“FALL HAS COME,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit on 13 September. “The dogwood berries are reddening, the maple leaves blush, the goldenrod and asters flaunt their beauty; and log fires burn and crumble in the north room in the evenings.”
Very slowly, he was recovering his joy in the natural world, after a summer of finding himself unable to think of much but mortality. Hearing that Ted had been nearly blinded and killed, Dick Derby thrown into the air by a shell, and seeing how “crippled” Archie was had compounded his grief over Quentin’s fate. However, all were safe for the moment, as well as Kermit, detached to an artillery school in Saumur. General Pershing had written to say that Ted was about to be promoted to a colonelcy. Two Colonel Roosevelts in one family, plus two decorated captains and one dead hero, added up to plenty of honor.
That did not help him feel any less sidelined, or any less beaten down physically and emotionally. The “gentleness” Corinne discerned in her brother struck others as exhaustion, if not desuetude: the Rooseveltian vigor di vita was gone. One day his literary colleague Mary Roberts Rinehart drove from New York out to Oyster Bay with him and Edith. “The Colonel sat with his chauffeur, saying nothing. Most of the time his head was bent on his breast, and I can still see his sturdy broad-shouldered figure, stooped and tired. For the first time he seemed old to me, old and weary.”
Roosevelt was loath to divide what was left of his energy between politics and war work, saying that he would tour in the fall only on behalf of Secretary McAdoo’s fourth “Liberty Loan” appeal. Extra military funds were urgently needed: the number of soldiers, sailors, and marines in service was now approaching three million, and the latest registration had increased the pool of potential draftees to an almost incredible twenty-four million—one and a half times as much as the total manpower of Britain and France. Roosevelt’s still-smoldering anger toward Woodrow Wilson was fueled by this evidence of how the nation could have armed itself after the sinking of the Lusitania, shortening the war and saving countless lives. Quentin’s included, perhaps.
The most he would do to help the GOP in its campaign to win back the Senate in November was volunteer a major address at Carnegie Hall, one week before the election, and write supportive letters and articles. On the twenty-eighth he set off on his fund-raising tour, regretfully leaving behind the sight of beach rosemary in pale, late bloom along Lloyd’s Neck.
AS HE TRAVELED WEST via Ohio to Missouri and Nebraska, he edited a selection of his recent journalism for book publication by Scribners. Charles Scribner was emboldened to invest in him yet again, on the strength of widespread sympathy engendered by newspaper syndication of “The Great Adventure.” Inevitably, that phrase became the title of the hardback release.
“It’s pretty poor business to be writing little books in these times of terrible action,” Roosevelt apologized in a letter to Belle, “but it’s all I can do, or at least all I am allowed to do by the people in power in Washington.”
Scribbling on dutifully, he used up the last of the triple-carbon notebooks that had served him so well in Africa and Brazil.
His speeches attracted large, affectionate crowds, but after nearly forty years of shouting at people he was no longer capable of saying anything new. It was enough for these tens of thousands of regular folks to say that they had “seen” the great Teddy. He still felt a kinship with them: it was they and their kind who had helped him become, in his own words, “at heart, as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” On his way home in early October, he spent the night in Billings, Montana, where once, as a dude ranchman from New York, he had knocked out a barroom bully. George Myers, his old cattleman, was on hand to visit with him at his hotel.
“Have you got a room, George?”
Myers shook his head.
“Share mine with me,” Roosevelt said, “and we’ll talk about old times.”
HE ARRIVED BACK EAST complaining of acute inflammatory pain in his left leg and both feet. Rheumatism was a disease he had long been afraid of, since it had racked his sister Bamie for most of her life, and made a hopeless invalid of his favorite presidential appointee, William Henry Moody. He had himself been bothered by it, on and off, since his last years in the White House, but never as sharply as now. If the two physicians he consulted—Drs. Walton Martin in Manhattan and George W. Faller in Oyster Bay—detected symptoms of rheumatic fever, a life-threatening pathology that often struck patients in October, they kept their concern from him. He was given conventional anti-inflammatory medicine and told to rest as much as possible.
Returning to Oyster Bay, he put himself in Dr. Faller’s care, and adjusted to the irony that he was once again prostrated, just when the presidency of Woodrow Wilson was nearing the zenith of its achievement. On the night he and George Myers had sat talking “about old times” in a hick town in Montana, the new Chancellor of Germany, Prince Maximilian of Baden, had asked the President ot begin negotiations for a “restoration of peace,” along the lines of his “Fourteen Points” agenda of last January.
Roosevelt’s tour had coincided, moreover, with the greatest combined offensive of the war: nine armies, including Pershing’s, assailing the Central Powers from Flanders all the way south to Palestine. The giant operation was still continuing, and Pershing was making a bloody mess of it in the Argonne, but an armistice on the Western Front was obviously imminent.
Britain and France did not want the President to negotiate anything less triumphant than unconditional surrender by each enemy in turn. Wilson declined to do what any belligerent wanted. Sure that he, alone and at last, held the fate of the world in his hands, he had responded with a “note of inquiry” asking Prince Maximilian to confirm whether Germany accepted all of the Fourteen Points—thereby endorsing the idea of a League of Nations—and to attest that a prince had constitutional authority to end a war waged by generals.
This sounded to Roosevelt like the prelude to another drawn-out period of “elocution” while more and more poilus, tommies, and doughboys died. “I regret greatly,” he said in a dictated statement, “that President Wilson has entered into these negotiations, and I trust that they will be stopped.” The Fourteen Points were “couched in such vague language that many of them may mean anything or nothing … while others are absolutely mischievous.” Freedom of the seas, for example, could be construed as permission to go on deploying U-boats. Disarmament could force America to give up the defense system it had so belatedly and expensively created. Giving autonomy instead of independence to oppressed subject races would be “a base betrayal of the Czechoslovaks, the Armenians, and our other smaller allies, and the cynical repudiation of the idea that we meant what we said when we spoke of making the world safe for democracy.”
He earnestly hoped, he said, that Wilson would “refuse to compound a felony by discussing terms with felons.”
These words showed that, ailing or not, the Colonel still packed a rhetorical punch. Similar statements by Henry Cabot Lodge and a nearly insubordinate General Pershing enraged the administration. Political strategists fantasizing another run by Roosevelt for the presidency in 1920 had a fair idea who he would choose as his secretary of state and secretary of war. Following up, Roosevelt sent an open telegram to Lodge, and carbon-copied it to Senators Poindexter and Hiram Johnson for promulgation “from one ocean to the other.” It expressed his fervent hope that the Senate would disavow the Fourteen Points “in their entirety,” and take independent action to ensure Germany’s unconditional surrender.
“Let us dictate peace by the hammering of guns,” he wrote, “and not chat about peace to the accompaniment of the clicking of typewriters.”
The President, goaded, issued a personal appeal to the nation the next day, 25 October. It was egotistical enough to make Roosevelt seem bashful: “My fellow countrymen, the congressional elections are at hand.… If you have approved of my leadership and wish me to continue to be your unembarrassed spokesman in affairs at home and abroad, I earnestly beg that you express yourselves unm
istakably to that effect by returning a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives.”
Wilson made things worse by saying it was “imperatively necessary,” with peace negotiations impending, that the Senate remain loyal to him. A loss by his party of either house would “certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” The respect that America’s allies entertained for him would be seriously undermined if they saw voters in the United States electing a legislature that was “not in fact in sympathy with the attitude and action of the administration.”
The folly of this statement, implying that Republicans put party above patriotism, and that only Democrats were idealistic enough to impose pax Americana on the world, admitted of no rational explanation. Wilson was neither tired nor sick nor inclined to be bothered by anything Roosevelt said about him. But he was bothered, to a degree that made him lose his famous calm, by the addressee of Roosevelt’s telegram. He had hated Henry Cabot Lodge ever since he heard that the senator had accused him of turning white and “womanish” after Vera Cruz. The prospect of Lodge, an outspoken opponent of Wilson’s League of Nations idea, becoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was more than the President could bear. He had had to be dissuaded from directly naming Lodge in his appeal.
Roosevelt sniffed a vote-getting issue and threw away the political address he had promised to give at Carnegie Hall. He composed a new one, passing the sheets to Alice Longworth as he wrote them.
TWO DAYS LATER the Colonel turned sixty. Archie and Ethel and their three children joined Alice and Edith in a celebration tinged with worry about his condition. He looked well, and somewhat thinner than he had been a year before, but his joints were burning with rheumatism. Ethel noticed that he still became dizzy if he moved too fast. He told her that ever since his abscess operation he had had “queer feelings” in his head.
She was encouraged to find him optimistic for a victorious end to the war, and philosophical about his birthday. Jokingly, he referred to himself as “Methuselah’s understudy” and “an elderly literary gentleman of quiet tastes and an interesting group of grandchildren.”
He pretended to have recovered from Quentin’s death, but Edith knew better. “I can see how constantly he thinks of him,” she wrote Kermit, “… sad thoughts of what Quentin would have counted for in the future.”
A well-wisher the following afternoon made sure Roosevelt kept brooding, by delivering part of the seat of Quentin’s crashed plane.
Carnegie Hall was crammed beyond its legal capacity when he arrived there that night. Women composed at least half of the audience, and practically every prominent Republican in New York State sat on the podium. No sooner had the Colonel walked onstage than a voice yelled, “Unconditional surrender.” He grinned and waved his speech script in reply. As he prepared to speak, another shout came, “Rub it in, Teddy!”
He spoke for more than two hours, excoriating Wilson for turning the war from a moral to a partisan issue. “If the President of the United States is right in the appeal he has just made to the voters, then you and I, my hearers, have no right to vote in this election or to discuss public questions while the war lasts.”
Over the next few days, his condition deteriorated sharply, to the point that on the evening of 2 November, when he returned home after attending a Negro War Relief benefit with Archie, he found it difficult to walk for the pain in his legs. Next morning he tried to get up for breakfast, and found that he could not get one shoe on. At various times he was told he was suffering from multiple rheumatism, lumbago, sciatica, or gout. All he knew for certain was that he felt steadily worse. He remained bedridden, learning from newspapers that Turkey and Austria-Hungary were both out of the war. Moreover, Pershing had launched an offensive across the Meuse so ferocious that the First American Army was now recognized to be a force equal to any in the world. The papers did not report that Black Jack was encouraging the German Third and Fifth armies to retreat with liberal quantities of mustard gas. The British had simultaneously swept clear through to Ghent, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s forces were elsewhere engaged in driving every last “Boche” off French soil. In a magnanimous gesture, Wilhelm II had offered sixty of his personal palaces as treatment centers for victims of the Allied onslaught. Nevertheless, the German war cabinet was insisting that he abdicate.
On election day, 5 November, Roosevelt hobbled into the blacksmith’s shop that served as Oyster Bay’s polling place and cast his ballot. Edith accompanied him. For all his support of universal suffrage, she was still not able to vote. They had the satisfaction of hearing next morning that the Democrats had lost both houses of Congress, in a Republican triumph devastating to Wilson’s hope of dominating the postwar international scene. Speaker Champ Clark was dethroned. Political analysts put most of the blame on the President for demanding a vote of confidence. Roosevelt congratulated himself as “probably the chief factor” in preventing Wilson from doing “what he fully intended to do, namely, double-cross the Allies, appear as an umpire between them and the Central Powers and get a negotiated peace which would put him personally on a pinnacle of glory in the sight of every sinister pro-German and every vapid and fatuous doctrinaire sentimentalist throughout the world.”
He was equally contemptuous of the Kaiser, after reading on 10 November that Wilhelm II had resigned in the face of mass desertions and mutinies in all German services. The Red Flag was now flying in eleven German cities—even over the imperial harbor at Kiel—and the Reichstag was in danger of being taken over by a combination of socialist soviets. An armistice delegation representing its centrist majority was suing for peace in the Forest of Compiègne.
“If I had been the Kaiser,” Roosevelt snorted, “when my generals told me that the war was lost, I would have surrounded myself with my six healthy and unharmed sons, and would have charged up the strongest part of the Allied lines in the hope that God in his infinite goodness and mercy would give me a speedy and painless death.”
Flat on his back that same day, he heard that Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., had gone AWOL from military convalescence and reassumed command of the Twenty-sixth Infantry Regiment, just in time to participate in Pershing’s final offensive. Kermit had gotten to the Front too, and fought in the same division. Quentin was avenged. Family honor was satisfied.
AROUND THREE O’CLOCK the following morning, floodlights illuminated the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Newspaper presses throughout the city thumped out an announcement by the State Department: “The Armistice has been signed.” At 6 A.M., local time, hostilities would cease on the Western Front.
Steam whistles began to blow long before dawn, in a continuous wail punctuated by motor horns and church chimes. By seven all Manhattan was throbbing, as fire crackers, cap pistols, brass bands, air-raid sirens, and even cow bells added to the cacophony. Impromptu parades joined together and marched up Fifth Avenue. Soldiers and sailors grabbed girls off the sidewalks and kissed them with a promiscuity unimaginable in prewar days. Airplanes roared overhead at dangerously low altitudes. There was a crescendo of noise through the day, approaching its climax in the late afternoon, just as Roosevelt was driven into town and returned to the hospital room he had occupied in February. It had windows facing toward Broadway, only one block distant. For as long as he remained awake, he could hear roaring and music in Columbus Circle.
Dr. John H. Richards announced overnight that the Colonel was back in Roosevelt Hospital because he needed to be “near his physician.” His ailment, diagnosed as “lumbago,” was not considered serious. “His blood pressure and heart action are those of a man of forty years.”
Subsequent bulletins, issued every few days by Richards and others, were equally positive, but vague enough to confuse reporters as to what, exactly, was wrong with Roosevelt. If he was in no danger, why had his wife moved into an adjoining room? And why was his treatment taking so long? On 21 November, a rumor t
hat he was facing an operation impelled his old literary friend Hamlin Garland to come and see him.
“I found him in bed propped up against a mound of pillows,” Garland wrote in a diary entry. “He looked heavier than was natural to him and his mustache was almost white. There was something ominous in the immobility of his body.”
After some chat about their youthful experiences out West, Garland said that he and a few friends would like permission to buy the field in France where Quentin was buried and turn it into a memorial park, “so that when you and Mrs. Roosevelt go there next summer, you will find it cared for and secure.”
Roosevelt’s eyes misted over. “That’s perfectly lovely of you, Garland.” But he needed to consult Edith before coming to a decision.
Corinne Roosevelt came in with a cake, and Garland rose to go. The Colonel would not let him. “Sit down!”
For half an hour the three of them talked about books and poetry. Roosevelt mentioned politics only once. “I wanted to see this war put through and I wanted to beat Wilson. Wilson is beaten and the war is ended. I can now say Nunc dimittis, without regret.”
Garland came back four days later to ask again about the memorial. Roosevelt seemed stronger: his operation had been merely a dental procedure, to remove two formerly abscessed teeth. Yet he emanated sadness, and his voice had a moribund sound. The stillness of his body, mummified in thick blankets, again struck Garland. It contrasted strangely with the movement of his arm as he reached out to shake hands. He was evidently in worse condition than the hospital would admit.
Edith, Roosevelt said, was opposed to the idea of a park around Quentin’s grave. She felt that her son had been “only an ordinary airman,” doing his duty. Many others had fallen: “Quentin was no more hero than they, and should not be honored above his merits because he was our son.”
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