Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  “Germany does not want to be the cause of this egregious war,” he wrote, “but … it would violate the deepest bonds of national loyalty—one of the noblest features of the German psyche … if it did not come to its ally’s aid just when this ally’s destiny is hanging in the balance.”

  Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s address to the University of Berlin had not gone down well in 1910, and was probably forgotten now, even by those in the audience who had managed to stay awake. The Kaiser had been one of the few who listened to every word, but his hummingbird mind never dwelt on any subject for long. If it had, he might have understood that Roosevelt—an objective American who had just toured nation after European nation—was addressing a particular warning to the German people through him: The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself.

  Now, four years later, the great accident was occurring, and Wilhelm was powerless to prevent it. There was a deterministic logic to Europe’s breakdown, as if that ancient seditionist, Fate, had engineered the whole thing. What empire in 1914, with the exception of the Ottoman, was more worn out than that of Austria-Hungary? Now that the heir to the Dual Monarchy had fallen, who could doubt that many more kings and emperors—maybe all of them east of Spain—would fall too, as generals and politicians became the new autocrats, and socialists and anarchists and separatists fought for postwar spoils? Even George V of England had to be afraid, with his own Irish subjects resorting to terrorism, and a general strike looming at home. France—“the French Socialist Republic” as Wilhelm contemptuously called it—had no king to kill. But it was as divided between its militaristic right and enragés of the left as it had been on the eve of the Revolution. Italy, nominally one of the Central Powers counterbalancing the Triple Entente, was so demoralized after its recent “Red Week” labor violence (fomented by a young socialist, Benito Mussolini) that it was likely to declare neutrality out of sheer lack of will. Russia, less centripetal than Austria or France, was more prerevolutionary than either. And the Balkans were the Balkans: forever divided between race and race, religion and religion. What Gavrilo Princip had so reflexively started would not stop.

  Owen Wister had been vacationing at Triberg, in the heart of the Black Forest, when the news came from Sarajevo. He stood with other people reading the dispatch on the hotel bulletin board. Nobody spoke. The mountain air was hot and still, charged with pine fumes. An old Bavarian had said, “That is the match which will set all Europe in flames.”

  Now Wister was in Brussels, awaiting the conflagration. A Belgian doctor told him that Germans shared two characteristics impelling them toward war: “the mania of grandeur, complemented by the mania of persecution.” It was the generalization of a frightened lowlander, certain that his country was about to be invaded, and would have been more accurate if the doctor had referred specifically to Prussians. The Zabern affair had dramatically demonstrated how great was the gulf, in Germany, between the Junker military elite and the bourgeois or working-class Volk empowering the Center Party, the National Liberals, the Progressives, and the Social Democrats—Europe’s largest socialist group. Although the parliament of these parties, the Reichstag, was still unable to override the will of the imperial government, it had profoundly shaken it with last December’s vote censuring Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. More recently, for the first time in history, the popular majority had refused to join in a traditional standing salute to Wilhelm II.

  That insult had done much to aggravate the two manias the Belgian doctor spoke of. Even Bethmann-Hollweg, a mild and almost peaceable man by Prussian standards, was persuaded to believe, along with his ministers, that a war mobilizing the entire Reich would purify it of the toxins of socialism and communism.

  He and Wilhelm hesitated, prevaricated, and panicked throughout the morning of Friday, 31 July, firing off diplomatic telegrams and summoning ambassadors. But at the same time Moltke and Falkenhayn, who cajoled the Kaiser to proclaim a state of “imminent war danger” at noon, became sure that tomorrow would be der Tag—“the Day” of final European reckoning. Ordinary Berliners seemed to sense the same thing. They took to the streets as the summer afternoon heated up. A belligerence as sudden as that which had gripped Vienna three days before spread outward from the imperial palace, along Unter den Linden, and down the Wilhelmstrasse, where Bethmann lived and Jagow worked. Traffic had to be rerouted from the center of the city. A crowd estimated at fifty thousand surged and sang “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the German victory anthem:

  Holy flame, burn and glow

  Unextinguishable

  For Fatherland!

  To foreigners listening at a distance, the words and tune could have been “God Save the King” or “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Except that British and American crowds did not sing with this kind of bellicosity. It was not a bloodthirsty so much as an exultant sound, a roar of rapture that all Germans now had a cause worth dying for: the protection and enlargement of the Reich. Only a few patriots felt uneasy about joining in the celebration, which was duplicated in other cities. One of them, the industrialist Walter Rathenau, felt that he was witnessing a Totentanz, “a dance of death, the overture to a doom which I had foreseen would be dark and dreadful.”

  * Charles F. Murphy, boss of Tammany Hall.

  * Wilhelm II reversed the words of urbi et orbi, a Latin phrase commonly used by the Vatican to address “the city [i.e., Rome] and the world.”

  CHAPTER 19

  A Hurricane of Steel

  No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies

  To rift the fiery night that’s in your eyes;

  But there, where western glooms are gathering,

  The dark will end the dark, if anything:

  God slays himself with every leaf that flies,

  And hell is more than half of paradise.

  No, there is not a dawn in eastern skies—

  In eastern skies.

  “THE SITUATION IN EUROPE is really dreadful,” Roosevelt wrote to his youngest son on 2 August 1914. “A great tragedy impends.”

  Had Quentin not been in the canyonlands of Arizona, about as un-European an environment as could be imagined, he might have agreed with his father. Or more likely, yesterday’s triple mobilization of Germany, Belgium, and France would have thrilled him, fascinated as he was with any kind of synchronized movement involving wheels, weight, oil, and fire. At the moment he was beyond the reach of news bulletins, and distracted by a riding accident that had badly wrenched his back. A packhorse had slipped and rolled over on him, dislodging two ribs where they joined the spine. It was not the kind of trauma a youth needed just when he was testing the limits of his new adult body.

  Of all Roosevelt’s children, Alice was the one most drawn to furor teutonicus, the German war rage that had been suppressed for so long. As a little girl, she had listened to recitations of the Nibelungenlied at her father’s knee, and reveled in the violent parts. There was a savage streak in Alice: she approved of the strong overriding the weak. Except that she did not require, as he did, that the strong should have a moral reason to do so. She was never entirely sure what he meant by “righteousness,” and why it meant so much to him. Righteousness had killed a goodly number of Filipinos during his presidency, and discharged a regiment of black soldiers without honor or due process, and separated Panama from the Colombian federation. But if he maintained these actions had been necessary, she took his word for it.

  “SHE WAS N
EVER ENTIRELY SURE WHAT HE MEANT BY ‘RIGHTEOUSNESS.’ ”

  Father and daughter, thinking their separate thoughts, summer 1914. (photo credit i19.1)

  His attitude to the developing war had so far been pessimistic yet detached. It was “a great black tornado” threatening Europe only, although Africa and Asia Minor might get sucked in. If Great Britain chose to fight, his emotions would be more engaged, insofar as he felt a solidarity with the English and their empire. (What would he be doing now, had Balfour’s dream of a Roosevelt-led Anglo-Saxon federation come true?) Yet he also had his “Saxon” side, with boyhood memories of living in Dresden and bonding with a pair of scar-faced swordsmen from the University of Leipzig. Their father had been a member of the Reichstag. Their sister had taught him German poetry, which he grew to love almost as much as English. Only recently, Roosevelt had confessed in his autobiography: “From that time to this it would have been quite impossible to make me feel that the Germans really were foreigners. The affection, the Gemütlichkeit (a quality which cannot be exactly expressed by any single English word), the capacity for hard work and science, the pride in the new Germany … these manifestations of the German character and of German family life made a subconscious impression upon me which I did not in the least define at the time, but which is still very vivid forty years later.”

  Millions of Americans outside New England felt a similar empathy, in contrast to the hot, inscrutable loyalties of Slavic immigrants. But the ethnic complexity of the United States weighed against any national leaning one way or another. Roosevelt himself delighted in finding, or inventing, common strains of ancestry with voters (“I wish I had a little Jew in me.”). Three thousand miles of seawater made the European war seem, for the moment, the Old World’s problem.

  ON 3 AUGUST, Germany declared war on France, for supporting Russia, and decided to override Belgium’s refusal to open its roads and railways to forces of the Reich. Luxembourg, another neutral state, was already invaded and occupied. Rectors of universities from Bavaria to Schleswig-Holstein urged students to enlist in what one scholar called “the battle forced upon us for German Kultur.”

  Britain’s House of Commons met that afternoon, to hear Sir Edward Grey confirm that his government would regard an invasion of Belgium as sufficient reason to declare war on Germany on behalf of France. Even the pacifists among his cabinet colleagues were agreed that a threat to the lowland countries was a threat to the English Channel—not to mention the web of support that France and Russia provided to the Empire in North Africa and the Far East.

  The foreign secretary’s speech was momentous, if academic, since Falkenhayn’s troops were already attacking Liège. More in despair than in hope, Grey undertook to give the Germans a twenty-four-hour deadline to quit Belgian soil. “If they refuse, there will be war,” he said to Paul Cambon, the French ambassador.

  At the end of the day, he stood at the window of his suite in Downing Street and watched a lamplighter moving from post to post below. The same operation, presumably, was taking place on the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. Along the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, dark would have come an hour sooner.

  Exhausted, Grey spoke to a friend who was standing with him. Afterward he could not remember what he had said, until the friend quoted his words back to him: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

  THE EXTREME TENSION that gathered in Parliament on Tuesday, 4 August, communicated itself to Sagamore Hill, where Roosevelt practically danced, Navajo-style, round his library, and piped at Charles Booth, the British humanitarian: “You’ve got to get in! You’ve got to get in!”

  Four Progressive intellectuals—Felix Frankfurter and the journalists Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—watched half-amused, half-awed by the Colonel’s vehemence. They recognized, with conflicting emotions, that if Britain did in fact enter the war, sooner or later America might be forced to “get in” too. Booth would only say that he supposed his government must make good on its threat. He was chairman of a shipping line based in Liverpool, and knew that he would be responsible for the lives of uncountable thousands of passengers if the war became general.

  Roosevelt saw the issue as one of simple right and wrong. Germany was treating its neutral neighbors as dirt underfoot, on the unbelievable premise that France and Russia meant to destroy the Reich. By any definition, this was militarism gone mad: the Triple Entente had no choice but to fight. If Germany defeated France and took over her colonial possessions, the strategic and economic balance of the whole Occident would be upset. What particularly disturbed Roosevelt was the possibility of Germany being defeated and disarmed. This would be a double tragedy, because in his opinion, the United States would one day need Germany as an ally against the power that had always worried him most—Japan. Furthermore (and here his guests agreed with him), a collapsed Reich “would result in the entire western world being speedily forced into a contest with Russia.”

  President Wilson saw no such eventuality. “The European world is highly excited,” he told reporters visiting him for comment, “but the excitement ought not to spread to the United States.” He said that he would issue a proclamation of neutrality soon. Americans should have “the pride of feeling” that one great nation, at least, remained uninvolved and stood ready to help the belligerents settle their differences. “We can do it and reap a great permanent glory out of doing it, provided we all cooperate to see that nobody loses his head.”

  Wilson spoke with considerable self-control, not revealing that his ailing wife apparently had just days to live.

  By Wednesday, furor teutonicus was general both east and west of the Central Powers. The front page of The New York Times required so many headlines to summarize all the cable dispatches from Europe that there was scarcely room for body text:

  KAISER HURLS TWO ARMIES

  INTO BELGIUM AFTER

  DECLARING WAR.

  —

  LIEGE ATTACK REPULSED

  —

  German Guns Are Reported to

  be Bombarding Both That

  City and Namur.

  —

  BELGIANS RUSH TO ARMS

  —

  Parliament Acclaims King’s

  Appeal and Votes $40,000,000

  for National Defense.

  —

  FRENCH BORDER CLASHES

  —

  Stronger German Forces Crossing

  the Border Near

  Mars-la-Tour and Moineville

  —

  RUSSIANS ATTACK MEMEL

  —

  The most momentous bulletin of all confirmed that since eleven the previous evening, a state of war had existed between Great Britain and Germany. Seventeen million soldiers of eight nations were now at arms. When other powers joined in, as they surely would (Italy, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire had yet to align themselves) and some of the world’s biggest navies began to clash at sea, the conflict would become global. If even tiny Switzerland was mobilizing, how long could the United States delude itself that engines of foreign war would not sweep west across the Atlantic? And pass into the Pacific via the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt’s gift to the battleships of all nations?

  ON 6 AUGUST, Ellen Wilson died. “God has stricken me,” the President wrote privately, “almost more than I can bear.”

  In the circumstances, Roosevelt’s first statement on the war attracted little attention. Issued that day from his new office at 30 East Forty-second Street in Manhattan, it was as neutral-sounding as anything Wilson had said. “Let us be thankful beyond measure that we are citizens of this Republic, and that our burdens, though they may be heavy, are far lighter than those that must be borne by the men and women who live in other and less fortunate countries.” He pledged himself and his party to “work hand in hand with any public man” or combination of citizens “who in good faith and disinterestedly do all that is possible to see that the United States co
mes through this crisis unharmed.”

  If this sounded like an endorsement of the President and his administration, Roosevelt felt that as a patriotic American he could say neither more nor less. “I simply do not know the facts.”

  Having lost a wife to Bright’s disease himself, he understood Wilson’s anguish. But empathy did not stop him confiding to Arthur Lee that he had deep doubts about the administration’s ability to defend the United States. Just as Europe was becoming a battleground, the President and his “prize idiot” of a secretary of state were continuing to tout the peacekeeping potential of arbitration treaties. “It is not a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”

  Yet for the moment, Roosevelt believed that it was right for America to stay neutral. Newspapers were reporting that no rules of war had so far been broken. “The melancholy thing about this matter to me,” he wrote Hugo Münsterberg, a Prussian-born professor at Harvard, “is that this conflict really was inevitable and that the several nations engaged in it are, each from its own standpoint, right under the existing conditions of civilization and international relations.”

  The only one he felt had a moral (as opposed to strategic or economic) reason to fight was Belgium, which had courageously vowed to defend its honor and sovereignty. He made this plain when an emissary from Wilhelm II visited him. Count Franz von Papen was military attaché to the German Embassy in Washington, and the only soldier in the diplomatic corps representing the Central Powers. Young and handsome, with a noble lineage extending back to the fifteenth century, Papen was a Westphalian gentleman of the finest sort, except that there was something unctuous about him that irritated Roosevelt.