Colonel Roosevelt (94 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
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:
“ ‘L
ORD, HOW
I
WOULD LIKE TO BE
P
RESIDENT
.’ ”
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.
