Colonel Roosevelt (110 page)

ON 15 APRIL HE
heard from Secretary Baker that his request to serve as a volunteer commander in the war was denied for “purely military” reasons. The War College Division of the General Staff had recommended that no American troops be sent to Europe until they were sufficiently numerous, equipped, and trained. “
This policy,” Baker wrote, “…  does not undertake to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would attach to a representation of the United States in France by a former President of the United States.” It was possible that pressure from the Allies might prompt the early dispatch of an American expeditionary force, but in that case, command positions would be given to regular officers “who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters, and have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war.”

Baker could not have made it clearer that he and Wilson considered Roosevelt to be an amateur soldier from the last century. The shock was enough to reduce the hero of San Juan Heights to temporary silence. He brooded for a week, then replied with an eighteen-page letter, rejecting Baker’s rejection. “
My dear sir, you forget that I have commanded troops in action in the most important battle fought by the United States army during the last half century.”
He noted that field assignments were being showered on division and brigade commanders who did not have “one tenth” of his experience. Moving on to direct criticism, he ascribed the War Department’s current need for an emergency training program to its failure to initiate preparedness two and a half years before. If back then the Springfield munitions factory had been cranked into instant high gear, “we would now be a million rifles to the good.” Baker’s current advisers in formulating mobilization policy were “well-meaning men, of the red-tape and pipe-clay school … hidebound in the pedantry of that kind of wooden militarism which is only one degree worse than its extreme opposite, the folly which believes that an army can be improvised between sunrise and sunset.”

Baker mercifully did not reply, in words he already shared with a friend, that he wished to avoid “
a repetition of the San Juan Hill affair, with the commander rushing his men into a situation from which only luck extricated them.” As gently as he could, he wrote, “
For obvious reasons, I cannot allow myself to be drawn into a discussion of your personal experience and qualifications.” Nor would he discuss those of his consultants, except to say that they were patriotic and high-minded officers. “The war in Europe is confessedly stern, steady, and relentless. It is a contest between the morale of two great contending forces.” Should the United States jump into the struggle with a division of “hastily summoned and unprofessional” volunteers, the Allies would be depressed and disillusioned, “deeming it an evidence of our lack of seriousness about the nature of the enterprise.”

Senator Chamberlain had similar doubts about sponsoring the Colonel’s amendment to the draft bill. Pressed by Henry Cabot Lodge, he allowed it to go forward under the name of Senator Warren Harding of Ohio. This move surprised political observers who remembered Harding as chairman of the 1916 Republican convention, disdainfully (with eagle profile) maneuvering to block Roosevelt’s nomination. But the eagle was far-sighted,
and looking ahead, saw no other likely nominee on the GOP’s horizon for 1920—unless it be himself. He was happy to do whatever was necessary to keep Party seniors happy.

On 24 April, Harding expanded the amendment to empower the President of the United States to appoint as many as four volunteer divisions of men not subject to conscription. The measure was optimistic in
assuming that Wilson would override the policy of his own War Department. It did not name Roosevelt as a potential commander, but the ensuing agitated debate was as much about him as about the incompatibility of voluntary and drafted service. Lodge threw all his own prestige, as ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, into the fray on behalf of the Colonel.

“
He is known in Europe as is no other American. His presence there would be a help and an encouragement to the soldiers of the allied nations.… For
Heaven’s sake, is there any reason why he should not be given an opportunity, if he desires, to give his life for what he regards as the most sacred of all causes?”

While the debate continued—postponing, to the relief of many congressmen, a proposal to prohibit liquor consumption in the Capitol—Roosevelt worked to ensure the fastest possible dispatch of his sons to the war. He asked Spring Rice to find out if British army regulations would permit Kermit to enlist without compromising his American citizenship. And he fattened Newton D. Baker’s already bulky “Roosevelt” file with a request to help Quentin get into the army flying school at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

“
It will give me pleasure,” Baker replied, “to think that your boy is there and a part of our establishment.”

The secretary’s pleasure was sincere. He had not enjoyed hurting a great man who was, palpably, aging but still full of ardor. Nor did he discount the power of the Roosevelt lobby on Capitol Hill. The passions unleashed in the Senate over the Harding amendment indicated that a vengeful Lodge could hinder the administration in its attempt to get the draft bill passed. Balfour’s British mission had arrived in Washington on 22 April, and a French one dominated by Marshal Joseph Joffre was due any day. Both statesmen were known to admire Roosevelt profoundly. It would be an embarrassment for Baker if a quarrel with him slowed the pace of American mobilization.

Quentin was summoned to Washington for examination as a candidate for flight training in the signal corps. Doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital poured hot and cold water into his ears, dropped belladonna into his eyes, made him hop along blindfolded, and then, conveniently ignoring his shortsightedness, declared him fit for service. He was billeted, not to Fort Monroe, but to Hazelhurst Field, Mineola, Long Island, an easy motorcycle spin from Sagamore Hill.

BY THE FIRST WEEK
of May, Roosevelt was receiving two thousand volunteer applications a day. Meanwhile, the administration’s draft bill passed both houses of Congress, but the Harding amendment was still so hot an issue it had to be settled by a House-Senate conference. The principal argument against letting Roosevelt have his division was that crackpot militiamen across the country might organize and demand that Wilson send them abroad too.

The leaders of the Allied missions were not encouraged by this discordance, judging from their looks and demeanor. Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of an antiwar congressman from Texas, wrote a description of Arthur Balfour in her journal: “
All the lines of him were drooping except his mouth, where there lingered a shadow of the usual British sneer at all things American, although somewhat chastened by their present desperate need for our help. His
trousers drooped because they didn’t fit, each corner of his long-tailed coat seemed to have a weight in it, his arrow string tie was limp, and his turned-down collar so low that he might have worn a locket.”

The foreign secretary certainly was desperate, more so than Mrs. Slayden knew.
His government was on the verge of bankruptcy, and would soon have to beg Washington for relief. Over the last six months its American debt, swollen by borrowing on Wall Street to keep the sterling-dollar exchange rate stable, had become an overdraft of $358 million. So much of what the Allies had bought in the way of food was being sent to the bottom by U-boats that a famine in Great Britain was no more than six weeks away. What London needed, even more than extra men, was extra credit. Touched as Balfour was to see Roosevelt rounding up volunteers willing to fight and die alongside Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s troops in Flanders, he had to accept the verdict of his chief military adviser, Lieutenant General George Bridges, that conditions there were “too serious … for untrained men or amateurs of any sort.”
They agreed, in other words, with Baker, and Bridges telegraphed London to warn of the inadvisability of “any form of volunteer group from America.” Britain would have to wait—and bleed—until the U.S. Army was ready to send over an expeditionary force of regular soldiers.

“T
HE FOREIGN SECRETARY CERTAINLY WAS DESPERATE
.”
Arthur Balfour (right) with René Viviani in Washington, April 1917
.
(photo credit i25.1)

Baker accordingly resisted
Marshal Joffre’s pleadings for a Roosevelt division to be attached to
his
troops further south. Last month’s disastrous French offensive in the Soissons-Reims sector had cost 120,000 casualties and caused dozens of divisions to mutiny. Although this shameful news was being kept secret, Joffre had replaced his commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, with General Henri-Philippe Pétain.

Roosevelt and Joffre were able to take stock of each other at a private dinner in Henry Frick’s mansion in New York on 9 May. Earlier in the day, the Colonel had been excluded from a city reception for the French mission, by order of the State Department. His rapprochement with the administration would appear to be over. Joffre—a big, beaming, pink-and-white man—was overjoyed to be seated next to an American who could speak his language. Afterward it was noticed that he had learned, in return, at least one word of English: “
Bul-lee.
”

“
He did not tell me anything I did not know, or suspect,” Roosevelt told Leary. “France does want our men. She wants them badly, more than she wants supplies.”

There was another dinner for the missions at the Waldorf two nights later. It was hosted by Governor Charles S. Whitman of New York, with Roosevelt seated well away from the guests of honor. But Balfour quietly arranged to come out to Sagamore Hill for “high tea” on Sunday the fifteenth. The State Department, alerted by a sudden deployment of secret service agents, was powerless to stop him.

For four hours, he and Roosevelt renewed their acquaintance: grayer and sadder statesmen than they had been when they were respectively prime minister and president. The war they had long seen coming both joined them and separated them now. Balfour confided that he found Woodrow Wilson’s White House to be lacking in urgency. Roosevelt talked of his frustrated desire to serve. Their only auditors, as they talked far into the night, were Balfour’s parliamentary assistant Sir Ian Malcolm, and a rookie pilot from Mineola, Private Quentin Roosevelt.

THAT SAME WEEKEND
, Roosevelt received another letter from Secretary Baker. The House-Senate conference was moving toward approval of the draft bill with the Harding amendment intact, but Baker did not want Roosevelt to think this presaged well for his division. “
Since the responsibility for action
and decision in this matter rests upon me, you will have to regard the determination I have already indicated as final, unless changing circumstances require a re-study of the whole question.”

The only “changing circumstance” Roosevelt could see ahead was Woodrow Wilson’s empowerment, under the pending act, to summon up five hundred thousand volunteer soldiers.
Roosevelt believed he could supply almost half that number out of the pool of applications he already had in hand—but what chance was there of the President turning to
him
, if it was so obviously Baker’s desire to do without volunteers altogether?