Colonel Roosevelt (100 page)

Roosevelt marveled at Wilson’s Bach-like ability to combine every theme with its own inversion. He was an equivocator himself, but this kind of skill mocked his clumsy habit of balancing one thing against the other. Half in awe, he analyzed fifteen presidential policy statements through 10 February, and found that Wilson had taken forty-one different positions on preparedness. “
Each of these 41 positions contradicted from 1 to 6 of the others. In many of the speeches, the weasel words of one portion took all the meaning out of the words used in another portion, and those latter words themselves had a weasel significance as regards yet other words.”

Hitherto, Roosevelt had made free with
epithets like “skunk” and “prize jackass” in his private references to Wilson. But he had avoided calling him names in public. The temptation became overwhelming to do so now, with an insult that sounded slanderous, but which no lawyer with a large dictionary could find actionable. He chose the splendid noun
logothete
, which he had recently tried out on Edith Wharton. It had vague connotations of word-spinning, but in fact meant little more than a bureaucrat, or petty accountant in ancient Constantinople. That gave him an ideal qualifier. When
Fear God and Take Your Own Part
came out in the second week of February, it contained Roosevelt’s latest and funniest contribution to political invective. He wrote that the President’s self-justifications in alternately trying to cow and cuddle up to bandits south of the border were “worthy of
a Byzantine logothete.”

The publication of
Fear God
coincided with the first anniversary of Wilson’s demand for “strict accountability” from Germany for any armed action hurtful to the United States. Roosevelt did not fail to mention this in his opening pages. He added the names of seven ships, other than the
Lusitania
, that
had been sunk in the interim, with some two hundred Americans aboard. “
If any individual finds satisfaction in saying that nevertheless this was ‘peace’ and not ‘war,’ it is hardly worth while arguing with him.”

ON 11 FEBRUARY
, he and Edith sailed for the West Indies on a little steamer, the
Guiana
. Caribbean waters were not immune to U-boat attacks, but Roosevelt was in need of sunshine and rest. The ideological temper he had worked himself up into in recent months, combined with several sharp attacks of “
jungle fever,” had jaded him. Besides, he wanted to get away from a biennial pest he could not seem to shake: swarms of importuners begging him to reenter party politics, either as a candidate or a campaigner.

The difference this time was that some of the supplicants were coming from conservative quarters. It had been observed on Wall Street that Roosevelt the
Metropolitan
columnist was no longer the progressive ideologue he had been in his early days at
The Outlook
. His attitudes toward corporatism and inherited wealth had definitely inched rightward since he became aware, around the time of Plattsburg, that many bankers and industrialists (above all arms manufacturers, raking in
mountains of Allied money) were as keen on intervention as he was.

Roosevelt still talked about federal control of competition, sounding like one of his shellac discs from 1912. But the kind of restraints he now spelled out in print were so pro-business they could have been—and possibly were—dictated by George W. Perkins. Government commissions, he now held, would ensure “ample profit” for industrial investors and greater efficiency “along German lines.” If certain corporations engaged in foreign trade were “Americanized” (a euphemism for
nationalized)
, their earnings would increase, and they would be more responsive when their resources were urgently called for.

Another sign of Rooseveltian recidivism was the Colonel’s new willingness to treat the new-money crowd with respect. Through
Metropolitan
magazine, he had made friends with Harry Payne Whitney, the kind of sporty millionaire he once despised.
He allowed Judge Elbert H. Gary of U.S. Steel and seventeen fellow plutocrats to fete him privately in New York, and was also guest of honor at a secretive luncheon at the Harvard Club, hosted by the publishing magnate Robert Collier. Downtown rumors alleged that “Teddy” was being groomed for another presidential run, this time as a Republican.

Roosevelt told the truth about the meetings to his latest confidant, John J. Leary, Jr., of the New York
Tribune
, on the understanding that he not be named as a source. “
Behind it all, I believe, was a desire of these men—all Americans, men who have done things and are doing big things, men who have a stake in the country—to take counsel together on the big problem of
national preparedness.” Far from asking or accepting their political support, he had told them that if the GOP in 1916 adopted a “hyphenated” platform, or nominated a candidate on the strength of “mongrel” promises, he, Theodore Roosevelt, would campaign for the reelection of President Wilson. “And, by Godfrey, I mean it!”

Leary understood the Colonel’s adjectives to refer to anything or anyone that compromised America’s duty to defend democracy around the world. Wilson at least half-recognized that duty now. “
I dislike his policies almost to the point of hate,” Roosevelt said, “but I am too good an American to stand by and see him beaten by a mongrel American.”

IF EDITH HOPED
that a seven-week cruise would take her husband’s mind off Europe, she forgot that most of the islands of the Lesser Antilles belonged to Britain or France, and were therefore as obsessed with the war as he was. As the
Guiana
steamed south, it frequently encountered armored cruisers of the Royal and French navies. A constant guard was being maintained against reincarnations of the German raider
Karlsruhe
, which had terrorized the entire Caribbean in 1914, before blowing up mysteriously off Barbados.

When Roosevelt stepped ashore on Martinique on 22 February, he found himself on French soil. The island was a
département
of the Republic and, in local opinion, indistinguishable from it. Fort-de-France had just been advised, by cable, of a German attack on the city of Verdun that was going beyond all previous extremes of military violence. The governor of Martinique welcomed Roosevelt with commensurate solemnity, and thanked him for his long crusade for the Allied cause. Not to be outdone, the mayor of Fort-de-France recalled that President
Roosevelt had been the first head of state to rush aid to Martinique in 1902, after the catastrophic eruption of Mont Pelée.

Roaring cheers and cannon fire shook the air as the distinguished visitors rode through town in an open automobile. House façades displayed the tricolors of France and the United States. At every stop, Roosevelt received full honors, as he had six years before in Paris. He asked to see something of the island, and was taken to the ridge of Vert-Pré, with its double view of the Atlantic and the Mer des Antilles. Northward, the ocean stretched blue and white-capped all the way to Brittany. To the west, the calm shallows of the New World lolled.

At 5
P.M
. the Roosevelts returned to Fort-de-France for a military review. Bugles sounded in the city square, and a double file of troops presented arms. Roosevelt inspected both ranks with the governor at his side. Then he joined Edith on the reviewing stand while the whole company saluted them
en défilé
.

Most of the marchers were youths of Quentin’s age, conscripted for service in Europe and only a month or two in uniform. But the effect of France’s preparedness program—even more intense, apparently, than that administered by General Wood at Plattsburg—was evident in their machine-like drill. A cavalry charge ensued. Then the entire island company, officers and youths, stamped to a halt in front of the Roosevelts and inclined the French flag at their feet.

Edith, who had always considered herself partly French, began to weep. So did another woman on the stand. Roosevelt turned to the governor and, courteously abandoning his own language, said, “
Je vois que Madame Guy pleure. Madame Roosevelt pleure aussi, et moi, je sens les larmes me monter aux yeux: c’est impressionnant.”
^*

Later he was asked to present the Croix de Guerre to a wounded corporal, and said companionably, “Moi aussi j’ai une balle allemande au dos. L’assassin qui me l’a tiré était un Allemand.”
^*

Edith excused herself from a grand banquet in the Chamber of Commerce garden that night. She thus missed a unique opportunity to hear her husband compared to Cyrano de Bergerac. Speaking with considerable emotion,
the governor recalled being present at the Sorbonne in April 1910, when Roosevelt had delivered his famous address exhorting Frenchmen to gird themselves for moral battle. Now the hour of blood and dust had come, and the students he had inspired were fighting for their country.

In youth, “l’ardent colonel des Rough-Riders” had fought likewise. More recently, as everybody in Martinique knew, he had been a lonely American oracle, shouting that democracy must be protected against barbarism—unlike certain of his countrymen who took refuge in “une neutralité prudente.” Turning to Roosevelt, the governor accorded him one of the most moving tributes he had ever heard:

AFTER VISITING THE
New York Zoological Society’s tropical research station in British Guiana, maintained by Charles William Beebe, Roosevelt proceeded to Trinidad. He arrived there on 3 March, and received a disquieting batch of cablegrams from New York. They informed him that prospective delegates to the Republican and Progressive conventions (scheduled to run simultaneously in Chicago, in early June) were already pledging themselves to him, as an expected bipartisan candidate for president. John McGrath had announced that the Colonel had no political ambitions, but the pledges would not stop.
No less a GOP stalwart than Augustus Peabody Gardner of Massachusetts was now calling himself a “Roosevelt Republican.”

Roosevelt remained silent while he went birding in the Trinidadian interior with an entomologist and mycologist, two of the inexhaustible list of friends he seemed able to call on wherever he traveled.
They spent an afternoon in a cave stranger than anything dreamed by Hieronymus Bosch. It concealed itself high in the mountains, behind a gush of clear water. Scrabbling through into pitch darkness, Roosevelt heard all around him a weird flapping and fluttering, combined with metallic clacks, growls, pipes, and wails. As torches lit up the gloom, he saw slabs and ledges slathered two feet deep with guano. Obese, naked
guacharo
chicks sat in this nitrous clay, peering blindly out of cup-shaped hollows, while overhead their parent birds sat guard like nighthawks. Bats furred the ceiling. Roosevelt was amazed to see slender fungi growing out of the guano, although there was no light to feed them.