Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Franklin did not comment on the Gulflight incident to reporters, but his cousin was under no such compunction. It had been “an act of piracy, pure and simple,” the Colonel declared out of court.

  DURING THE NEXT TWO days Roosevelt returned to the stand again and again, clarifying and amplifying his testimony for Bowers. When not being questioned, he looked bored. He flinched as Ivins, given the chance to cross-examine, said with mock exhaustion, “I don’t know that I care to have anything more to do with Mr. Roosevelt.”

  The old lawyer was trying for a laugh, but what sounded like a collective groan ran through the courtroom. His witness was, after all, a former head of state.

  That night, Thursday, 6 May, an ominous letter reached Roosevelt in the house of his local host, Horace S. Wilkinson. It came from Cal O’Laughlin, who was always ahead of the news, and transmitted the written warning of a “high German official” that the administration’s shipping policy was putting American national unity “to a dangerous test.” Citizens of German or Irish ancestry had the right to protest, even sabotage, a neutrality so obviously favoring Great Britain. Their target might be the Cunard flagship Lusitania, currently en route from New York to Liverpool.

  She had sailed on the first day of the month, amid a strange flurry of other threats—some wired pseudonymously to passengers as they checked in to their cabins—that she might be struck by a U-boat. An advisory signed and paid for by the German Embassy in Washington had appeared alongside her final sailing notice in several newspapers, reminding travelers “intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage” that a state of war existed between the Reich and Great Britain. Any vessel flying the Union Jack in “waters adjacent to the British Isles,” was therefore “liable to destruction.”

  Roosevelt was infuriated by the arrogant tone of the document O’Laughlin enclosed. “It makes my blood boil to see how we are regarded,” he wrote back. “Lord, how I would like to be President in view of what he says about the huge German-Irish element and the possible sinking of the Lusitania.” Personally, he would hang any such scaremonger, “and I would warn him that if any of our people were sunk on the Lusitania, I would confiscate all the German interned ships, beginning with the Prinz Eitel.”

  Perhaps it was just as well that Roosevelt was out of office in his current mood. He confessed to O’Laughlin that “if I didn’t keep a grip on myself,” a provocation of this kind “would make me favor instant war with Germany.”

  He was back in court the following day, Friday, to hear Bowers begin to wind up the case for the defense. For hours, legal arguments droned back and forth between floor and bench, and Roosevelt looked, if possible, even more bored than he had the day before. Ivins took pity on him and walked over with a little green-covered edition of the plays of Aristophanes. “I came across this yesterday, Colonel, and it struck me that it was a first-class translation, and that if you cared to amuse yourself with anything of this sort while this uninteresting testimony is going on, you might enjoy it.”

  Roosevelt was profoundly touched. “Thank you, thank you. I certainly am de-light-ed, Mr. Ivins.”

  He remained buried in the book until late in the afternoon, when a messenger brought him a telegram. Reading it, his face changed. At five o’clock the court adjourned, with Andrews warning Bowers that unless more conclusive evidence was offered regarding Barnes’s state printing contracts, he would strike out all testimony heard so far on the subject. This was gloomy news for Roosevelt to ponder over the weekend, but it did not compare with the front-page story in the Syracuse evening newspaper, just then going on sale:

  “ ‘LORD, HOW I WOULD LIKE TO BE PRESIDENT.’ ”

  The evening newspaper that greeted TR as he emerged from the courthouse, 7 May 1915. (photo credit i21.3)

  On an inside page, it was reported that President Wilson had no comment. This was not surprising, since the story was so fresh, terrible, and incomplete. If the fate of those aboard was “unknown,” how could it be that most were “believed” to be safe?

  It was clear, all the same, that a German torpedo had sunk the biggest ship in the Cunard fleet, with a mostly American manifest, just offshore of County Cork in Ireland. Many of the first-class passengers listed were known to Roosevelt, including Alfred G. Vanderbilt and Miss Theodate Pope, a young architect and member of the Progressive Party. He went to his lodgings and paced up and down in front of Horace Wilkinson, debating what to say about the catastrophe. On Monday, the twelve Syracusans who would pass judgment on him were due to start hearing from William Barnes, Jr. Two or three had German-sounding names. What verdict were they likely to render, if he criticized Germany’s action against an enemy vessel?

  “I’ve got be right in this matter,” he said, and went to bed early.

  The inevitable telephone call from an Associated Press reporter came around midnight. Wilkinson took it and went to wake Roosevelt.

  “All right, I’ll speak to him.”

  The reporter gave him the full story that would appear in tomorrow’s papers. There had been 1,918 souls aboard the Lusitania, and only 520 had so far been rescued. The ship had sunk in fifteen minutes, going down so fast that at least a thousand passengers were presumed dead, many of them mothers with children.

  “That’s murder,” Wilkinson heard the Colonel saying. “Will I make a statement? Yes, yes. I’ll make it now. Just take this.”

  It appeared as dictated on Saturday, 8 May, in newspapers across the country.

  I can only repeat what I said a week ago [sic], when in similar fashion the American vessel the Gulflight was destroyed off the English coast and its captain drowned.…

  This represents not merely piracy, but piracy on a vaster scale of murder than any old-time pirate ever practiced. This is the warfare which destroyed Louvain and Dinant, and hundreds of men, women and children in Belgium. It is warfare against innocent[s] traveling on the ocean, and to our fellow countrywomen, who are among the sufferers.

  It seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.

  WOODROW WILSON’S FIRST reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania had been to flee the White House. Evading his secret service detail, he walked the drizzly streets of Washington unrecognized, while newsboys shrieked the story he already knew. When he came back he retired to his study and refused to see any advisers through the weekend. The White House issued a statement saying that the President was pondering “very earnestly, but very calmly, the right course of action to pursue.”

  Colonel House, who was in London, tried to point him in the direction of an ultimatum. “America has come to the parting of the ways,” he cabled, “when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. We can no longer remain neutral.”

  It seemed to Wilson that all warfare was uncivilized. After going to church on Sunday he spent most of the afternoon being chauffeured around the countryside. It was dark before he got home. Sitting down at his typewriter, he began to tap out a formal note to the German foreign minister, pursuant to the one he had issued in February holding the Reich responsible for any act of violence against American citizens. He called no special session of his cabinet for the following morning. Late in the afternoon he traveled to Philadelphia to speak at a gathering of recently naturalized immigrants. By the time he stepped onstage in Convention Hall, three and a half days had elapsed since the tragedy in the Celtic Sea, and expectation around the world was intense as to what he would say. William Howard Taft had no doubt that if the President called for revenge, Congress would oblige him with a declaration of war.

  To general amazement, Wilson did not mention the Lusitania, or Germany, or the war. He talked about “ideals” and “visions” and “dreams,” and “touching hearts with all the nations of mankind.” But one declaration, expressing his personal attitude toward conflict, rang out with particular impact: “The example of America must be the example not merely
of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”

  ONE CONSEQUENCE OF the sinking of the Lusitania was that Barnes v. Roosevelt was swept off the front pages of newspapers everywhere, even in New York. Suddenly the squabbles of libel lawyers in a salt town upstate sounded petty and irrelevant, in contrast to cable stories of five-ton lifeboats skidding down the decks of the tilted liner, crushing passengers by the dozen, and dead blue babies being fished from the sea like mackerel.

  Roosevelt was not sorry for the distraction. He felt that his case was going badly, and disliked having millions of people read Justice Andrews’s rulings against him. He was, besides, angered to the point of frenzy by Wilson’s Philadelphia speech. According to The New York Times, some four thousand people, many of them German-born, had roared support when the President talked about being “too proud to fight.” Stocks had surged next day, and editorials nationwide rejoiced that the administration was keeping a cool head in the crisis. William Randolph Hearst blustered that Germany had every right to sink a ship flying an enemy flag. Taft expressed relief and support of Wilson, in a rebuff to Roosevelt that was lavishly praised by The New York Times.

  The Colonel raged against them all in a letter to his most militant son:

  Dear Archie:

  There is a chance of our going to war; but I don’t think it is much of a chance. Wilson and Bryan are cordially supported by all the hyphenated Americans, by the solid flubdub and pacifist vote. Every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease … is enthusiastically in favor of Wilson; and at present the good citizens, as a whole, are puzzled and don’t understand the situation, and so a majority of them also tend to be with him. This is not pardonable; but it is natural. As a nation, we have thought very little about foreign affairs; we don’t realize that the murder of the thousand men, women and children in the Lusitania is due, solely, to Wilson’s cowardice and weakness in failing to take energetic action when the Gulflight was sunk but a few days previously. He and Bryan are morally responsible for the loss of the lives of those American women and children—and for the lives lost in Mexico, no less than for the lives lost on the high seas. They are both of them abject creatures, and they won’t go to war unless they are kicked into it.

  He was overwrought, but this kind of language appealed to Archie. The youth was already asking permission to quit Harvard and serve in an American expeditionary force to Europe, should Wilson decide to send one. Roosevelt did not see that happening soon. He was sure, nonetheless, that America would eventually enter the war.

  Like most Northeasterners, he sympathized with the Allied cause, and admired Britain’s decision to stand by Belgium and France. Nevertheless, there was much that disturbed him about the blockade policy of the Royal Navy, which Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, frankly described as a tactic to “starve the whole [German] population—men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”

  Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, the Kaiser’s personal spokesman in the United States, complained in a public statement that Britain had made the North Sea a war zone long before Germany, “in retaliation,” applied a similar designation to the other waters around England and Ireland. American travelers had been repeatedly warned that any vessel suspected of transporting contraband in that theater would be destroyed, whether large or small or belligerent or neutral. The master of the Gulflight had been delivering oil to France. As for the Lusitania, New York’s own collector of customs had certified that she carried “for Liverpool, 260,000 pounds of brass; 60,000 pounds of copper; 180 cases of military goods; 1,271 cases of ammunition, and for London, 4,200 cases of cartridges.” Cunard might claim that these items were technically non-contraband, yet Dernburg was correct in saying that the Lusitania was registered as “a British auxiliary cruiser.” She had gun mounts to prove it. Germany’s official notice published on her day of departure could not have more clearly hinted that she was doomed.

  Roosevelt knew Dernburg, and five months before had agreed with him that a great nation “fighting for its life” must do what was essential to defend itself and feed itself. But he scoffed at Dernburg’s insistence that the rape of Belgium had been “an absolute necessity.” Nor did he see that any civilized power had the right to sink ships, whatever their cargo, by means of submarines unable to rescue innocent passengers.

  Now that the inevitable calamity had occurred, Roosevelt felt that he had no alternative but to support English democracy against Prussian autocracy. It was not a palatable choice, given Britain’s own arrogance at sea. But at last report, Allied forces had not yet drowned any babies or torched any universities.

  He decided that he and his sons would show publicly that they had a different idea of pride than Woodrow Wilson. A monthlong “preparedness” camp to train civilians for military duty was scheduled to take place in Plattsburg, New York, in August. Leaving Ted to sign up for himself, Roosevelt put down the names of Archie and Quentin. He promised that he would visit the camp personally and advertise it to the world in his journalism.

  Meanwhile, Barnes v. Roosevelt dragged on into its fourth week.

  THE PRESIDENT REGRETTED his gaffe in Philadelphia, and tried to get it deleted from the official transcript of his speech. He claimed that he been expressing “a personal attitude.” But to some ears, There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight had the same smug sound as his confession over the bodies of the marines who died at Vera Cruz: There are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire.

  On 13 May, his note responding to the Lusitania disaster was cabled to James W. Gerard, the American ambassador in Berlin. Gerard had been expecting to be recalled, preparatory to a complete severance of diplomatic relations. Instead, he found himself charged with the delivery of a polite document appealing to the peaceable emotions of the Kaiser’s war cabinet.

  Wilson stated that the situation was “grave.” He reported that several recent German attacks upon his countrymen at sea, traveling freely as was their privilege, had caused “concern, distress, and amazement” in the United States. Over a hundred Americans had died aboard the Lusitania; his administration was “loath to believe” that the U-boat commander responsible could have been obeying orders. The man must have been “under a misapprehension” of “the high principles of equity” for which Prussian war planners were famed. Making no mention of Belgium, the President praised Germany’s long-standing “humane and enlightened attitude … in matters of international right.” Surely Germans must agree that underwater attacks upon any merchantman, neutral or belligerent, were going “much beyond the ordinary methods of warfare at sea.”

  He granted that the action of certain adversaries who sought “to cut Germany off from all commerce” had forced the Reich to resort to extraordinary countermeasures. But the United States was not responsible for either policy. It declined to surrender its travel and trading rights as a neutral nation. Wilson felt obliged to repeat that he held Germany “to a strict accountability for any infringement of those rights, intentional or incidental.” He was confident that the Imperial Government would “disavow” the attacks he complained of, make appropriate reparations, and promise that no such outrages would happen again.

  The note won general approval, especially in Britain, when its text was released. Wilson’s elaborate courtesies fell within the norms of diplomatic style, and did not hide his determination to get satisfaction from the Wilhelmstrasse. At best, that would be an apology and a promise not to attack any more passenger vessels. More likely, there would be an apology and a counter-move, designed to draw him into protracted negotiations.

  Only the most cynical readers of the President’s text (and Americans were not good at cynicism) might wonder if he hoped to be so drawn. In little over a ye
ar, he was almost certain to win renomination for another term in the White House. But he could not dream of being reelected, unless he acted now as a man of peace: the mood of the country was overwhelmingly antiwar. It was remotely possible that Wilson might agree with Roosevelt that the nation would, sooner or later, have to fight for the survival of democracy. If so, his pose of unctuous expectation of a humane response from Germany now was just a tactic to gain him five more years of power—and his note a masterpiece of deceptive rhetoric, designed to ensure that when all the belligerents had spent their wrath, they would turn to him as their savior.

  ROOSEVELT FACED HIS FIFTH frustrating week in Syracuse, chafing under the mockery of William Ivins and jotting furious rebuttals with a green and gold fountain pen. Barnes, summoned from Albany, made a dignified witness, testifying coolly and precisely. It was noticed, however, that the jurors did not stare at him with the undisguised fascination they accorded the defendant. He was honest in his self-portrayal as a professional politician who understood that lawmakers needed the counsel and financial backing of corporate interests. Posturing ideologues and ill-informed common voters (Barnes denied ever calling them “riff-raff”) only impeded the legislative process.

  On Thursday, 20 May, Ivins summed up his case by accusing Roosevelt of a lifetime habit of turning on former associates. He quoted Shakespeare’s famous directive I charge thee, fling away ambition; by that sin fell the angels. The last words members of the jury heard were those of Justice Andrews, who instructed them to forget that the defendant had ever been President of the United States, and concentrate only on whether one man’s libelous charges against another were true. If not, malice could be established by circumstantial evidence, and punitive damages imposed.