Colonel Roosevelt (90 page)

In a letter to a woman asking him to announce that he was an “Anglo-American,”
he disclaimed all hyphenated allegiances. “
England is not my motherland any more than Germany is my fatherland. My motherland and fatherland and my own land are all three of them the United States.”

His new book, hortatory by purpose, lacked such plain eloquence. Its few statesmanlike passages were obscured by a surf of words so repetitive and overstated as to numb any reader. Roosevelt had always excused his habit of saying everything three, or thirty-three times with the rationale that it was the only way to drum certain basic truths into the public mind. But
America and the World War
took repetition to the point of pugilism, as if he wanted to knock out everyone who did not feel as strongly as he did.

Many bookstore browsers glancing through its table of contents felt that they had already gotten the Colonel’s message, and would gain little by reading further:

1. THE DUTY OF SELF-DEFENSE AND OF GOOD CONDUCT TOWARD OTHERS
   
2. THE BELGIAN TRAGEDY
   
3. UNWISE TREATIES A MENACE TO RIGHTEOUSNESS
   
4. THE CAUSES OF THE WAR
   
5. HOW TO STRIVE FOR WORLD PEACE
   
6. THE PEACE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS
   
7. AN INTERNATIONAL
   POSSE COMITATUS
   
8. SELF-DEFENSE WITHOUT MILITARISM
   
9. OUR PEACEMAKER, THE NAVY
   
10. PREPAREDNESS AGAINST WAR
    
11. UTOPIA OR HELL?
    
12. SUMMING UP
    

It was unfortunate that Roosevelt, in his haste to cram together articles originally published separately, had not blended them into a more sequential argument.
America and the World War
had some passages of real power, especially in pieces written after the election, when all gloves were off. His call for a
posse comitatus
, or central police force of neutral nations, sounded all the more urgent now that the Hague tribunal had adjourned for the duration of the war. It was unfortunate, though, that he used the word
posse
, which invited jokes about his youth in the Wild West even though he construed it as Latin. He insisted that he was not advocating unilateral armed action by the United States, only its commitment (perhaps as the founding member) to a postwar peacekeeping league. “
I ask those individuals who think of me as a firebrand to remember that during the seven and a half years I was President
not a shot was fired at any soldier of a hostile nation by any American soldier or sailor, and there was not so much as a threat of war.… The blood recently shed at Vera Cruz … had no parallel during my administration.”

He poured scorn on Wilson and Taft for allegedly neglecting the navy since he left office. As a result, the Great White Fleet of 1909 was now underfunded and demoralized. The condition of the army was even worse: it numbered only 80,804 officers and men, half of whom were deployed overseas. Yet Wilson, in his latest message to Congress, had scorned preparedness and declared that the United States was secure. This enabled Roosevelt to demolish some of the approving comments that had followed:

In his summary chapter, looking back at the events of late July 1914, Roosevelt wrote, “
I feel in the strongest way that we should have interfered, at least to the extent of the most emphatic diplomatic protest at the very outset [of the war]
and then by whatever further action was necessary
, in regard to the violation of the neutrality of Belgium.” He thus made it plain that had he been in the White House, he would have been willing to resort to force, on the same grounds that Britain had cited. Wilson would argue that the United States had no treaty obligation to do anything of the kind, but Roosevelt considered its endorsement of The Hague conventions of 1897 and 1907 to be binding. “
As President,” he boasted, “I ordered the signature of the United States to these conventions.”

Elihu Root was no longer at his elbow to remind him, with a sarcastic
smile, that his enthusiasm for both documents had been slight. But as Roosevelt pointed out in his peroration, there had been epic changes since then.

WISTER WAS ONE
of several friends who saw, with varying degrees of alarm, that Roosevelt’s obsession with the war had darkened his personality. David Goodrich, a fellow veteran of the Santiago campaign, went riding with him, and noticed that he kept swinging his half-blind head as he scoped out the icy countryside.
He was playing the German game of
Kriegsspiel
—imagining battlefields and figuring out how to deploy troops across them. Hamlin Garland visited him in his new office at
Metropolitan
magazine and found him distinctly older in looks and demeanor. His eyes were dull, and his manner subdued. “
He will never run for President again,” the novelist lamented. “That he may never lose his sense of humor is my prayer.”

Finley Peter Dunne, a fellow contributor to
Metropolitan
, caught the Colonel on a more spirited day, dictating an article to a stenographer. Dunne was put off by the hectoring tone of his sentences, so at odds with the literary grace he was capable of. At a pause in the dictation, Dunne told Roosevelt he felt his recent pieces were unworthy of him.

Shortly afterward, Dunne left
Metropolitan
to write for
Collier’s
. He took with him the memory of Roosevelt marching up and down, “
striking his palm with a clenched fist and shouting an article that no one but himself ever read.”

WOODROW WILSON MAY HAVE
been isolated by grief that February, but he was not immobilized by it. He fully understood that he had to do something soon to revise his definition of neutrality, in the view of growing tensions between the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. “
We cannot remain isolated in this war,” he said to Joseph Tumulty, “for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our own shores. On the one side Mr. Bryan will censure the administration for being too militaristic, and on the other we will find Mr. Roosevelt criticizing us because we are too pacifist in our tendencies.”

On 4 February, the German government issued a shipping advisory so menacing that Wilson had to reply in a similar tone. The issue was America’s protectionist policy toward England, under which it exported prodigious quantities of munitions there for war use. Technically, such cargo was contraband and subject to seizure by German warships. But since the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic, the arms flow might have been on a conveyor belt. Britain had begun to take further advantage of her naval superiority to seize American vessels carrying non-contraband goods to Germany. Sir Edward Grey insisted with a straight face that because the Reich had placed flour, wheat, and corn in official distribution, those items were
de facto
militarized. Cotton, too, was declared contraband, since it was used to clean German rifles.
Britain proposed to apply these restrictions even to shipments to Germany’s neutral neighbors—countries as harmless as Sweden and Holland—on the grounds that landed goods could be relabeled and reshipped to the Reich.

To that end, it had for the last three months unilaterally blockaded both entrances to the North Sea and sown the water with mines. Desperate for food
and humiliated at the impotence of its dreadnoughts, which were jammed in Wilhelmshaven like toys in a drawer, Germany now announced that it had no choice but to use the only marine weapon it could still deploy: the
Unterseeboot
, or U-boat. “
The waters surrounding Great Britain, including the whole English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone,” the advisory ran. “On or after the 18th of February, 1915, every enemy merchant ship found in the said war zone will be destroyed.… Even neutral ships are exposed to danger [and] neutral powers are accordingly forewarned not to continue entrusting their crews, passengers, or merchandise to such vehicles.”

As Sir Cecil Spring Rice advised the State Department, “
This is in effect a claim to torpedo at sight … any merchant vessel under any flag.”

Wilson hesitated only six days before sending Berlin a note that used the kind of specific language he usually avoided.