Colonel Roosevelt (88 page)

Roosevelt emphasized that he was not advocating military intervention. Americans, he wrote, had no quarrel with any of the belligerents, although the Japanese (perpetually resentful of “yellow peril” prejudice in California) needed watching. The United States was therefore in a position to try to bring about peace. Whoever represented it in negotiations (he was careful not to ascribe that privilege exclusively to Wilson) should make clear that Congress would not tolerate any accord that compromised the national security.

The only possible good he saw coming out of the current conflict was a spread of democracy in Europe, or “at least a partial substitution of the rule of the people for the rule of those who esteem it their God-given right to govern the people.” He noted approvingly that socialist parties in the belligerent countries had all backed the decisions of their governments to fight. Having watched old Franz Joseph rinse and spit, and marveled at the Kaiser’s ignorance, and marched among all the monarchs now bridling at one another, he felt it would be a good thing if most of their crowns toppled.

Probably, after the war, there would be an increase in the number of international disputes submitted to justice, because justice was what democracy aspired to. But what court should administer it? Roosevelt, coming to the end of his long essay, echoed what he had said to the Nobel Prize committee about the impotence of the Hague tribunal. Work must begin at once to replace it with “an efficient world league” for peacekeeping. “
Surely the time ought to be ripe for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized military powers
to back righteousness by force
.”

RUMORS BEGAN TO CIRCULATE
that private citizens lobbying for an American peace committee thought that Theodore Roosevelt would be the ideal person
to press for a diplomatic settlement of the war.
The New York Times
reported that Oscar Straus was spending many hours with the Colonel, both in New York and Oyster Bay, and that both men were cagey about their discussions. Sources in Washington were quoted as acknowledging that Roosevelt had “a thorough knowledge of the conditions in Europe,” and enjoyed cordial friendships with many of the belligerent leaders, particularly Wilhelm II.

These qualifications also occurred to the editor of the mass-market New York
World
. He sent a representative, John N. Wheeler, to Oyster Bay to ask if the Colonel would be willing to go abroad as a war correspondent, at the staggering salary of three thousand dollars a week. Roosevelt hesitated, then declined.

“
It would reflect on the dignity of this country and the position I have held.”

John Wheeler, who had just formed a popular-press syndicate, had another idea. “How about doing a series on the lessons this country should learn from the war?”

Roosevelt thought he had written plenty about that already in
The Outlook
, but the opportunity to broadcast his views to the largest possible audience was irresistible. “You will hear from me,” he said.

HE WROTE FOUR PIECES
at once, because he had to spend most of October on the road. Deliberately adopting a journalistic style, he compared what had happened to prosperous, pleasure-loving Europe to the fate that had befallen the
Titanic
. “
One moment the great ship was speeding across the ocean, equipped with every device for comfort, safety, and luxury.… Suddenly, in one awful and shattering moment, death smote the floating host, so busy with work and play.” The “lesson” for Americans in Europe’s catastrophe was to see how quickly even the most civilized nations reverted to barbarism, and how vulnerable great powers were to sudden attack. The United States was no exception, now that the Panama Canal was open. Its army was as small as Persia’s. Its navy was by some counts third in the world, but a single lethal blow to its battleship fleet, and San Francisco or New York would be as open to destruction as Louvain. “
Under such circumstances, outside powers would undoubtedly remain neutral exactly as we have remained neutral as regards Belgium.”

Although he did not refer to Wilson or Bryan by name, his evident contempt for them caused the pro-Democratic New York
World
to pass on the series. So did the Hearst news organization.
The New York Times
, however, ran the first article prominently in its Sunday edition on 27 September. It increased the paper’s circulation by several thousand copies. Other periodicals rushed to reprint Roosevelt’s series, and by mid-October he was reaching a
readership of fifteen million. Wheeler urged him to continue with as many more war articles as he pleased.

He obliged with another five, dashed off between whistle-stops, for weekly publication through the end of November. By the time he was through, he had thoroughly unburdened himself on the responsibilities of the United States to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907; on the causes of the war (chiefly “fear … and the anger born of that fear”); on the development of an “international conscience” to chasten national self-interest; on the dangers inherent in disarmament; on the necessity for active, rather than passive neutrality; on preparedness (“
the one certain way to invite disaster is to be opulent, offensive, and unarmed”); and on the current dereliction of the American military.

In his public appearances, Roosevelt stuck to Progressive domestic boilerplate, drummed out with more energy than enthusiasm. It was clear to him that the electorate had lost interest in political reform. So had he, although he insisted he was as radical as ever. His mind was elsewhere.
When he encountered old friends on the road, he wanted to talk only about the war, and about the burning of Louvain in particular.
Word that German troops had virtually destroyed the great cathedral at Reims caused him further anguish.

EDITH ROOSEVELT WORRIED
about her husband’s gloom whenever he climbed onto another train. To cheer him up after an especially onerous trip to Philadelphia, where the Pinchots had pushed him for speech after speech, she went into New York to meet his train and spent the night of 29 October with him. He had no time to come home: he was needed the following day in Princeton, New Jersey.

She brought with her a long letter from Ethel in Paris. “
You cannot imagine the conditions here—If we knew them at home our country would not be able to be neutral—It’s appalling.” The American Hospital was full of Belgian soldiers, hideously mutilated by shrapnel and shell, “—hardly any from bullets.” Every day, more civilian refugees arrived, including many unattached children, “—alone, not knowing even their own names—put on the train by the mayors of the towns just to get them out of the way, and after all had been ruined, some of them wounded, very few boys, & many of the boys with their right hands cut off.”

Roosevelt had received similar reports, and worse, from Kipling and other witnesses better informed than his credulous daughter. All wanted to convince him that German soldiers on the warpath were Neanderthal in their savagery. The Colonel reserved judgment on most of their stories. Mutilated soldiers were what a nurse should be expected to see, thirty miles from the front in wartime. But Ethel had plainly only heard about handless little boys,
as Kipling had only heard about rapes and mass executions. “
My experience in the Spanish war has taught me that there is a tendency to exaggerate such outrages,” Roosevelt wrote him.

He granted that when millions were at war, “some thousands of unspeakable creatures will commit unspeakable acts,” but did not see that nationality was any constraint. He reminded Kipling that even so patriotic a historian as William Lecky had found that “frightful atrocities” were committed by English soldiers in the Irish uprising of 1798, and that in 1900, Britain’s current allies, the French and the Russians, had behaved abominably on the march to Peking. In an admission he would never have made before he met Natalie Curtis, he added: “I have known Americans do unspeakable acts against Indians.”

Ethel’s letter, all the same, brought the war home in a personal way that made him forget, at Princeton, his promise not to make it a campaign issue. The fact that the university’s former president was now President of the United States may also have prompted him to launch into
an impassioned speech on preparedness that had his audience, mainly students, cheering vociferously.

ON 3 NOVEMBER
, the Progressive Party lost all its state contests except in California, where Hiram Johnson was reelected. Only one Progressive kept his seat in the House of Representatives. Nationwide, the Party registered just two million votes—half its strength in 1912—to six million apiece for the two major parties. This was good news to the GOP, an effectively leaderless force that regained many of its defectors from 1912. But it was not good news to Woodrow Wilson, who had hoped those defectors would vote Democratic, as a show of confidence in him. He was still far from popular. A prolonged recession had disillusioned the electorate with New Freedom, and by extension, New Nationalism.
In a post-election poll of nine thousand “leading men of the country” by
The Lawyer and Banker
, Wilson came second to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane as their preferred Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1916. And Lane was far behind their favorite Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.

Of the twelve names polled, Theodore Roosevelt came in last, with only 11 votes to Hughes’s 1,584. Having made a career out of attacking precisely the combination embodied in the phrase
Lawyer and Banker
, he could not expect readers of such a magazine to rank him much higher, even if he was a declared candidate. Still, he had just participated in his third failed campaign in five years—confessedly an “
utter and hopeless one” as far as Progressivism was concerned. His words from a past moment of triumph resounded hollowly:
We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men
.