Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Dr. Richard Derby read about Louvain, and Liège, and the Battle of the Marne, and decided to go to France to help treat the wounded. He volunteered his services as a surgeon in the American Hospital in Paris. Ethel insisted on accompanying him as a nurse. Little Richard was only five months old, but her parents were glad to look after him while she was away. She promised to return, with or without Dick, in December.

  Kermit and Belle took the opportunity to book their own departure, on the same ship but to a different final destination. During his wife’s illness, Kermit had negotiated a job in Buenos Aires, Argentina, better than the one he had planned to take in Brazil. It was to be assistant manager of a new branch of the National City Bank. A house and servants came with it, plus plenty of fashionable society to keep Belle happy. He would have to learn Spanish, of course, but for him that was as easy as switching to a new brand of breakfast cereal.

  The war had wrought such havoc with ocean traffic that it was not possible to get to Buenos Aires from New York except by crossing to Liverpool and reembarking from there. Hence the double departure of the two young couples from New York on 26 September.

  Edith said goodbye to them in bright, windy weather. The Colonel was off on another campaign tour, this time of the Midwest. She hated his absence and knew that he did too. Fortunately he had his voice back, and looked well again, although he complained often of rheumatism. Having encouraged him to found the Progressive Party in 1912, she could not complain about him taking, as he put it, “a violent part in the obsequies.” But with him gone, Quentin back at Groton, and Archie at Harvard, Sagamore Hill was a lonely place. Edith’s only company was a baby that slept fifteen hours a day. She occupied herself, as she had since childhood, with incessant reading.

  As he traveled, Roosevelt pondered the text of an extraordinary letter from Sir George Otto Trevelyan:

  I have something special to tell you. In the course of the last nine or ten months I have been brought into singularly intimate relations with a new class of American friends belonging to the Democratic party; and I have entertained here, or have received long and spontaneous letters from, old friends and acquaintances of the Republican party who did not support you at the last election. Three distinguished Democrats, two of them public men, and the other of exceptional literary and educational note … talked with me freely of your immense administrative power and success—as evinced in such questions as the Panama Canal, the Russian and Japanese war, the Labour troubles, and other like matters—and they all spoke of, and seemed to sympathize with, the widespread affection which your countrymen feel for you. The Republicans, men of the highest eminence, held the same [opinion]. They seemed in this respect to share the sentiment of a great mass of their party.…

  The deduction I draw from these conversations and letters is a conviction that it is of untold importance that you should have a leading part at this conjuncture.… Your mode of thought on international policy, and your deep and wide interest in the history of the past, would be of immeasurable service now and hereafter. I may be biased in this matter by my own regard for you, and my earnest desire to see you at the center of the world’s affairs; but, after all, that is on my part no ignoble motive.

  Trevelyan had never quite recovered from being the recipient of the Colonel’s gigantic epistle describing his “royal” tour of Europe in the spring of 1910. It and dozens more in their long correspondence demonstrated a mastery of foreign affairs that made the old historian dream of having Roosevelt back in the White House. Other representatives, official and unofficial, of the belligerent nations exhibited a similar desire, as the war on all sides lost momentum and gained in ferocity. Each believed they had his sympathy. Count Albert Apponyi and Baron Hengelmüller, the retired Austrian ambassador to Washington, wrote pleading the causes respectively of Budapest and Vienna. Sir Edward Grey asked him to receive J. M. Barrie and A. E. W. Mason, two English writers touring America as propagandists for His Majesty’s Government. Rudyard Kipling reported that female Belgian refugees in Britain were thankful to have been only raped by German soldiers, not executed as well. “Frankly we are aghast at there being no protest from the U.S.” The antisemitic Cecil Spring Rice complained that Oscar Straus and other wealthy Jews were preaching pacifism at the White House, so that Wall Street would continue to profit from war-related exports. “It is no good arguing with these financiers—appealing to their sense of honor is like shooting them in the foreskin.”

  Roosevelt reminded his correspondents that the only influence he retained was that of his pen. And he still wanted to be fair to Wilson. “An ex-President,” he reminded Kipling, “must be exceedingly careful in a crisis like this how he hampers his successor in office who actually has to deal with the situation.” Trevelyan’s salute, however, inspired him to publish a major essay, “The World War: Its Tragedies and Its Lessons,” in The Outlook on 23 September. For the first time he gave the full range of his views on the war, writing with strong feeling but also with objectivity and erudition.

  “THERE CAN BE NO HIGHER international duty,” he declared, “than to safeguard the existence and independence of industrious, orderly states, with a high personal and national standard of conduct, but without the military force of the great powers.” Examples of these were Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and Uruguay. The first had just been trampled underfoot—was still being trampled—while the United States, the world’s most righteous republic, raised no objection.

  Roosevelt did not blame any of the belligerents for taking up arms, allowing that each had reasonable grievances. Austria-Hungary was right to punish Serbia for the murder of Franz Ferdinand, yet Serbia was right to oppose Austrian expansionism in the Balkans. Tsar Nicholas, as the protector of all Slavs, could not have remained passive after Hötzendorf attacked Belgrade; Kaiser Wilhelm felt a similar ethnic compulsion to defend Vienna; and Germany had been wise to strike France before that nation, unreconciled to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, struck her. The British had acted nobly in honoring their ancient pledge to uphold Belgian neutrality, and they were wise to oppose Prussian militarism. Even in the Far East, where the war had spread, Japan was justified in besieging Germany’s naval base at Kiaochow,* China, thus ending a nineteen-year provocation. The fall of that garrison looked imminent, and in Roosevelt’s opinion would greatly improve the local balance of power.

  He took no side except that of Belgium. “It seems to me impossible that any man can fail to feel the deepest sympathy with a nation which is absolutely guiltless of any wrongdoing.” That was, any man whose ethics were not perverted by the amorality of war. Roosevelt noted that Britain had ignored the neutrality of Denmark when fighting France in 1807, “and with less excuse the same is true of our conduct toward Spain in Florida nearly a century ago.” The only principle that applied in major conflicts, those that wrought fundamental change, was “the supreme law of national self-preservation,” a deterministic force that had no scruples.

  “But Germany’s need to struggle for her life,” he went on, “does not make it any easier for the Belgians to suffer death.” He had read German military textbooks, and the tactician in him accepted the logic of Friedrich von Bernhardi’s “necessary terror” in attack. However, as a human being, he was revolted at its injustice. King Albert’s subjects had fought with wonderful courage against a force they could not withstand. As a result, they were suffering, “somewhat as my own German ancestors suffered when Turenne ravaged the Palatinate, somewhat as my Irish ancestors suffered in the struggles that attended the conquests and reconquests of Ireland in the days of Cromwell and William.” The agony of the Belgians might not yet compare with that of the Germans themselves at French hands in 1674 and 1689. Even so, the sack of Louvain was “altogether too nearly akin to what occurred in the seventeenth century for us of the twentieth century to feel overmuch pleased at the amount of advance that has been made.”

  He remarked with a touch of disdain that it was probably
impossible for most Americans, “living softly and at ease,” to feel what it was like to be crushed by a conquering power. If they did not read European history, they could not understand how complicated a policy neutrality was, and how morally compromising. This brought on his idée fixe about peace and arbitration treaties.

  I suppose that few of them now hold that there was value in the “peace” which was obtained by the concert of European powers when they prevented interference with Turkey [in 1894–1896] while the Turks butchered some hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children. In the same way I do not suppose that even the ultrapacifists really feel that “peace” is triumphant in Belgium at the present moment. President Wilson has been much applauded by all the professional pacifists because he has announced that our desire for peace must make us secure it for ourselves by a neutrality so strict as to forbid our even whispering a protest against wrong-doing, lest such whispers might cause disturbance to our ease and well-being. We pay the penalty of this action—or rather, supine inaction—by forfeiting the right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present.

  The last two sentences were too provocative for Lawrence Abbott, who cut the one about Wilson, and deleted the sarcastic clause in the other. Roosevelt was not the only eminent person to speak out against the administration’s apathy on the Belgian issue—William Dean Howells and Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi were just as disapproving—but he was, after all, the President’s most visible political opponent, and might deter Wilson from coming around slowly to Belgium’s side.

  Roosevelt emphasized that he was not advocating military intervention. Americans, he wrote, had no quarrel with any of the belligerents, although the Japanese (perpetually resentful of “yellow peril” prejudice in California) needed watching. The United States was therefore in a position to try to bring about peace. Whoever represented it in negotiations (he was careful not to ascribe that privilege exclusively to Wilson) should make clear that Congress would not tolerate any accord that compromised the national security.

  The only possible good he saw coming out of the current conflict was a spread of democracy in Europe, or “at least a partial substitution of the rule of the people for the rule of those who esteem it their God-given right to govern the people.” He noted approvingly that socialist parties in the belligerent countries had all backed the decisions of their governments to fight. Having watched old Franz Joseph rinse and spit, and marveled at the Kaiser’s ignorance, and marched among all the monarchs now bridling at one another, he felt it would be a good thing if most of their crowns toppled.

  Probably, after the war, there would be an increase in the number of international disputes submitted to justice, because justice was what democracy aspired to. But what court should administer it? Roosevelt, coming to the end of his long essay, echoed what he had said to the Nobel Prize committee about the impotence of the Hague tribunal. Work must begin at once to replace it with “an efficient world league” for peacekeeping. “Surely the time ought to be ripe for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized military powers to back righteousness by force.”

  RUMORS BEGAN TO CIRCULATE that private citizens lobbying for an American peace committee thought that Theodore Roosevelt would be the ideal person to press for a diplomatic settlement of the war. The New York Times reported that Oscar Straus was spending many hours with the Colonel, both in New York and Oyster Bay, and that both men were cagey about their discussions. Sources in Washington were quoted as acknowledging that Roosevelt had “a thorough knowledge of the conditions in Europe,” and enjoyed cordial friendships with many of the belligerent leaders, particularly Wilhelm II.

  These qualifications also occurred to the editor of the mass-market New York World. He sent a representative, John N. Wheeler, to Oyster Bay to ask if the Colonel would be willing to go abroad as a war correspondent, at the staggering salary of three thousand dollars a week. Roosevelt hesitated, then declined.

  “It would reflect on the dignity of this country and the position I have held.”

  John Wheeler, who had just formed a popular-press syndicate, had another idea. “How about doing a series on the lessons this country should learn from the war?”

  Roosevelt thought he had written plenty about that already in The Outlook, but the opportunity to broadcast his views to the largest possible audience was irresistible. “You will hear from me,” he said.

  HE WROTE FOUR PIECES at once, because he had to spend most of October on the road. Deliberately adopting a journalistic style, he compared what had happened to prosperous, pleasure-loving Europe to the fate that had befallen the Titanic. “One moment the great ship was speeding across the ocean, equipped with every device for comfort, safety, and luxury.… Suddenly, in one awful and shattering moment, death smote the floating host, so busy with work and play.” The “lesson” for Americans in Europe’s catastrophe was to see how quickly even the most civilized nations reverted to barbarism, and how vulnerable great powers were to sudden attack. The United States was no exception, now that the Panama Canal was open. Its army was as small as Persia’s. Its navy was by some counts third in the world, but a single lethal blow to its battleship fleet, and San Francisco or New York would be as open to destruction as Louvain. “Under such circumstances, outside powers would undoubtedly remain neutral exactly as we have remained neutral as regards Belgium.”

  Although he did not refer to Wilson or Bryan by name, his evident contempt for them caused the pro-Democratic New York World to pass on the series. So did the Hearst news organization. The New York Times, however, ran the first article prominently in its Sunday edition on 27 September. It increased the paper’s circulation by several thousand copies. Other periodicals rushed to reprint Roosevelt’s series, and by mid-October he was reaching a readership of fifteen million. Wheeler urged him to continue with as many more war articles as he pleased.

  He obliged with another five, dashed off between whistle-stops, for weekly publication through the end of November. By the time he was through, he had thoroughly unburdened himself on the responsibilities of the United States to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907; on the causes of the war (chiefly “fear … and the anger born of that fear”); on the development of an “international conscience” to chasten national self-interest; on the dangers inherent in disarmament; on the necessity for active, rather than passive neutrality; on preparedness (“the one certain way to invite disaster is to be opulent, offensive, and unarmed”); and on the current dereliction of the American military.

  In his public appearances, Roosevelt stuck to Progressive domestic boilerplate, drummed out with more energy than enthusiasm. It was clear to him that the electorate had lost interest in political reform. So had he, although he insisted he was as radical as ever. His mind was elsewhere. When he encountered old friends on the road, he wanted to talk only about the war, and about the burning of Louvain in particular. Word that German troops had virtually destroyed the great cathedral at Reims caused him further anguish.

  EDITH ROOSEVELT WORRIED about her husband’s gloom whenever he climbed onto another train. To cheer him up after an especially onerous trip to Philadelphia, where the Pinchots had pushed him for speech after speech, she went into New York to meet his train and spent the night of 29 October with him. He had no time to come home: he was needed the following day in Princeton, New Jersey.

  She brought with her a long letter from Ethel in Paris. “You cannot imagine the conditions here—If we knew them at home our country would not be able to be neutral—It’s appalling.” The American Hospital was full of Belgian soldiers, hideously mutilated by shrapnel and shell, “—hardly any from bullets.” Every day, more civilian refugees arrived, including many unattached children, “—alone, not knowing even their own names—put on the train by the mayors of the towns just to get them out of the way, and after all had been ruined, some of them wounded, very few boys, & many of the boys with their right
hands cut off.”

  Roosevelt had received similar reports, and worse, from Kipling and other witnesses better informed than his credulous daughter. All wanted to convince him that German soldiers on the warpath were Neanderthal in their savagery. The Colonel reserved judgment on most of their stories. Mutilated soldiers were what a nurse should be expected to see, thirty miles from the front in wartime. But Ethel had plainly only heard about handless little boys, as Kipling had only heard about rapes and mass executions. “My experience in the Spanish war has taught me that there is a tendency to exaggerate such outrages,” Roosevelt wrote him.

  He granted that when millions were at war, “some thousands of unspeakable creatures will commit unspeakable acts,” but did not see that nationality was any constraint. He reminded Kipling that even so patriotic a historian as William Lecky had found that “frightful atrocities” were committed by English soldiers in the Irish uprising of 1798, and that in 1900, Britain’s current allies, the French and the Russians, had behaved abominably on the march to Peking. In an admission he would never have made before he met Natalie Curtis, he added: “I have known Americans do unspeakable acts against Indians.”

  Ethel’s letter, all the same, brought the war home in a personal way that made him forget, at Princeton, his promise not to make it a campaign issue. The fact that the university’s former president was now President of the United States may also have prompted him to launch into an impassioned speech on preparedness that had his audience, mainly students, cheering vociferously.

  ON 3 NOVEMBER, the Progressive Party lost all its state contests except in California, where Hiram Johnson was reelected. Only one Progressive kept his seat in the House of Representatives. Nationwide, the Party registered just two million votes—half its strength in 1912—to six million apiece for the two major parties. This was good news to the GOP, an effectively leaderless force that regained many of its defectors from 1912. But it was not good news to Woodrow Wilson, who had hoped those defectors would vote Democratic, as a show of confidence in him. He was still far from popular. A prolonged recession had disillusioned the electorate with New Freedom, and by extension, New Nationalism. In a post-election poll of nine thousand “leading men of the country” by The Lawyer and Banker, Wilson came second to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane as their preferred Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1916. And Lane was far behind their favorite Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.