Colonel Roosevelt (96 page)

Once more his hasty step and high-pitched laughter were heard down the corridors of
Metropolitan
magazine.
He cheerfully tolerated the left-wing views of his younger colleagues, including Israel Zangwill, Sonya Levien,
George Bellows, and John Reed, who professed admiration for the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa.

“
Villa,” Roosevelt said, “is a murderer and a rapist.”

Reed tried to provoke him. “What’s wrong with that? I believe in rape.”

But Roosevelt only grinned. “I’m glad to find a young man who believes in something.”

Not even an invoice from Bowers & Sands for $31,159.64 affected his good humor. Court costs and the expenses of scores of witnesses were sure to raise this total above $40,000. Coincidentally,
Congress owed him a nearly identical sum: it had never gotten around to spending the Nobel Prize money he rolled over in 1906, to establish “a foundation for industrial peace.” That cause seemed almost quaint now, in view of the war.

Friends offered to help him with his legal bill, but he declined. George Meyer visited him at Sagamore Hill and asked how the trial had gone.

“
Why, I won it.”

“Oh, I know that, but I can’t remember how much damages you got.”

“Would you mind saying that again, George?”

Meyer did, and Roosevelt, twinkling, placed a fatherly hand on his head.

“My dear fel-low,
I
was the de-
fend
-ant.”

IN THE SECOND WEEK
of June, he treated himself to a short vacation in an environment so airy and unpopulated as to purge all memory of the stuffy courtroom in Syracuse. His trip to the barrier islands of Louisiana was a pilgrimage of a sort, because in 1904 he had designated part of the sandy, crescent-shaped archipelago just east of New Orleans as Breton National Wildlife Refuge. He sailed there aboard a yacht belonging to the state Conservation Commission, accompanied by three local friends and a photographer. Two members of the Louisiana Audubon Society trailed behind in an underpowered motorboat.

Roosevelt might have been unaccompanied for all the attention he paid to anyone else, as skein after skein of birds rose to protest his invasion of the sanctuary he had given them.
Each island gave off its alarmed guard, flashing and fluttering, croaking and bleating, until the sky seemed alive with graceful long-winged things. No doubt they reacted in the same way to visitors less disposed to exult in their clamor: the eggers and poachers and plume-hunters looking for feathers, or even whole birds, to ornament the hats of
fashionable ladies (such as Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt of Washington, D.C.).

The waters of the Gulf were calm, but they too were full of movement. Silver shrimp undulated back and forth. Schools of mullets and sardines drifted darkly, like cloud shadows. Always, it occurred to him, the animal world was
in flight from death, or was pursuing other life with deathly intent. “
Nature is ruthless, and where her sway is uncontested there is no peace save the peace of death; and the fecund stream of life, especially of life on the lower levels, flows like an immense torrent out of non-existence for but the briefest moment before the enormous majority of beings composing it are engulfed in the jaws of death, and again go out into the shadow.”

Having only one good eye did not prevent him observing, with the accuracy of the field naturalist he had once hoped to be,
a big humming hornet pursue a greenhead horsefly and light on it from behind. Poor little Belgium! The greenhead managed to turn before it was stung, and sink its lancet into the marauder’s body. Fly and hornet grappled frantically for a few minutes, and then the sting found its target. The fly fell dead. But it had given a good account of itself before yielding to superior power. Roosevelt watched the hornet rubbing its sore spot with a spare pair of legs, and stagger off hunchbacked, evidently “a very sick creature.”

He saw the same aerial warfare operate on a thousandfold larger scale, as three man-of-war birds pursued a royal tern with a fish in its claws. The tern was a strong flier, and ascended almost out of view, but its pursuers were even stronger, their enormous wings beating and finally engulfing it. Out of the mêlée, the fish fell. But before it could hit the water, one of the giant birds snatched it up.

A swim was proposed one day, as the yacht drifted between two islands under the burning midday sun. Captain Sprinkle of the motorboat effectively cautioned that there was a large shark in the water. The critters tended to operate
like U-boats, off landfalls.

Early the following evening, 10 June, a commission mail boat hove to alongside Roosevelt’s yacht, moored off Battledore Island, and the pilot shouted hot news from the Associated Press office in New Orleans: William Jennings Bryan had resigned as secretary of state. The President, apparently, had rejected his urgent pleas for a peaceable compromise with Germany over its submarine policy.

Roosevelt went into an instant frenzy. “
This means war.” He demanded to be returned to the mainland, so that he could take the next train north and sign up for military service. But night had come on, and his companions had islands they still wanted him to see. The pilot came aboard and offered to relay any comment he cared to make back to the AP. Under the dim light of a lamp swinging in the cabin, Roosevelt scribbled a statement on coarse yellow paper:
Of course I heartily applaud the decision of the President, and in common with all other Americans who are loyal to the traditions handed down by the men who served under Washington, and by the others who followed Grant and Lee in the days of Lincoln, I pledge him my heartiest support in all the steps he takes to uphold the honor and the interests of this great Republic
which are bound up with the maintenance of democratic liberty and of a wise spirit of humanity among all the nations of mankind. Theodore Roosevelt
.

He could have given second thought to a change in political attitude that was sure to be received with incredulity in Washington. But he allowed the pilot to go off with it next morning. Within twenty-four hours, his praise of Woodrow Wilson was a front-page story as far away as Fairbanks, Alaska.

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN
was replaced by Robert Lansing, a rigidly correct bureaucrat who could not have been more of a contrast to the departing Commoner. Bryan had been agonizing since early February over the President’s haughty policy toward Germany. He knew, as few people did, that Lansing—formerly counselor at the State Department—was the original author of the phrase
strict accountability
, in a note draft that Wilson had approved. Those two words, Bryan felt, were seeds of war for the United States. They would eventually crack and grow. How, he asked, could Germany not feel discriminated against, in the face of the administration’s callow capitulation to the British naval blockade? What did a neutral power expect, if its citizens insisted on traveling aboard vessels as vulnerable as the
Lusitania?
As he put it, in a bitter reproach to the President, “
Why be shocked at the drowning of a few people if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?”

Wilson was not used to that kind of bluntness, and Bryan had probably sealed his fate there and then. He was not a partisan of Germany. For all his much-mocked “grape juice diplomacy,” he had been
the only high official in Washington who sincerely believed that Americans should be (in Wilson’s glib formula) “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.” The truth was that the administration’s anglophilia stopped just short of alliance. When Wilson pictured Europe, he saw Oxford’s dreaming spires. He could no more have sat on a charger at Döberitz, discussing field tactics with the Kaiser, than he could have held his own in the Hungarian parliament. “
England is fighting our fight,” he told Joseph Tumulty. Lansing was strongly pro-Ally. Ambassador Walter Hines Page sucked up to Sir Edward Grey with the obsequiousness of an Andrew Carnegie. Colonel House took Texan satisfaction in being invited to stay on English country estates, and regularly advised Wilson that Germany was a menace to Anglo-American relations.

A hail of vituperation beat on Bryan’s bald head as he tried to justify his resignation as something other than a betrayal of the President in a time of crisis. “Mr. Bryan has done the one thing in his power most likely to bring about war between the United States and Germany,” the New York
World
declared, in one of its rare agreements with Theodore Roosevelt.
The Washington Post
was thankful that the Peerless One would no longer be “making
mischief” as secretary of state, and the
Lowell
(Mass.)
Sun
looked back in disgust at his long career of “peace piffle.” Only a minority of commentators—and they wrote mainly for America’s German-language newspapers—gave Bryan credit for dissociating himself from a foreign policy he passionately believed to be inhumane.

Remarkably, Wilson displayed no animus against the old idealist, and wrote him a farewell letter full of respect. The White House let it be known that when the two men took their leave of each other, they had both said, “
God bless you.”

Next morning, Bryan stated that for the first time in months he had been able to sleep through the night.

“
GOOD MORNING, LITTLE
Miss Anarchist, I understand you are cutting my copy.”

Somehow, Roosevelt had found out that Sonya Levien, his junior colleague at
Metropolitan
magazine, was of radical Russian background. It bothered him no more than the short work she made of some of his essays. The Colonel remained, as ever, a delight for editors to work with. No matter how sick he might be (since Brazil, his fever attacks had multiplied), or how distracted by other responsibilities, his copy was always ready when due, revised down to the last semicolon. The same went for galleys, which he checked the moment he received them. If passages he had labored over fell victim to Miss Levien’s scissors, his good humor never failed. “I always regard with stoical calm the mutilation of my bantlings.”

Although he now regretted his AP statement in support of the President, and was once again violently abusing the administration, Miss Levien was struck by the contrasting mildness of his personality. “
There was an air of suppressed amiability about him which made one realize what fun his children must have had with him.” He was unable to resist any boy or girl of romping age: their company made him revert to childhood himself. One morning when the anteroom to the Colonel’s office was crowded, as usual, with politicians, newspapermen, foreigners, and favor-seekers, Miss Levien was alarmed to hear roars and shrieks emanating from his sanctum. She went to investigate and found Roosevelt “on his knees playing bear with the adorable, red-headed freckle-nosed son of Mr. Dunne.”

For all the Colonel’s charm, she found him unsentimental about her personal experience of growing up among the working poor. When she said that the sordid privations and deadly monotony of those days had made her a socialist, he scoffed that “
radicals laid too much stress upon the drudgery of the day laborer’s work.” So much for his own claim to be a radical, a few years back.
Much of the work of artists, directors, and writers, he told Miss Levien,
was drudgery of the most monotonous kind. But he saw nothing sordid in it, only enjoyment and satisfaction if the end product—a painting, a play, a T-girder—benefited civilization. Of course, “There are people who enjoy nothing, who have not the capacity for fun and contentment—no matter in what status of life they happen to be.”