Colonel Roosevelt (85 page)

Exhausted, Grey spoke to a friend who was standing with him. Afterward he could not remember what he had said, until the friend quoted his words back to him: “
The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

THE EXTREME TENSION
that gathered in Parliament on Tuesday, 4 August, communicated itself to Sagamore Hill, where Roosevelt practically danced, Navajo-style, round his library, and piped at Charles Booth, the British humanitarian: “
You’ve got to get in! You’ve got to get in!”

Four Progressive intellectuals—Felix Frankfurter and the journalists Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl—watched half-amused, half-awed by the Colonel’s vehemence. They recognized, with conflicting emotions, that if Britain did in fact enter the war, sooner or later America might be forced to “get in” too.
Booth would only say that he supposed his government must make good on its threat. He was chairman of a shipping line based in Liverpool, and knew that he would be responsible for the lives of uncountable thousands of passengers if the war became general.

Roosevelt saw the issue as one of simple right and wrong. Germany was treating its neutral neighbors as dirt underfoot, on the unbelievable premise that France and Russia meant to destroy the Reich. By any definition, this was militarism gone mad: the Triple Entente had no choice but to fight. If Germany defeated France and took over her colonial possessions, the strategic and economic balance of the whole Occident would be upset. What particularly disturbed Roosevelt was the possibility of Germany being defeated and disarmed. This would be a double tragedy, because in his opinion, the United States would one day need Germany as an ally against the power that had always worried him most—Japan. Furthermore (and here his guests agreed with him), a collapsed Reich “
would result in the entire western world being speedily forced into a contest with Russia.”

President Wilson saw no such eventuality. “
The European world is highly excited,” he told reporters visiting him for comment, “but the excitement ought not to spread to the United States.” He said that he would issue a proclamation of neutrality soon. Americans should have “the pride of feeling” that one great nation, at least, remained uninvolved and stood ready to help the belligerents settle their differences. “We can do it and reap a great permanent glory out of doing it, provided we all cooperate to see that nobody loses his head.”

Wilson spoke with considerable self-control, not revealing that his ailing wife apparently had just days to live.

By Wednesday,
furor teutonicus
was general both east and west of the Central Powers. The front page of
The New York Times
required so many
headlines to summarize all the cable dispatches from Europe that there was scarcely room for body text:

The most momentous bulletin of all confirmed that since eleven the previous evening, a state of war had existed between Great Britain and Germany. Seventeen million soldiers of eight nations were now at arms.
When other powers joined in, as they surely would (Italy, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire had yet to align themselves) and some of the world’s biggest navies began to clash at sea, the conflict would become global. If even tiny Switzerland was mobilizing, how long could the United States delude itself that engines of foreign war would not sweep west across the Atlantic? And pass into the Pacific via the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal,
Theodore Roosevelt’s gift to the battleships of all nations?

ON 6 AUGUST
, Ellen Wilson died. “
God has stricken me,” the President wrote privately, “almost more than I can bear.”

In the circumstances, Roosevelt’s first statement on the war attracted little attention. Issued that day from his new office at 30 East Forty-second Street in Manhattan, it was as neutral-sounding as anything Wilson had said. “
Let us be thankful beyond measure that we are citizens of this Republic, and that our burdens, though they may be heavy, are far lighter than those that must be borne by the men and women who live in other and less fortunate countries.” He pledged himself and his party to “work hand in hand with any public man” or combination of citizens “who in good faith and disinterestedly do all that is possible to see that the United States comes through this crisis unharmed.”

If this sounded like an endorsement of the President and his administration, Roosevelt felt that as a patriotic American he could say neither more nor less. “
I simply do not know the facts.”

Having lost a wife to Bright’s disease himself, he understood Wilson’s anguish. But empathy did not stop him confiding to Arthur Lee that he had deep doubts about the administration’s ability to defend the United States. Just as Europe was becoming a battleground, the President and his “prize idiot” of a secretary of state were continuing to tout the peacekeeping potential of arbitration treaties. “
It is not a good thing for a country to have a professional yodeler, a human trombone like Mr. Bryan as secretary of state, nor a college president with an astute and shifty mind, a hypocritical ability to deceive plain people … and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”

Yet for the moment, Roosevelt believed that it was right for America to stay neutral. Newspapers were reporting that no rules of war had so far been broken. “
The melancholy thing about this matter to me,” he wrote Hugo Münsterberg, a Prussian-born professor at Harvard, “is that this conflict really was inevitable and that the several nations engaged in it are, each from its own standpoint, right under the existing conditions of civilization and international relations.”

The only one he felt had a moral (as opposed to strategic or economic) reason to fight was Belgium, which had courageously vowed to defend its honor and sovereignty. He made this plain when an emissary from Wilhelm II visited him. Count Franz von Papen was military attaché to the German Embassy in Washington, and the only soldier in the diplomatic corps representing the Central Powers. Young and handsome, with a noble lineage extending back to the fifteenth century, Papen was a Westphalian gentleman of the finest sort, except that there was something unctuous about him that irritated Roosevelt.

The message he brought was more than eight months old, and consisted of nothing more than one of the Kaiser’s typical protestations of esteem, updated to suit the current emergency. Papen obviously meant to take advantage of it by enlisting Roosevelt as a voice for the German cause. Bowing, he said that His Imperial
Majesty had never forgotten how pleasurable it had been to entertain the Colonel four years before, “as a guest in Berlin and at the palace at Potsdam.” In view of these fond memories, Wilhelm “felt assured” that he could count on Roosevelt’s “sympathetic understanding of Germany’s position and action.”

Roosevelt bowed back. He said that he too had never forgotten the royal way the Kaiser had treated him, “nor the way in which His Majesty King Albert of Belgium received me in Brussels.”

Silence fell. Papen’s expression did not change. He clicked his heels, bowed again, and left the room without uttering another word.

The visit only confirmed Roosevelt’s intent to support Wilson and Bryan as they pursued their policy of noninvolvement. He made his commitment clear in one of the occasional articles he now contributed to
The Outlook:
“
In common with the immense majority of our fellow countrymen, I shall certainly stand by not only the public servants in control of the administration at Washington, but also all other public servants, no matter of what party, in this crisis; asking only that they with wisdom and good faith endeavor … to promote the cause of peace and justice throughout the world.”

He commended an early offer by the President to act as a mediator in Europe, although evidence mounted
daily in black headlines (
swamping even, on 15 August, news of the inauguration of the Panama Canal) that the war was irreversible.

The truth was, Wilson had no diplomatic qualifications. His only exposure to the outside world—unless Bermuda counted as a foreign power—had been gained on two or three vacations in Britain, visiting universities and bicycling through the Cumberland and Scotland of his ancestors. Roosevelt had gone on four grand tours of Europe and the Middle East before he was thirty, amassing an international circle of acquaintance that now extended from emperors down to his barefoot
camaradas
in Brazil. He could converse in three languages and read in four. He had been blessed by a Pope, honored by the mullahs of Al-Azhar, and asked to mediate an international war. He had heard Casals play Bach, confronted Cubism, and watched the gyrations of snake priests and
Diaghilev’s dancers—not to mention the goose-steps of German troops at Döberitz. He had killed a man in battle and just four months before, on the shore of a river unknown to any cartographer, confronted death himself.

These and maybe a thousand other aspects of wisdom were embodied in the retired statesman who found few journalists, that summer, interested in his views on any subject other than Progressive politics. Ray Stannard Baker visited him at Sagamore Hill and got the impression that Roosevelt was chafing in unaccustomed obscurity. “
It must indeed be a cross for him not to keep on the front page!”

THE PRESIDENT’S TENDENCY
to talk in the abstract was demonstrated in his salute to the Panama Canal as a waterway that would permit “a commerce of intelligence, of thought, and sympathy” around the world, as if such things were dry goods.
On 19 August, he formally called upon Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.”

But to the handful of his countrymen who were still in Brussels, the spectacle of the German army marching into town next day was so overwhelmingly physical as to negate philosophy. Richard Harding Davis of the New York
Tribune
had seen war before—in Cuba, where he had followed Roosevelt’s Rough Riders to Santiago—but he realized that the new technological century was going to make it infinitely more horrible.

Belgium’s defense strategy, modeled on that of Russia against Napoleon in 1812, had been to leave the capital unprotected. By ten in the morning, all non-official citizens were off the streets and hidden behind shuttered windows. The first German to appear on the Boulevard de Waterloo was a captain on a bicycle, no more fearsome than Woodrow Wilson
en vacance
. He was followed by a pair of privates, also pedaling, their rifles casually slung. But right behind came such a gray mass of men and matériel, advancing row on row, hour after hour till sunset and beyond, that Davis was at first amazed, then numbed, then stupefied.