Colonel Roosevelt (106 page)

Roosevelt threw his speech script to the floor and continued in near-absolute silence.

ON THE FOLLOWING NIGHT
, with thirty-six hours to go before the election, Roosevelt slumped in the back of Regis Post’s car, humming to himself. They were returning from a Republican rally in Connecticut.

“
The old man’s working out something,” Post said to John Leary, who sat up front. “He always thinks hardest when he makes that queer noise. I wonder what’s up?”

What was up was a drift of voter sympathy toward Wilson that Roosevelt feared would erode the last of Charles Evans Hughes’s support. Leary had already, with a young man’s optimism, predicted that a defeat for Hughes would bode well for Roosevelt in 1920.

“You are wrong there,” the Colonel said. “This was my year—1916 was my high twelve. In four years I will be out of it.”

HUGHES MANAGED
, all the same, to attract enough votes on 7 November that
The New York Times
called the election for him.
Wilson took the news with a grace that said much for his inner equilibrium. But then returns from late-counting states showed that Republicans and former Progressives had deserted Hughes in the Midwest, canceling out his early gains elsewhere. The great bulk of those desertions could be ascribed to Roosevelt’s warlike rhetoric, which had made Hughes’s candidacy seem more pro-intervention than it actually was. In the end, after two days of statistical swings, the normally Republican state of California reelected Wilson by a margin of only 3,773 votes. Hughes was so angry in defeat that he did not concede until 22 November.

“
I hope you are ashamed of Mr. Roosevelt,” Alice Hooper wrote Frederick Jackson Turner. “If one man was responsible for Mr. Wilson he was the man—thus perhaps Mr. Roosevelt ought to see the Shadows of Shadow Lawn and the dead babies in the ooze of the Sea!”

At Sagamore Hill,
Roosevelt began to pack up his papers for deposit in the Library of Congress. Hamlin Garland came to visit and found him cheerful, clomping around in spurred boots, but grayer and more slowly spoken than before.

“
I am of no use, Garland. I feel my years.”

IN A SERIES OF
quick coincidences that seemed like coordination, Wilson’s election was followed by
leadership changes in four of the belligerent powers. All portended a protraction of the war and a worsening of the fighting. Emperor Franz Joseph died, and was succeeded by his great-nephew Karl, an impulsive young man convinced that the Habsburg monarchy was eternal. Two new, aggressive prime ministers came to power: Alexander Trepov in Russia and David Lloyd George in Britain. At the Wilhelmstrasse, an even more aggressive commoner, Arthur Zimmermann, replaced Count Jagow as secretary of state for foreign affairs.

On 12 December, Count Bernstorff visited the White House with a surprise proposal from Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg.
The German ambassador had never revealed what was in the letter Captain Rose had handed over in Newport, except to dismiss it as “unimportant.” It had certainly not advised him that Germany was about to moderate its war at sea. Since then, Britain and France had been losing shipments at the rate of sixty thousand tons a month. Sir Edward Grey wrote a panicky envoi to Arthur Balfour, his successor as foreign minister: “The submarine danger seems to me to be increasing so rapidly that unless in the next two months or so we abate it, the Germans will see their way to victory.”

The document Bernstorff now gave to the President, copied to all the Allied powers, expressed Germany’s “willingness to enter henceforth into peace negotiations.” But its language—probably Zimmermann’s—was so truculent, warning of “further bloodshed” if it was rejected, that Wilson read it in disbelief.

He was put out because the proposal, already making headlines around the world, preempted one he had been secretly working on himself. Cecil Spring Rice had suspected for some time that Wilson was up to something. “
The President’s great ambition,” the ambassador informed Balfour on 15 December, “is to play a high and moral part on a great stage.”

Four days later, Wilson cabled his own peace note to the belligerents, calling on them to make “an avowal of their respective views as to the terms upon which the war might be concluded.” He pointed out that none of the fourteen powers now variously at war had ever said, in precise words, what they wanted of one another. Precision was necessary, because to him their general objectives seemed to be “virtually the same.” He offered to serve as the facilitator
of a conference that would result in “a league of nations to ensure peace and justice throughout the world.”

Wilson had touched on this idea before, in his address to the League to Enforce Peace, but now he zealously promulgated it to the world. “
If the contest must continue to proceed toward undefined ends by slow attrition until the one group of belligerents or the other is exhausted; if million after million of human lives must continue to be offered up … hopes of peace and of the willing concert of free peoples will be rendered vain and idle.”

Secretary Lansing felt obliged to offer an extraordinary public qualification: “The sending of this note will indicate the possibility of our being forced into the war.” He was reprimanded by Wilson and tried to withdraw his words, but the effect of them remained.

Roosevelt, massively attired as Santa Claus for the Cove School Christmas party at Oyster Bay, guffawed. “The antics of the last few days have restored what self-respect I lost in supporting Hughes.”

PLAYING ALONG WITH WILSON
, Germany replied more favorably than Britain or France to the notion of a peace conference. The Allies published a joint note on 11 January 1917 that took exception to the President’s remark about the similarity of the aims of the warring powers. They declined to specify all their settlement demands in advance of any negotiations, but provided
a sample list so unacceptable to Germany (including liberation of the Slavs, and expulsion of the Turks from Europe) that Wilson saw that the time had come for him to exert rhetorical force, rather than mere argument, in separating nations bent on self-destruction.

Sneer as Roosevelt might about his preference for “elocution” over acts, a close reading of the President’s policy statements to date indicated a steadily increasing willingness to go to war in defense of democracy. Amid the camouflage of elegant circumlocutions,
certain phrases glinted like gunmetal:
thrust out into the great game of mankind
.…
America will unite her force and spill her blood.… The business of neutrality is over
.… Even his campaign slogan,
He kept us out of war
, had always been carefully phrased in the past tense.

Wilson saw, now, the paradox that every belligerent was desperate for peace, yet determined to win without concession. The apocalyptic battles of Verdun and the Somme had only just come to an end, with no clear victor. Germany was malnourished by the blockade, yet energized industrially by its conquest of oil-rich Romania (the Kaiser’s new chief of staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had tripled artillery and machine-gun production). Britain had lost ninety-six thousand men in the Somme alone, while developing
a formidable new weapon, the tank. France was nearly prostrate, although triumphant that Verdun had not fallen. Russia was crippled by strikes and impoverished by the influx of three and a half million refugees, while the Tsar looked for protection to an army almost stripped of arms.

On 22 January, Wilson made one of his sudden appearances before Congress. He said he was speaking “for the great silent mass of mankind” in calling for “a peace without victory” in Europe. Victory achieved at the cost of more Verduns, and worse, “would mean peace forced upon the loser … at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.”

It was inconceivable, he said, that the United States should not try to bring about some concord stronger and more liberal than this. He spelled out the essentials of the agreement he had in mind—freedom of the seas; general disarmament; self-determination for all nations (including “a united and autonomous Poland”); and common membership, after the war’s end, in a league of nations “which will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe would ever overwhelm us again.”

Congress heard the word
us
, and gave him
only moderate applause.