Colonel Roosevelt (99 page)

“A
FLIGHT OF PELICANS WINGING THEIR WAY HOMEWARD
.”
Bird life on Breton Island, Louisiana, photographed during TR’s visit
.
(photo credit i22.2)

IN THE NEW YEAR
of 1916 the one journalist in America who knew Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson equally well tried to sum up their essential differences. “
With T.R.,” Ray Stannard Baker wrote, “the executive spirit comes first. The temptation for Wilson is to think and express too much—that of T.R. to act too much. Wilson works with ideas, T.R. directly with men.”

Expanding his comparison, Baker observed that whereas Wilson the rationalist sought to persuade by argument, Roosevelt “like an angry boy” wanted to shout down all those who disagreed with him. “
In the present crisis T.R. is appealing to every kind of emotion … anything to stampede the nation into terror of war and great armaments.”

Baker worried that Germany’s continuing reluctance to atone for the
Lusitania
incident, combined with the arrogance of the British in searching and seizing American freighters destined for any ports but their own, had brought the freedom-of-the-seas issue to a head—and with it, such divisive questions as preparedness and military intervention, sure to be debated in the coming presidential campaign. Like most of his countrymen, Baker was opposed to any thought of going to war overseas, and hoped that Wilson was too. Offensive strategy was not the President’s forte: his disastrous overreaction against Mexico in 1914 had demonstrated that. It would be fatal if he yielded now to Roosevelt’s constant taunts of cowardice.

“
I can understand how a man like T.R. might hate and despise a man like Wilson,” Baker wrote, “thinking him a mere academic theorist with no ‘red blood,’ but, in my judgment, the future lies with the Wilsons.”

Roosevelt was regretfully of the same opinion. He believed that during his own presidency, he could have aroused Americans to whatever degree of righteous anger a foreign provocation might justify. But they seemed to have lost their moral fiber under the administrations of Taft and Wilson—so much so, they were prepared to forget about Belgium and the
Lusitania
. He confessed to Kermit that during the last year he had begun to feel like a locomotive in a snowstorm. “I have accumulated so much snow on the cow catcher that it has brought me to a halt.… The majority of our people are bound now that I shall not come back into public life.”

He would not mind that, if only they would listen to him and not insult him by thinking he cared only for war. “
I’m a domestic man,” he told Julian Street. “I have always wanted to be with Mrs. Roosevelt and my children, and now with my grandchildren. I’m not a brawler. I detest war. But if war came I’d have to go, and my four boys would go, too, because we have ideals in this family.”

It was quite natural, he said, that men whose patriotism had atrophied would allow a soothsayer like Wilson to furnish them an excuse to stay home. But he still believed that his own, much more direct appeals to the national sense of honor would prevail in the end—even if he shouted away the last remnants of his former presidential dignity.

Street, an unabashed hero-worshipper, asked him if he thought he had genius.

“
Most certainly not. I’m no orator, and in writing I’m afraid I’m not gifted at all.…” Roosevelt pondered the question further, then said with a smile, “If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership.”

TRUE TO HIS
vow to keep crusading, he wrote another war volume while still checking the proofs of
A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open
. It consisted largely of diatribes against the administration that he had already published in
Metropolitan
magazine, updated and notched several tones higher on the shrillness scale. The opening chapter was new, and carried criticism of Woodrow Wilson to the verge of personal insult. He entitled it “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (a quote from George Borrow), and tried some hot passages out at a conference of the National Americanization Committee in Philadelphia on 20 January. The choice of location was deliberate: Wilson had made his infamous “too proud to fight” address in that city, before another immigration-minded audience. Roosevelt was evidently setting himself as the President’s ideological foil, just as Republicans and Progressives were negotiating
the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate in the spring.

If by doing so he meant to signal his own availability, he could not have more effectively encouraged isolationists, pacifists, hyphenated Americans,
and other interest groups to unite behind someone else. Even those of his hearers who did fear God might have wondered if the Colonel’s personal deity was not Mars. He advocated military training in the nation’s high schools, followed by compulsory field service; a chain of new, federally financed munitions plants, located inland so as to be safe from seaboard attack; an accelerated naval construction program; and enlargement of the current seventy-four-thousand-man army to a force of a quarter of a million. As always when reading from a typescript, he improvised freely, hurling regular insults at all
persons lacking manly qualities.

The Washington Post
awarded him four of its seven front-page lead columns the next morning (the other stories being a declaration by the King of Greece that nobody could win in Europe, a report of hand-to-hand fighting between Russians and Austrians on the Bessarabian front, and a rumor that vigilantes employed by William Randolph Hearst had captured Pancho Villa). Some of Roosevelt’s latest thunderings were featured in a special box, along with the text of a letter that he had sent to the National Security League, currently meeting in Washington. This document, read to the League by his sister Corinne Roosevelt Robinson, was even more contemptuous of administration policies than his speech had been. The
Post
reported that it had been applauded by an audience of manufacturers, merchants, lawyers, and not a few fire-breathing women.

Wilson remained impassive. “
The way to treat an adversary like Roosevelt,” he said, “is to gaze at the stars over his head.”

THE COLONEL LIKED
his rabble-rousing chapter title so much that he decided to apply it to his whole war book.
Fear God and Take Your Own Part
was rushed to press in advance of
A Book-Lover’s Holidays
. Its main theme, preparedness, had become the issue of the hour.

For as long as Britain and France had seemed to be holding their own in Europe, the great majority of Americans who were pro-Allies had winked at Wilson’s policy of being “neutral in fact as well as in name.” They realized that, with Bryan gone, the word
neutral
implied a prejudice toward Germany on the part of the administration that stopped just short of provocation. Ominously, though,
the winter so far had been a season of triumph for the Central Powers, now buttressed by Turkey. British forces were routed at Gallipoli, besieged in Mesopotamia, and outmaneuvered in East Africa. The Western Front was impregnably defended by Germany, and Serbia and Bosnia lay helpless in the grip of Austria-Hungary. At latest count, France had lost two and a half million men. Eight Russian armies were beaten back in the East, while Bolshevism smoldered like an underground fire beneath the palaces of St. Petersburg—or Petrograd, as that city now called itself. The Japanese
were allies—of sorts—to Britain and France in the Far East, but since seizing Kiaochow had shown themselves to be rapacious for territory and natural resources. Roosevelt warned that their sophisticated new battleships posed a long-term threat to the U.S. Navy.

Almost to his disbelief, he found that
an appreciable minority of Americans were beginning to listen to him. With the phrase
world war
replacing
European war
in everyday speech, he no longer sounded like the lonely saber-rattler of last May. Even pacifists had to agree that the globe was smaller and more dangerous, now that two oceans were mixing at Panama, and Zeppelins floating across the English Channel to bomb Londoners. Day by day, paper by paper, America’s editorial writers acknowledged the wisdom of taking at least some of the defense precautions shouted for by the Colonel.

And not only him: over the past half-year, several of Roosevelt’s literary friends had issued alarums as urgent as his own. Frederic Louis Huidekoper’s scholarly history,
Military Unpreparedness
, was the bible of the Plattsburg movement.
Owen Wister’s bestselling
The Pentecost of Calamity
, an anguished dirge to the death of German liberalism, compared the obliteration of the University of Louvain to the fate awaiting democracy itself, if Prussians in jackboots were to despoil the rest of Europe. Edith Wharton’s
Fighting France
testified to the willingness of
millions of
poilus
to die for the culture enshrined at Reims and Chartres.

Hearing these voices, Woodrow Wilson became a reluctant convert to the cause of preparedness. His enthusiasm for men in uniform remained slight, but he acknowledged the need for increased defense spending, if only to reassure Americans that he would keep the country secure. The moment had come, he announced at a dinner of railroad executives in New York on 27 January, for decisive action. “
Does anybody understand the time?”

Wilson paused for effect. A gigantic Stars and Stripes hung tentlike over his head, covering the entire ceiling of the Waldorf ballroom. His new wife watched adoringly from an upper gallery. “Perhaps when you learned,” the President said, “that I was expecting to address you on the subject of preparedness, you recalled the address which I made to Congress something more than a year ago, in which I said that this question of military preparedness was not a pressing question. But more than a year has gone by since then, and I would be ashamed if I had not learned something in fourteen months.”

He was applauded for his willingness to admit fault. Fourteen months was about the length of Roosevelt’s campaign to make him a more interventionist figure in world affairs. Wilson did not indicate who, or what, had taught him his new defense philosophy. But he said he was for the immediate recruitment of a five-hundred-thousand-man “Continental” army, which would be voluntary,
federally controlled, and supplementary to the National Guard. He also wanted “
a proper and reasonable program for the increase of the navy.”

Wilson proceeded westward in his first campaign swing since 1912. He ventured with considerable courage into the heartland of isolationism, via pro-German Milwaukee to Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, the two most antiwar cities in the country. Graceful, smiling, elegant, and humorous, he demonstrated over and again a mastery of persuasive oratory. His sentences seemed to flow as if unpremeditated, but journalists transcribing them noticed his wizardry in qualifying every phrase likely to thrill interventionists with another that reaffirmed his love of peace. “You have laid upon me,” he would tell a crowd, “this double obligation: ‘We are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep us out of this war, but we are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the nation unstained.’ ” In St. Louis, he said, “I don’t want to command a great army,” before vowing to build up “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”