron (op. cit.) the most concise. An excellent specialized study is Henry J. Hendrix, Theodore Roosevelt’s Naval Diplomacy: The U.S. Navy and the Birth of the American Century (Annapolis, Md., 2009). See also Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle, 1966), and A. Gregory Moore, “Dilemma of Stereotypes: Theodore Roosevelt and China, 1901–1909,” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1978).

  60 Other representatives TR, Letters, 8.819–20; Hengelmüller to TR, 24 Sept. 1914, reprinted at TR’s request in The New York Times, 8 Nov. 1914.

  61 Sir Edward Grey asked In his letter, dated 10 Sept. 1914, the foreign minister included a fair amount of anti-German propaganda of his own. See Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.143–44. The author of Peter Pan lunched with the Roosevelts on 3 Oct. He did not like TR, whom he found oppressively talkative, and EKR did not like him. “A mousy, moody little man.” EKR to ERD, 5 Oct. 1914 (ERDP).

  62 Rudyard Kipling reported Kipling to TR, 15 Sept. 1914 (TRP).

  63 “It is no good” Cecil Spring Rice to TR, 10 Sept. 1914 (CSR). The ambassador’s conspiracists, “toiling in a solid phalanx to compass our destruction,” also included Adolph Ochs and “the arch-Jew,” Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (Spring Rice to Valentine Chirol, 13 Nov. 1914 [CSR].) For a brief account of Straus’s negotiations, which were concerned not with commerce but with his plan to launch a new mediatory effort by the Wilson administration, see Straus, Under Four Administrations, 378–85, and Grey, Twenty-five Years, 2.119–21. The plan was rejected by both Germany and Great Britain.

  64 “An ex-President” TR to Rudyard Kipling, 3 Oct. 1914 (TRC).

  65 Roosevelt did not blame See also TR, Letters, 7.794.

  66 Even in the Far East Kiaochow surrendered on 7 Nov. 1914. For a modern endorsement of the view that all the belligerents in World War I were right as well as wrong, see Joachim Remak in Lee, Outbreak of the First World War, 147–49.

  67 “It seems to me” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914.

  68 He had read Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (U.S. edition, New York, 1914).

&nb
sp; 69 “somewhat as my own” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914.

  70 “living softly” Ibid.

  71 butchered some hundreds of thousands Not to be confused with the Turkish-Armenian massacre of 1915.

  72 The last two “For this error of judgment … I am afraid Roosevelt never forgave me.” (Abbott, Impressions of TR, 250–51.) TR restored the deleted language when he republished the essay in Jan. 1915.

  73 “Surely the time” TR in The Outlook, 23 Sept. 1914. TR’s essay is reprinted in TR, Works, 20.14–35.

  Historiographical Note: TR herewith revived his earlier call for “a League of Peace” at Christiania, Norway, in May 1910. Just eight days after the beginning of the war, he had tried the idea out privately on Hugo Münsterberg, envisaging “the kind of caprice among the great powers which will minimize the armaments of all and will solemnly bind all the rest to take joint action against any offender.” (TR, Letters, 7.795–96.) He spelled out this vision in more detail on 18 Oct. in The New York Times, by which time it had become “a great World League for the Peace of Righteousness.” Six weeks later in The Atlantic Monthly, the Cambridge classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson published the first of two influential articles advocating the organization of a “League of Nations.” TR rejected his concept as excessively theoretical and lacking in the vital dimension of “international force.” (TR, Letters, 852–55.) Nevertheless, Lowes Dickinson later helped frame the official League of Nations Covenant of 1919. For a detailed history of TR’s proposal, 1910–1917, see Stephen A. Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, William Howard Taft and a Legalist League of Nations” (AB diss., Harvard, 2007).

  74 Rumors began The New York Times, 14 Sept. 1914.

  75 “It would reflect” John N. Wheeler, I’ve Got News for You (New York, 1961), 43–44. TR nursed ancient grudges against the World, going back to its opposition to his candidacy in the presidential election of 1904. For his subsequent persecution of the paper and its publisher, see James McGrath Morris, Joseph Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power (New York, 2010), chaps. 29, 30. By 1914, Pulitzer was dead.

  76 “One moment” The New York Times, 27 Sept. 1914.

  77 “Under such circumstances” Ibid.

  78 Although he did not Wheeler, I’ve Got News, 44–45; John N. Wheeler to TR, 14 Oct. 1914 (TRP).

  79 He obliged with The New York Times, 4, 11, 18 Oct., and 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 Nov. 1914. Reprinted with variations in TR, Works, 20.36–216.

  80 “the one certain way” TR, Works, 20.107.

  81 When he encountered Parsons, Perchance to Dream, 253.

  82 Word that Germany TR, Works, 20.4.227. For an eloquent private statement of TR’s war views in the early fall of 1914, see his letter to Hugo Münsterberg, 3 Oct. 1914, TR, Letters, 8.822–25.

  83 “You cannot imagine” ERD to EKR, 6 Oct. 1914 (ERDP).

  84 Roosevelt had received Rudyard Kipling to TR, 15 Sept. and 20 Oct. 1914 (TRP).

  85 “My experience in” TR to Kipling, 3 Oct. 1914 (TRC). Kipling had complained that the tone of TR’s war articles was too mild.

  86 He granted that Ibid. Five days before a campaigning TR wrote this letter, he was waylaid in Cleveland by members of a Belgian government commission charged with alerting key American figures to the suffering inflicted on their country. They found the Colonel sympathetic but unwilling to criticize WW’s silence on the issue. “If you were President, what would you do?” “Exactly what Mr. Wilson is doing.” The commissioners said they were going on to meet with former President Taft. “You’ll like him awfully,” TR replied, “he’ll agree with everything you say.” Lalla Vandervelde, relief lobbyist, in Monarchs and Millionaires (New York, 1925), 71–73.

  87 an impassioned speech Parsons, Perchance Some Day, 255. See also Robinson, My Brother TR, 282–83: “Unless I am very much mistaken, [that was] the first speech on that subject in the United States during the Great War.” Both women were eyewitnesses to the occasion. For an example of TR’s formidable aggression on this issue, see his letter to the pacifist Andrew Dickson White in TR, Letters, 8.827–28.

  88 In a post-election poll The New York Times, 20 Dec. 1914.

  89 “utter and hopeless” TR, Letters, 8.831.

  90 We, here in America See 180. In a letter to Lyman Abbott, forecasting the death of the Progressive Party, TR made plain that he felt progressivism as a “movement” would go on. “I honestly feel that none of us have any cause to be ashamed of what we did in 1912.” 7 Nov. 1914 (TRP).

  Historical Note: The narrative of this book will not deal with the Progressive Party’s prolonged death throes through the spring of 1916. TR dutifully fulfilled his duties as Party chief until then, but his heart was elsewhere. For a detailed account, see Gable, The Bull Moose Years, chaps. 9 and 10, and the relevant correspondence in TR, Letters, 8.843–1085.

  91 “I wish I could stroke” TR, Letters, 8.832.

  92 And Edith too Kipling reported that he had seen KR and Belle just before they sailed from Liverpool. “Happiness wasn’t the word to describe ‘em!” To TR, 15 Sept. 1915 (TRP).

  93 Roosevelt persuaded himself TR to KR, 11 Nov. 14 (TRC).

  Biographical Note: With TR’s approval, John C. O’Laughlin, who had once served as assistant secretary of state and was a capable private envoy, went to London in Nov. 1914 to ask if Sir Edward Grey would be interested in TR as a peace broker between the Powers. The foreign minister, reluctant to go behind WW’s back, was courteously discouraging. He praised TR’s recent war articles, but said that he did not agree with him about the apathy of the Wilson administration. “The President has been strictly correct, as has Ambassador Page.” O’Laughlin to TR, 29 Nov. 1914 (OL).

  94 Through the Brazilian See. e.g., The New York Times, 15 Nov. 1914 (“Colonel Roosevelt … is blessed with a power for minute and careful observation.… One more excellent volume [added] to a list which is already a praiseworthy record”); The Spectator, 19 Dec. 1914 (“The art of the narrator is invariably swift and keen. A better record of adventure … it would be difficult to find”); Geographical Journal, Feb. 1915. On 6 Nov., TR sent a copy of Through the Brazilian Wilderness to Cândido Rondon, with apologies for it being in English. “Malheureusement, cette terrible guerre européene a empeché toute traduction allemande et française, aussi ne puis-je vous en envoyer qu’un exception en anglais.” For the full text of his letter, see Vivieros, Rondon, 424–25.

  95 For as long as Sullivan, Our Times, 5.199.

  96 Next February H. J. Whigham, editor of Metropolitan magazine, recalled in old age that TR at first rebuffed his approaches because he felt that the salary offered ($25,000) was too much for the work required: “I would not feel that if I were writing an article once a month that I was really earning the money properly.” He would prefer, he said, to write many more articles for the Wheeler syndicate for the same sum. It took the combined efforts of Whigham and Harry Whitney, the magazine’s owner, to persuade him to sign on. Whigham interiewed by Hermann Hagedorn, 12 May 1949 (TRB).

  97 brilliant young men Soon after the election, TR invited Croly, Lippmann, and another co-founder of The New Republic, Walter Weyl, to dine with him—“just you three and I.” He clearly wanted to pass on his Progressive-ideological torch. Lippmann, who impressed TR as “on the whole, the most brilliant young man of his age in all the United States,” had just brought out a new book of political essays. Entitled Drift and Mastery, it won Lippmann early fame as an astute analyst of American domestic unrest. TR reviewed it favorably, along with Croly’s Progressive Democracy, in The Outlook. Although he later split with The New Republic on its attitude to the war, Lippmann continued to revere him. TR to Croly et al., 11 Nov. 1914; TR, Letters, 8.872; TR Works, 14, 214–22.

  98 “It is perfectly obvious” TR, Letters, 8.835–39.

  99 “Heartily know” Ibid. TR appears to be slightly misquoting an unidentified verse he had read in Charles Henry Parkhurst’s Portraits and Principles of the Wor
ld’s Great Men and Women (Springfield, Mass., 1898), 177.

  CHAPTER 20: TWO MELANCHOLY MEN

  1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 27.

  2 The winter of 1914 Ecksteins, Rites of Spring, 100; Robert Cowley, ed., The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War (New York, 2004), 37.

  3 “a war with which” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.88.

  4 White House aides Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 340–42.

  5 Roosevelt appeared TR, Letters, 8.849; TR to KR, 11 Nov. 1914 (TRC); TR, Letters, 8.903.

  6 “Father is” Gordon Johnston interviewed by Ethel Armes, ca. 1920 (TRB). Johnston was shocked by TR’s appearance. “I had never seen him so low.” For other depictions of TR at this time, see Charles Washburn in Wood, Roosevelt As We Knew Him, 394; Nicholas Roosevelt, TR, 155; Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 11, 56.