Colonel Roosevelt (105 page)

THE CAMPAIGNS OF THE
two parties cranked up.
Roosevelt fretted over Hughes’s dryasdust speaking style, and in a letter to the candidate, repeated the advice he had given Henry Stimson in 1910: “What the average voter wants is not an etching, but a poster, a statement so broad and clear and in such simple language that he can thoroughly understand it.” Hughes took the advice of an old pro with good grace. In return, he politely asked Roosevelt to stay off the subject of hyphenated minorities through the election, and the Colonel just as politely agreed. Then they went their separate rhetorical ways.

Wilson chose to follow the tradition that a sitting president should not stump for himself. He remained at Shadow Lawn while Democratic orators itemized his record of progressivism, preparedness, and peace. Hughes was uncertain how to attack him on these issues without seeming reactionary in one direction and warlike in the other. Party wags suggested that the former justice had moved “
from the bench to the fence.”

For the sake of solidarity, Roosevelt agreed to do the RNC a favor on 3 October, and shake hands with William Howard Taft at a reception for Hughes in the Union League Club. “It was one of those friendly affairs,” he said afterward, “where each side, before entering the meeting place, made sure its hardware was in good working order.” The clasp between the two former presidents was brief and virtually wordless. For the rest of the evening, GOP stalwarts kept them apart, as if afraid that Roosevelt might use his right fist for some other purpose. Hughes complained in mock chagrin, “I was only the side show.”

Four days later, the Woodrow Wilson College Men’s League, consisting of 2,500 bright young progressives and independents, paid court to the President at Shadow Lawn. Wilson saw an opportunity to mock the Republican Party for fielding a surrogate candidate. Without naming Roosevelt directly, he won cheers when he observed that there was only one oracle in the GOP—“a very articulate voice [that] professes opinions and purposes at which the rest in private shiver and demur.” It was a voice for war not peace, “shot through with
every form of bitterness, every ugly form of hate, every debased purpose of revenge … discontented and insurgent.”

AS HE SPOKE
, residents of Newport boggled at the insurgence offshore of a sea-green, 213-foot German submarine.
It cruised into the inner harbor, where thirty-seven warships of the U.S. North Atlantic squadron lay at anchor, and docked as coolly as if it had been a yacht putting in for tea at the Casino. The captain emerged, a neat bearded figure with an Iron Cross on his breast, and said something to the crowd clustering the waterfront. Miss Margaret Fahnestock, a fellow debutante of Flora’s, translated for him. He identified himself as Lieutenant Hans Rose, and produced a letter for the German ambassador in Washington, Count Bernstorff. An Associated Press reporter, hardly able to believe the dimensions of his scoop, undertook to mail it. Somebody asked if the submarine was in need of supplies.

“We require nothing, thank you,” Rose said.
He added, smiling, that he and his crew of thirty-three had been at sea for seventeen days. They had more than enough food and fuel to get home to Wilhelmshaven. “Maybe soon, maybe never!” Anyone who wanted was welcome to tour his vessel, the U-53.

Men, women, and children took turns clambering down its stairwell and found the interior spotless and comfortable. Six torpedoes were clearly visible. “A constant comment of those permitted on board,” the AP man noted,
“was on the thorough preparedness which the vessel seemed to exhibit despite her many days at sea.” One of Newport’s hyphenated citizens presented an officer with an Irish Republican flag. This elicited some more Prussian humor.

“R
ESIDENTS OF
N
EWPORT BOGGLED AT … A SEA-GREEN, 213-FOOT
G
ERMAN SUBMARINE
.”
The U-53 pays a visit to America, 7 October 1916
.
(photo credit i24.2)

“
The first British ship we sink,” the officer promised, “we will hoist this flag in honor of Ireland.”

People ashore observed that the new banner was already flying when, at 5:17
P.M.
, the U-53 set off again. A flotilla of pleasure craft followed it out of the harbor, but as it approached Fort Adams it settled low as an alligator and began to accelerate. The small boats hove to, rocking in its wash. It remained in sight until darkness fell, then its lights doused and it slid underwater, leaving behind nothing but a trail of moonlit foam.

Early the next morning, Sunday, SOS signals from the sea lane off Nantucket began to bombard radio receivers at Newport Naval Station. Six eastbound ships loaded with contraband had been sunk by the U-53, including a British liner carrying a large number of American citizens. All had been permitted to lower lifeboats before they were struck. Eighteen children were among the many in need of rescue.

Rear Admiral Albert Greaves, commander of the U.S. Atlantic fleet, dispatched all his available warships.
Throughout the day, a crescendo of crackling in the radio office heralded the approach of Royal Navy destroyers looking for the U-53. But it was nowhere to be found. By nightfall, two hundred refugees had been brought to Newport, and were being luxuriously comforted by Beeckmans and Vanderbilts.

President Wilson remained noncommittal at Shadow Lawn, saying that he had no “official” knowledge of the sinkings. On Monday afternoon he issued a statement: “The country may rest assured that the German government will be held to the complete fulfillment of its promises to the government of the United States.”

Roosevelt followed up with a statement of his own. He sounded more sick at heart than outraged in affirming, “
Now the war has been carried to our very shores.” The administration’s dismissive attitude to seaborne terrorism, going back to the
Lusitania
, had made it inevitable that something like this would happen. “President Wilson’s ignoble shirking of responsibility has been clothed in an utterly misleading phrase, the phrase of a coward,
He kept us out of war
. In actual reality, war has been creeping nearer and nearer, until it stares at us from just beyond our three-mile limit, and we face it without policy, plan, purpose or preparation.”

THE COLONEL’S PROMISED
“swing” for Hughes—a high-speed tour of the West and Southwest—was marked by tumultuous, sometimes hysterical receptions. They left him unmoved. On his way back through Indiana, he
turned fifty-eight. George Perkins and Henry L. Stoddard drove him back to Oyster Bay, raw-voiced and spent, in the small hours of 29 October.

“
Old trumps,” he said as the car wound its way through Long Island fog, “let me tell you.… I’ve done my bit for Hughes.… I am positively through campaigning forever.”

“L
ET ME TELL YOU
.… I’
VE DONE MY BIT FOR
H
UGHES
.”
TR on the campaign trail, fall 1916
.
(photo credit i24.3)

Yet he stayed at home only long enough to hear, two days later, that
a pair of British steamers, the
Marina
and the
Rowanmore
, had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, with eight American travelers lost between them. The administration could argue—in fact, was arguing—that the U-53 had previously not broken international law in its sinkings off Nantucket. This double attack, however, proved that Germany had decided to ignore Wilson’s
Sussex
ultimatum of five months before.

The first of November found Roosevelt on a flying trip through Ohio. He felt he had to compensate for Hughes, who kept maundering about the tariff in order to avoid saying anything that might alienate antiwar voters. John Leary became concerned at Roosevelt’s red-faced fervor and told him that some reporters were saying he had arteriosclerosis.

“
Just what is that?”

Leary explained.

“Well, they are right.”

His blood pressure was not reduced by an announcement that
eleven of the nineteen Progressives who had helped him formulate his policies in 1912 were going to vote Democratic. On 2 November, Amos Pinchot publicly taunted him with an assertion that the Bull Moose platform had been “out-and-out pacifist.”

The Colonel contained himself for twenty-four hours, then wrote Pinchot, “
Sir, when I spoke of the Progressive Party as having a lunatic fringe, I specifically had you in mind.”

That night he appeared at Cooper Union in New York. He was greeted with a whistling, stomping chorus of “We want Teddy!” that went on for ten minutes. There was not a single cry for Hughes.

A sense spread through the audience that Roosevelt was going to let rip, as he had when he jumped onto a table in Atlanta in 1912. But nothing he had said then, or since, compared with the attack on Woodrow Wilson that now rasped into every corner of the hall.