Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Of the twelve names polled, Theodore Roosevelt came in last, with only 11 votes to Hughes’s 1,584. Having made a career out of attacking precisely the combination embodied in the phrase Lawyer and Banker, he could not expect readers of such a magazine to rank him much higher, even if he was a declared candidate. Still, he had just participated in his third failed campaign in five years—confessedly an “utter and hopeless one” as far as Progressivism was concerned. His words from a past moment of triumph resounded hollowly: We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.

  Once again the Colonel returned to a Sagamore Hill deserted by politicians and reporters. Little Richard was pining for Ethel. So was he. She gave off and attracted more love than any other of his children. “I wish I could stroke your neck and hair,” he wrote her. Happily, both Derbys would be back home in time for Christmas. Alice was likely to be less difficult, this festive season, now that Nick had been reelected to Congress. And Edith too should be happier, once she heard that Kermit and Belle were safely settled in Buenos Aires.

  Roosevelt persuaded himself that he looked forward to private life, although Wilson’s cool refusal to speak out about Belgium tormented him. For the moment, he did not have a big book to write, nor was any publisher asking for one. An Autobiography had been a disappointment for Macmillan, and Life-Histories of African Game Animals was so technical that Scribners had printed it almost as an act of charity. Through the Brazilian Wilderness, just out, was earning excellent reviews, and in narrative quality was probably the best thing he had ever done. But its early sales did not compare to those of African Game Trails.

  For as long as the European war lasted, Roosevelt felt inclined to focus on journalism. Next February he would have a new editorial platform, as guest columnist for Metropolitan magazine. Pacifism, preparedness, and moral cowardice were to be his themes; he was bored with partisan argument. Let those intellectuals who were more policy-minded than he was—brilliant young men such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann—adapt what survived of Progressivism to suit a magazine they had just founded, The New Republic.

  “It is perfectly obvious that the bulk of our people are heartily tired of me,” Roosevelt wrote William Allen White, in a posterity letter tinged with regret.

  I shall fight in the ranks as long as I live for the cause and the platform for which we fought in 1912. But at present any attempt at action on my part which could be construed … into the belief that I was still aspiring to some leadership in the movement would, I am convinced, do real harm. It has been wisely said that while martyrdom is often right for the individual, what society needs is victory. It was eminently proper that Leonidas should die at Thermopylae, but the usefulness of Thermopylae depended upon its being followed by the victory of Themistocles at Salamis.… When it is evident that a leader’s day is past, the one service he can render is to step aside and leave the ground clear for the development of a successor. It seems to me that such is now the case as regards myself. “Heartily know that the half-gods go when the Gods arise.”

  * Now Tsingtao.

  CHAPTER 20

  Two Melancholy Men

  The coming on of his old monster Time

  Has made him a still man; and he has dreams

  Were fair to think on once, and all found hollow.

  THE WINTER OF 1914–1915 found the Allies and Central Powers entrenched opposite each other in two freezing fissures that divided Western Europe like a fault line, all the way north from Switzerland to Ypres and the Belgian ports. Another fissure ran alongside the Bzura-Ravka riverline west of Warsaw and cracked down the map into Galicia, holding eight ill-supplied Russian armies at bay. Gone was the mobility that had characterized the early months of the war: the Schlieffen Plan’s rotation, the cavalry sweeps, the cuts and thrusts of maneuvers at Tannenberg and in the Marne. Abandoned, too, was the delusion of the soldiers dug in that a trench was a temporary thing that would last only as long as it took for politicians to settle the misunderstandings of last summer. The war was going to be long, and mortal beyond calculation: a continuum of attrition, to be won by whichever power had the largest reserves of blood, bread, industrial plant, and patience. Germany had by now lost well over a million men, France almost that number. On the Eastern Front, 750,000 Russian, German, and Austrian soldiers had fallen in just six weeks.

  Across the Atlantic, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt hunkered down in their own psychological ditches. They were two melancholy men counterposed on either side of a foreign issue that most Americans chose to ignore—in Wilson’s words, “a war with which we have nothing to do.” White House aides were alarmed at the President’s inability to recover from the death of Ellen Wilson, five months before. He was not the type to share deep emotion with anybody except Colonel House and the few women closest to him: his two daughters, his sister and cousins, and a clutch of married confidantes. None could console him. From time to time grief forced Wilson to reveal that he felt “wiped out,” unable to think straight. The unremarkable Democratic vote in the recent elections made him feel that his domestic reform program had failed. He frightened Colonel House by saying he would not mind being assassinated.

  Roosevelt appeared on the surface to be content. He insisted, as he had in late 1910 and 1912, that his politicking days were over (“I never wish to leave Sagamore again!”) and that his heart and mind were at ease. Family and friends used to such protestations saw that he was, on the contrary, unhappier than at any time they could remember. He had regained the seventy pounds of flesh he lost to malaria, and it was not the firm musculature of earlier years, but a fatness around the waist and neck that disgusted him. “I am now pretty nearly done out,” he confided to his former White House physician, Dr. Presley Rixey. “The trouble is that I have rheumatism or gout and things of that kind to a degree that make it impossible for me to take very much exercise; and then in turn the fact that I cannot take exercise prevents my keeping in good condition.” Like many another ovoid person, he did not relate his weight gain to compulsive eating.

  Ted was concerned enough about him to call old Rough Riders and ask them to rally round. “Father is in very bad shape. Won’t you come out and see if you can cheer him up.” Those who did tried the dubious therapy of encouraging Roosevelt to think of raising a volunteer division to fight in Mexico or, if need be one day, overseas. Edith lost patience with these fantasies. “Both you men,” she said to her husband and Frank Knox, “are exactly like small boys playing at soldiers.”

  She sat in glowing firelight, with needlework on her lap.

  “It’s a lovely game. But as far as the Mexican trouble is concerned, Theodore, you know quite as well as I do that Mr. Wilson will never let you, or your division, get into it at all.”

  William Allen White correctly diagnosed that the Colonel was suffering from power deprivation. As the ambivalent leader of a dying party, he no longer looked or sounded presidential. It was inconceivable, given what was happening in Europe, that he could ever again call upon straw-hatted idealists to stand and fight at Armageddon. In his despair that nothing was being done for the Belgians (or was it frustration at not being in control?), he was resorting increasingly to ugly language against Wilson and Bryan. His series of articles on the war had become near-libelous after the election. That infallible sign of Rooseveltian frustration, the tendency to castrate political opponents, had resurged: “Weaklings who raise their shrill piping for a peace that shall consecrate successful wrong occupy a position quite as immoral as and infinitely more contemptible than the position of the wrong-doers themselves.… It comes dangerously near flattery to call the foreign policy of the United States under President Wilson and Secretary Bryan one of milk and water.”

  White tried to tease him back into the kind of civilized essay-writing that suited him best. “Your ciste
rn is dry on politics.… I understand that you have a contract with the Metropolitan. If I were you I would go strong on the discussion of modern tendencies in architecture with here and there a few remarks on Sir Oliver Lodge’s views on abnormal psychology, and I might take a swipe at the national moving picture censorship, but I would not have anything to do with friend Bryan or friend Wilson.”

  Roosevelt did not rise to White’s humor. “I am more like a corpse than like the cistern of which you spoke.” He laboriously explained that Metropolitan magazine was interested only in his views on “international, social and economic questions,” and would not permit him to write literary essays—much as he might want to. “Like you I make my living largely by my pen. I don’t care to go into work that will take me beyond the time when Quentin, my youngest son, is launched into the world, but that won’t be for three years yet.…”

  He did not mention a financial threat that loomed ahead of him: the $50,000 libel suit he had brought on himself, last July, by accusing William Barnes, Jr., of aiding and abetting the “rotten” state government of New York. The case had been expensively delayed and relocated from Albany to Syracuse, on the ground that Boss Barnes’s dominance of the former city would preclude a fair jury. It was now due to be tried in April. Roosevelt knew from his libel suit against George Newett that even if he successfully defended himself, the costs he would incur were likely to be enormous. If he lost—and Barnes was a wealthy and formidable adversary—Quentin might have to be “launched” much sooner than 1918.

  Metropolitan was a large, lavishly illustrated monthly owned by Harry Payne Whitney, a racehorse breeder so blinkered with wealth that he did not seem to notice that its editor, Henry J. Whigham, had a radical bias that veered close to socialism. Roosevelt was willing to live with that as long as Whigham let him preach his own, more paternalistic brand of politics. The magazine, in addition, was a strong supporter of preparedness.

  “After this January,” he told White, “I shall do my best to avoid mentioning Wilson’s and Bryan’s names.”

  AS THE NEW YEAR progressed, however, he managed to mention them often, and harshly. Always his anger was directed at their interpretation of neutrality. They seemed to think it was a right that could be proclaimed, he wrote, whereas in fact it was only a privilege conceded by belligerent nations—for as long as those nations felt so disposed. Nor was it necessarily virtuous: “To be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.” Roosevelt felt that American apathy about the war was solidifying, and decided to move quickly before it became a cement resistant to chipping. Taking advantage of the New York publishing industry’s extraordinary ability to print and distribute a bound book in little more than two weeks, he edited his ten war articles of the previous fall for publication before the end of January. He supplemented them with two newer pieces on military training and “utopian” peace plans.

  “A LARGE, LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY.”

  Metropolitan magazine, TR’s main journalistic outlet from 1915 to 1918. (photo credit i20.1)

  The resultant twelve-chapter volume, entitled America and the World War, was issued by Scribners. It made permanent the breach between him and the administration, and established him as Wilson’s doctrinal foil. Critical reaction, when not dismissive, was divided. To Roosevelt’s chagrin, reviewers sympathetic to Britain, Belgium, and France accused him of favoring Germany. The reverse obtained with those who described themselves as “German-American,” a locution he detested.

  In a letter to a woman asking him to announce that he was an “Anglo-American,” he disclaimed all hyphenated allegiances. “England is not my motherland any more than Germany is my fatherland. My motherland and fatherland and my own land are all three of them the United States.”

  His new book, hortatory by purpose, lacked such plain eloquence. Its few statesmanlike passages were obscured by a surf of words so repetitive and overstated as to numb any reader. Roosevelt had always excused his habit of saying everything three, or thirty-three times with the rationale that it was the only way to drum certain basic truths into the public mind. But America and the World War took repetition to the point of pugilism, as if he wanted to knock out everyone who did not feel as strongly as he did.

  Many bookstore browsers glancing through its table of contents felt that they had already gotten the Colonel’s message, and would gain little by reading further:

  THE DUTY OF SELF-DEFENSE AND OF GOOD CONDUCT TOWARD OTHERS

  THE BELGIAN TRAGEDY

  UNWISE TREATIES A MENACE TO RIGHTEOUSNESS

  THE CAUSES OF THE WAR

  HOW TO STRIVE FOR WORLD PEACE

  THE PEACE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

  AN INTERNATIONAL POSSE COMITATUS

  SELF-DEFENSE WITHOUT MILITARISM

  OUR PEACEMAKER, THE NAVY

  PREPAREDNESS AGAINST WAR

  UTOPIA OR HELL?

  SUMMING UP

  It was unfortunate that Roosevelt, in his haste to cram together articles originally published separately, had not blended them into a more sequential argument. America and the World War had some passages of real power, especially in pieces written after the election, when all gloves were off. His call for a posse comitatus, or central police force of neutral nations, sounded all the more urgent now that the Hague tribunal had adjourned for the duration of the war. It was unfortunate, though, that he used the word posse, which invited jokes about his youth in the Wild West even though he construed it as Latin. He insisted that he was not advocating unilateral armed action by the United States, only its commitment (perhaps as the founding member) to a postwar peacekeeping league. “I ask those individuals who think of me as a firebrand to remember that during the seven and a half years I was President not a shot was fired at any soldier of a hostile nation by any American soldier or sailor, and there was not so much as a threat of war.… The blood recently shed at Vera Cruz … had no parallel during my administration.”

  He poured scorn on Wilson and Taft for allegedly neglecting the navy since he left office. As a result, the Great White Fleet of 1909 was now underfunded and demoralized. The condition of the army was even worse: it numbered only 80,804 officers and men, half of whom were deployed overseas. Yet Wilson, in his latest message to Congress, had scorned preparedness and declared that the United States was secure. This enabled Roosevelt to demolish some of the approving comments that had followed:

  Mr. Bryan came to his support with hearty enthusiasm and said: “The President knows that if this country needed a million men, and needed them in a day, the call would go out at sunrise and the sun would go down on a million men in arms.” … I once heard a Bryanite senator put Mr. Bryan’s position a little more strongly. [He] announced that we needed no regular army, because in the event of war “ten million freemen would spring to arms, the equals of any regular soldiers in the world.” I do not question the emotional or oratorical sincerity either of Mr. Bryan or of the senator. Mr. Bryan is accustomed to performing in vacuo; and both he and President Wilson, as regards foreign affairs, apparently believe they are living in a world of two dimensions, and not in the actual workaday world, which has three dimensions.…

  If the senator’s ten million men sprang to arms at this moment, they would have at the outside some four hundred thousand modern rifles at which to spring. Perhaps six hundred thousand more could spring to squirrel pieces and fairly good shotguns. The remaining nine million men would have to spring to axes, scythes, hand-saws, gimlets, and similar arms.

  In his summary chapter, looking back at the events of late July 1914, Roosevelt wrote, “I feel in the strongest way that we should have interfered, at least to the extent of the most emphatic diplomatic protest at the very outset [of the war] and then by whatever further action was necessary, in regard to the violation of the neutrality of Belgium.” He thus made it plain that had he been in the White House, he would have been willing to resort to force, on the same grounds that Britain had cited. Wilson would argue that the United State
s had no treaty obligation to do anything of the kind, but Roosevelt considered its endorsement of The Hague conventions of 1897 and 1907 to be binding. “As President,” he boasted, “I ordered the signature of the United States to these conventions.”

  Elihu Root was no longer at his elbow to remind him, with a sarcastic smile, that his enthusiasm for both documents had been slight. But as Roosevelt pointed out in his peroration, there had been epic changes since then.

  In the terrible whirlwind of the war all the great nations of the world, save the United States and Italy, are facing the supreme test of their history.* … Yet, in the face of all this, the President of the United States sends in a message dealing with national defense, which is filled with prettily phrased platitudes of the kind applauded at the less important types of peace congress, and with sentences cleverly turned to conceal from the average man the fact that the President has no real advice to give, no real policy to propose.…