Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Among his urgent priorities was the securing of all foreign ships held in American harbors from further acts of sabotage, and rapid action to prevent the Panama Canal from being blocked at either end. He had also to prepare for a possible order from Congress to raise, train, and equip a million-man army, by whatever means Wilson thought best. That order might never come: a group of isolationists in the Senate, led by Robert La Follette, was already ganging up in opposition to it. But whatever happened, Baker was determined not to send Theodore Roosevelt into battle.

  Ironically, on 5 February he had to slash his zigzag beneath the commission of Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., as a major of infantry in the Officers’ Reserve Corps. The President countersigned.

  SIR CECIL SPRING RICE sent Arthur Balfour a cogent explanation as to why Wilson would have to resort to a draft to get a million men into uniform. “It is not immediately evident to an American citizen of German descent resident in Omaha, Nebraska, that he should shed his German blood because an American negro from New Orleans has been drowned on a British ship, carrying munitions to France.”

  The ambassador did, all the same, see signs of domestic bellicosity spreading as U-boats continued to destroy neutral ships. A majority of the President’s cabinet now favored intervention. Wilson went back before Congress on the twenty-seventh to ask for authority to arm American merchantmen. He emphasized that he was not “proposing or contemplating war.” However, a great nation had a right and a duty to defend itself. The House Democratic leadership introduced a bill appropriating $1,000,000,000 for the purpose. As a result, the word billion began to creep into everyday speech, along with a new Wilsonism, armed neutrality.

  Nothing in the President’s stately demeanor that day betrayed the fact that he was in possession of intelligence so explosive as to remove all doubt that he would soon be forced to ask for a declaration of war. British cryptographers had provided him with the decoded text of an incendiary telegram from Arthur Zimmermann to the German minister in Mexico. Wilson was waiting for a State Department retranslation of the decode, but some of the original, operative words leaped out bold and clear:

  U BOOT KRIEG ZU BEGINNEN … AMERIKA … NEUTRAL … SCHLAGEN WIR MEXICO.… KRIEGFÜHRUNG … FINANZIELLE … MEXICO IN TEXAS … NEU-MEXICO … ARIZONA … JAPAN …

  U-boat warfare had begun. Germany would try to keep America neutral. Contract an alliance with Mexico if unsuccessful. Declare joint war against the United States. Provide finances. Mexico could recover Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Japan might join in.…

  On the face of it, the Zimmermann telegram looked delusional. Carranza was currently well-disposed toward the Wilson administration, and Japan was allied with Britain. However, if Britain collapsed (German submarines had sunk 536,000 deadweight tons of her shipping this month alone), who doubted that the Japanese would realign themselves?

  Certainly not Theodore Roosevelt. He had never felt easy about “that polite, silent and inscrutable race of selfish and efficient fighting men.” Zimmermann’s plot jibed with the scenario he had tried to impress on President Taft in 1910 (“a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers”), and also with one he had sketched out in 1914, of Germany defeating Britain, then forming an alliance with Japan against the United States.

  Wilson released the verified text of the telegram to the press overnight on 28 February. The sun rose next morning, Thursday, 1 March, on a nation shocked from its complacency. Everything the Colonel had been saying for two and a half years, at the cost of becoming a screechy-voiced scold, now sounded prophetic—as did the supporting chorus of his fellow interventionists. A new degree of neurosis attached to Texan memories of the Alamo, and to Californian dread of the Yellow Peril. Irish and German hyphenates clung to their sentimental notions of “home,” but no longer flaunted them.

  With only four days to go before the end of the Sixty-fourth Congress, events accelerated toward decisive action, if not—yet—a declaration of war. The House at once passed the Armed Ships bill. It would have cleared the Senate, but for a last-minute filibuster by Robert La Follette. Wilson issued a statement blaming him and ten other isolationist senators for thwarting popular desire: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”

  There was now as much of a sense of emergency on Capitol Hill as in the White House. Republicans and Democrats alike appealed to the President to summon a premature session of the Sixty-fifth Congress, which otherwise would not assemble until December.

  On Monday, 5 March, the President drove in gusty rain to the Capitol to deliver his second inaugural address. He had been sworn in privately the day before. Thirty-two secret service agents guarded his carriage, and more than twice as many swordsmen of the Second Cavalry framed them in a nervously jiggling square. Pennsylvania Avenue was lined on both sides with National Guardsmen in olive drab, rifles at the ready. Many of them were bronzed from recent service in Mexico. The roofs of neighboring buildings bristled with sharpshooters. Machine gunners covered the crowd waiting in East Capitol Park.

  “I beg your tolerance, your countenance, and your united aid,” Wilson shouted into the wind. He gave no hint of when, or even whether, he would ask Americans to take up arms, but talked of “the shadows that now lie dark across our path,” and prayed to God to give him “wisdom and prudence” in the days that lay ahead. Few spectators could hear what he was saying, but they were visually reassured by the long jaw jutting over the balustrade, the confident poise, and the statuesque proximity of Edith Wilson. Rolling cheers followed the presidential car all the way back downtown, along with impromptu choruses of “America.”

  ROOSEVELT, WHOSE FIRST reaction to the Zimmermann telegram had been to crumple his newspaper in rage, exulted to Kermit that “the lily-livered skunk in the White House” had at last begun to act like a man. He restrained himself from public commentary, not wanting to appear disloyal to the President at a time of crisis, or to jeopardize his dream of raising a volunteer division (or two, or three, or four) with Secretary Baker’s approval.

  Even now, Wilson seemed to hope that “armed neutrality” would be enough to keep the United States at peace. On 9 March, professedly bedridden with a cold, he summoned the new Congress. However, he postponed the date of its assembly to 16 April, six weeks off. That rendered Senator La Follette powerless in the interim to stop an executive order requiring all American freighters to arm themselves. For the next ten days the President remained out of sight, while his wife fronted for him.

  In Russia, meanwhile, half-starved workers revolted against an imperial ban on organized demonstrations. The first news of food riots in Petrograd and Moscow reached Washington via Stockholm on 12 March. Vast crowds were reported to be on the rampage, roaring “Down with autocracy!” The Russian army, weakened by the loss of three and a half million men, was either unable or unwilling to restore order. Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik exile living in New York, rejoiced that after twelve years of seismic buildup, the revolution of the proletariat was at last happening. Five days later The Washington Post confirmed that the Tsar had abdicated. A socialistic “provisional government” headed by Prince Lvov and dominated by the social democrat Aleksandr Kerensky was announced. “Unless improbable events occur,” The New York Times reported, “Russia has today become a republic.”

  The news caused more satisfaction in the United States than in Britain and France. Both were in terror that Russia would now withdraw from the war and enable the Central Powers to turn all their firepower on the Western Front. This, plus the deaths of fifteen Americans in yet another “submarining” (the word had become a verb) put pressure on Wilson to summon Congress sooner.

  On 20 March the President met with his cabinet and asked each member for advice. All were in favor of a prompt declaration of war against Germany, although Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the navy, cried as he committed himself. Newton D. Baker, all ve
stiges of past pacifism shed, argued for rapid rearmament with an earnestness that impressed Robert Lansing.

  After the meeting, which Wilson closed without indicating his own feelings, Baker returned to the War Department to be confronted by a telegram from Roosevelt: IN VIEW OF THE FACT THAT GERMANY IS NOW ACTUALLY ENGAGED IN WAR WITH US I AGAIN EARNESTLY ASK PERMISSION TO BE ALLOWED TO RAISE A DIVISION FOR IMMEDIATE SERVICE AT THE FRONT.

  Baker wrote back to say that no additional forces could be raised except by an act of the new Congress. When that body reassembled, the administration would present a plan “for a very much larger army than the force suggested in your telegram.” He let Roosevelt know that there was unlikely to be a commission for him. “General officers for all the volunteer forces are to be drawn from the regular army.”

  The result was an impatient speech by the Colonel that night in the Union League Club of New York City. Entirely at home again among Republicans who, four years before, had shunned him, he joined Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, and Joseph Choate in endorsing a resolution, “War now exists by act of Germany.” He noted that more than two years had passed since the administration had demanded strict accountability for all U-boat attacks on American citizens. Germany was now killing more of them than ever, “and she has proposed to Japan and Mexico an alliance for our dismemberment as a nation.”

  It was irresponsible, he said, to wait another year for revenge, while the administration raised its million-man army. “We can perfectly well send an expeditionary force abroad to fight in the trenches now—” He corrected himself. “Within four or five months.”

  Closeted afterward with Root, Hughes, and Robert Bacon, he begged them to do everything they could to persuade the President to let him fight in Europe. Hughes was struck by Roosevelt’s emotion as he said, “I shall not come back, my boys may not come back, my grandchildren may be left alone, but they will carry forward the family name. I must go.”

  WILSON RESPONDED TO his cabinet’s consensus for war only by announcing that he would advance the forthcoming session of Congress by two weeks. He said he would then present lawmakers with “a communication concerning grave matters of national policy.” In an almost perverse display of calm, he let state papers pile up while he relaxed with his wife, socialized, and shot pool.

  Roosevelt, too, took time off before what he knew would be one of the most momentous addresses in American history. He told reporters that he was heading for Punta Gorda, Florida, to hunt shark and devilfish for the rest of the month. “I shall be back by April 2, when Congress assembles.”

  When he passed through Washington on his way south, the city was already flaming with flags.

  CHAPTER 25

  Dust in a Windy Street

  He may have stumbled up there from the past,

  And with an aching strangeness viewed the last

  Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—

  A flame where nothing seems

  To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;

  And while it all went out

  Not even the faint anodyne of doubt

  May then have eased a painful going down

  From pictured heights of power and lost renown.

  HENRY ADAMS WAS JUST ABOUT to have dinner in Washington on the rainy evening of 2 April 1917 when he heard the hoofbeats of Woodrow Wilson’s cavalcade departing the White House and heading for Capitol Hill. By the time the old historian had finished eating, newsboys in Lafayette Square were already yelling out the story of their “extry” editions: the President had asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

  Theodore Roosevelt’s slow train from Florida did not get into Union Station until noon the following day. By then he had read the full text of Wilson’s address. Surrounded by a huge crowd outside the platform gates, he dictated a statement to reporters: “The President’s message is a great state paper which will rank in history among the great state papers of which Americans in future years will be proud.”

  His tribute was awkwardly worded but heartfelt. All the rage he had nurtured against Wilson gave way to something like admiration. Yesterday’s timid, selfish, cold-blooded sophist, the narrow and bitter partisan and debaucher of brains, had at last come to see things his way. Here, streaming across the front page of The Washington Post in double-width columns (juxtaposed with a dispatch that another U.S.-flagged steamer had been torpedoed, with eleven dead), was the oratory, impassioned yet rational, of a statesman whose mind was made up:

  With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical nature of the step I am now taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerency which has been thus thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

  Wilson noted that among the steps he was requesting Congress to authorize were the extension of liberal financial credit to the Allies, a powering-up of American industrial resources, and an addition of at least half a million men to the army by means of a universal draft, with equally large increments to follow. “We have seen the last of neutrality,” he said. The United States had “no quarrel with the German people”—only with the autocratic oligarchy that had sent them to war without consulting them. Autocracy could not be allowed to pervert any postwar partnership of free nations. “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

  Reportedly, this last line had not kindled the immediate ovation the President expected. But Senator John Sharp Williams, a Missouri Democrat who had served in Congress since the days of Grover Cleveland, had recognized it as the keynote of Wilson’s future foreign policy: an active, and if necessary forcible, imposition of American values upon “the world.” Williams had stood and applauded until his perception spread through both legislative bodies (the judiciary too, as represented by all nine members of the Supreme Court) and an enormous roar had built and built.

  If Roosevelt had not delayed his departure from Punta Gorda, in order to harpoon the second largest devilfish ever measured, he could have gotten to Washington in time to witness this triumph—so much greater than any he had experienced as president. But he found himself, on the morning after, an out-of-towner with no business to do in a city electric with urgency. The newsmen who greeted him vanished after taking his statement. They had other leads to pursue. Congress was about to debate a war resolution, over Senator La Follette’s filibuster. Antiwar lobbyists were besieging the Capitol. Senator Lodge, of all people, was reported to have knocked one pacifist down.

  Alice Longworth was on hand to take her father to lunch. He had a few hours to kill between trains, so they went to congratulate Lodge on his pugilism. The “Brahmin Bruiser” was away from his office. Roosevelt decided to pay a call on Woodrow Wilson.

  The White House was closed to visitors without appointment, as it had been since the spring of 1913. But when the guard at the northwest gate saw who was sitting with Alice in her big car, he automatically waved it through. The driveway that had been theirs for seven and a half years uncurled; the familiar portico loomed up; the glass doors to the vestibule swung open. Ike Hoover emerged from the usher’s office. The time was a few minutes before three.

  Roosevelt asked if he could see Wilson. Hoover regretted that the President was not at home: he had just gone to the West Wing for a cabinet meeting. Could the Colonel return later in the day? Roosevelt explained that he had no time, and left his card. He asked that Wilson be informed that he had come to congratulate him on “that remarkable state paper.”

  Alice drove him back to the station. Starved as ever for his company, she volunteered to ride with him as far as Ba
ltimore. Before he climbed into the train after her, Roosevelt admitted to a stray reporter, “I don’t know just what I’m going to do when I reach New York.” He said the next few days in Congress were crucial to his plans. “I can’t say anything more about organizing a division to go to the firing line until I find out something more about the policy of this government. I am sorry not to have seen the President.”

  TED AND KERMIT MET him in New York and drove him out to Oyster Bay, where Edith was brooding over a telephone call from Harvard. Quentin, her youngest and least martial son, was “coming down to get into the war.” She had been unable to dissuade him on the grounds of his bad back and his poor eyesight. He said he intended to train as a fighter pilot.

  Archie had an announcement too. He was engaged to Miss Grace Lockwood of Back Bay, Boston, and wanted to marry her as soon as possible, in order to be available for service the moment Congress answered Wilson’s recruitment call.