Colonel Roosevelt (98 page)

Reporters following him were not discouraged. They waited until the Colonel was just about to board his train home, and asked him directly if he supported the President. While still declining to name names, he said that any peace-loving prose stylist living in a house once inhabited by Abraham Lincoln should emigrate to China.
“Let him get out of the country as quickly as possible. To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely upon high-sounding words unbacked by deeds, is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of shame.”

JULIAN STREET, A YOUNG
journalist assigned to write a profile of Roosevelt for
Collier’s
, had an appointment to interview him in his Manhattan office the following morning. Expecting to encounter a fierce militarist, Street was pleasantly disappointed.
“As the Colonel advanced to meet me he showed his hard, white teeth, wrinkled his red, weather-beaten face, and squinted his eyes half shut behind the heavy lenses of his spectacles, in suggestion, as it seemed to me, of a large, amiable lion which comes up purring gently as though to say, ‘You needn’t be afraid. I’ve just had luncheon.’ ”

Before they could talk, a clutch of newsmen arrived to announce that the secretary of war, Lindley M. Garrison, had telegraphed
a reprimand to General Wood for allowing Roosevelt to cast aspersions on President Wilson at an army base. Street looked, fascinated, as
the Colonel dictated a statement absolving Wood of responsibility.

At first Roosevelt spoke gravely, and the faces of the reporters mirrored his sober expression. “
It was not until he lapsed briefly into irony, turning on, as he did so, that highly specialized smile, that I perceived how truly those young men reflected him.… To watch their faces was like watching the faces of an audience at a play: when the hero was indignant they became indignant; when he sneered they sneered; and when he was amused they seemed to quiver with rapturous merriment.”

Street visited with Roosevelt several more times over the course of the next
few days, trying to get as much out of him as possible before he left for a three-week hunting trip to Quebec. In the event, he got a major scoop: Roosevelt flatly declared that he would not accept any party’s nomination in 1916. Then, with sublime appropriateness, he packed his guns and went north in search of a bull moose.

During his absence, Street wrote the profile.
The young man was convinced that Roosevelt was the greatest man alive. For journalistic purposes, however, he decided to go no further than to call him “the most interesting American.” The phrase leaped out as the title of his magazine piece, and also of the book that might grow out of it: a portrait of the Colonel as the prophet of preparedness and, not inconceivably, President of the United States again someday.

That fantasy made Street worry about the consequences of publishing his “scoop.” Some momentary political situation could arise in which Roosevelt might regret disqualifying himself as a candidate in 1916. With a deadline from
Collier’s
looming, Street took his manuscript to Sagamore Hill to show to Edith.

She sighed heavily at the thought of her husband being dragged into another presidential run. “It almost killed us last time!” But she said he would be home soon, and promised to ask him about withdrawing his statement.

On 27 September she wrote Street, “
The Master of the house is home, & entirely approves of the omission.”

ROOSEVELT GOT HIS BULL MOOSE
, in addition to another that caused him considerable embarrassment, because the province of Quebec had licensed him to shoot only one specimen.
He had to explain, in a bizarre deposition endorsed by both of his guides, that the second moose had pursued him both in water and on land, uttering strange cries and banging its antlers against trees. It was evidently as insane as Amos Pinchot, and as unwilling to let him go. He had had to kill it before it killed him.

Shaken by the experience, he told Charles Washburn early in October that his hunting days were over. He did not want to risk his deteriorating body on any more strenuous chases. It would be a humiliation, he said, to end up being “taken care of.”

Washburn observed that the Colonel had aged much over the last year and a half. “This mighty human dynamo,” he noted in his diary, “is working with a somewhat diminished energy.” But so, to a greater or lesser extent, were all the Roosevelt Familiars. Their time was passing. The death on 28 September of the beautiful Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, once the presiding grace of Henry Adams’s old salon in Washington, had poleaxed the senator and caused Adams to relive the nightmare of his own wife’s suicide. “Jusserand is deeply
depressed,” Sir Cecil Spring Rice wrote Roosevelt, almost incoherent with grief himself. “She is [
sic
] the last of … the most delightful circle of friends we have ever known—How the world changes. Poor Cabot!”

Springy and Jules regretted more than the loss of their beloved “Nannie.” They were mourning an era when their respective countries had been proud and inviolate and not hemorrhaging youth. Now all was disorder and death. Golden Rule diplomacy had given way to a new, scientific barbarism that burned libraries, dropped bombs out of the sky, cast babies into the sea, poisoned the very air that troops breathed, and—in its latest nihilistic advance—invented a flamethrower that vaporized men on the spot. War, once movement, had become stasis. Emperors had little sway. The world’s richest and most resourceful country would do nothing to stop its rivals from damaging one another to the point that they all had to be saved. Was that what Wilson was waiting for? Or was he just, as Roosevelt complained to Edith Wharton,
a “shifty, adroit, and selfish logothete,” interested only in being reelected next year?

The man was unreachable to all of them, unreadable. In the first months of his presidency, Wilson had impressed the world at large as an inspiring new American voice, less preachy than Roosevelt, more self-confident than Taft. As James Bryce had remarked then, “
Terse, clear and vigorous diction is extremely rare in this country.… When it is heard, and especially when it is accompanied by a certain imaginative or emotional color it produces an effect great in its proportion to its rarity.” The language was still terse, and clear when Wilson wanted it to be, but his preference for prose rather than speech, for stately notes laced with subtle qualifications and dispatched while he himself remained unseen, had vitiated his once full-bodied image. The President sounded, in short, not quite human.

“
All these letters to Germany!” Roosevelt snorted to Julian Street. “Of late I have come almost to the point of
loathing
a bee-
you
-ti-ful,
pol
-ished
dic
-tion!”

Actually,
the President’s most recent note to Count Jagow was more blunt than polished, going to the limit of diplomatic courtesy in stating that Germany’s failure, so far, to apologize and pay reparations for the
Lusitania
tragedy was “very unsatisfactory,” and that any further “illegal and inhuman” attack upon Americans traveling freely on the high seas would be regarded as “deliberately unfriendly.”

On 5 October, Wilson was rewarded with a partial capitulation by Germany. Ambassador Bernstorff stated that his government was prepared to pay indemnity for the American lives “which, to its deep regret, have been lost on the
Arabic,
” and announced that German submarines would in future operate under orders “so stringent that the recurrence of [such] incidents … is considered out of the question.”

Representatives of all shades of opinion hailed the news as a triumph for the President. The chorus of praise drowned out a few cautionary voices pointing out that Germany had still not atoned for the sinking of the
Lusitania
, nor had it abandoned its submarine strategy. Even so, Wilson had been successful in his negotiations so far—what Roosevelt scornfully called “waging peace”—and clearly deserved the support of the American people as he continued to demand guarantees of their neutrality and safety.

In addition to which, he now had a claim to their personal good wishes.
On the day after the German concession, Wilson announced that he was engaged to Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt.

“
I AM GIVING CERTAIN
finishing touches to a book which Scribners will publish next spring,” Roosevelt wrote Quentin on 18 October. Outside his study window, the trees of Sagamore Hill were at their peak of fall brilliancy. “I shall dedicate it to you and Archie,” he went on, “as the opening chapters are those I wrote about our Arizona trip.”

Quentin had joined his brother at Harvard, and the diaspora of the Roosevelt children was now complete. Dispersed, too, were any present hopes that the Colonel may have entertained of prevailing in his campaign to warn Americans of their folly in supporting a President too proud to fight.
It was obvious to all political observers that Wilson would run for, and probably win, reelection next year on the merits of a foreign policy that seemed to gratify 90 percent of the country—“waging peace.” Once again Roosevelt found himself shouting into a wind that bore his words back at him, mostly unheard.

And once again he turned to writing for solace. Quentin (who had already stocked his bookcase in Cambridge with copies of George Canning’s
Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin
, Austen Layard’s
Nineveh and Its Remains
, and a life of Genghis Khan) was to be his literary correspondent, just as Kermit had once been the recipient of his presidential posterity letters.
Roosevelt had been pleased to discover, during Quentin’s last year at Groton, that the boy was something of a scribe himself, the author of some imaginative prose pieces in the school magazine. “He is maturing rapidly, and is really a very successful person.”

As a token of their camaraderie as men of the pen, Roosevelt confided that Charles Scribner had declined first serial rights on two chapters of the new book “which
I
thought were the best.” He now had eleven chapters nearly ready. Many were pieces he had published as periodical articles, and since they all dealt with nature or literature in varying degrees, he decided to group them under the ungainly title,
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
. He lavished
particular care on an account of his visit to the Breton bird sanctuary last June. The result was the most eloquent of all his writings on conservation.