Colonel Roosevelt (89 page)

Once again the Colonel returned to a Sagamore Hill deserted by politicians and reporters. Little Richard was pining for Ethel. So was he. She gave off and attracted more love than any other of his children. “
I wish I could stroke your neck and hair,” he wrote her. Happily, both Derbys would be back home in time for Christmas. Alice was likely to be less difficult, this festive season, now that Nick had been reelected to Congress.
And Edith too should be happier, once she heard that Kermit and Belle were safely settled in Buenos Aires.

Roosevelt persuaded himself that he looked forward to private life, although Wilson’s cool refusal to speak out about Belgium tormented him. For the moment, he did not have a big book to write, nor was any publisher asking for one.
An Autobiography
had been a disappointment for Macmillan, and
Life-Histories of African Game Animals
was so technical that Scribners had printed it almost as an act of charity.
Through the Brazilian Wilderness
, just out, was earning excellent reviews, and in narrative quality was probably the best thing he had ever done. But its early sales did not compare to those of
African Game Trails
.

For as long as the European war lasted, Roosevelt felt inclined to focus on journalism.
Next February he would have a new editorial platform, as guest columnist for
Metropolitan
magazine. Pacifism, preparedness, and moral cowardice were to be his themes; he was bored with partisan argument. Let those intellectuals who were more policy-minded than he was—
brilliant young men such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann—adapt what survived of Progressivism to suit a magazine they had just founded,
The New Republic
.

“
It is perfectly obvious that the bulk of our people are heartily tired of me,” Roosevelt wrote William Allen White, in a posterity letter tinged with regret.

THE WINTER OF
1914–1915 found the Allies and Central Powers entrenched opposite each other in two freezing fissures that divided Western Europe like a fault line, all the way north from Switzerland to Ypres and the Belgian ports. Another fissure ran alongside the Bzura-Ravka riverline west of Warsaw and cracked down the map into Galicia, holding eight ill-supplied Russian armies at bay. Gone was the mobility that had characterized the early months of the war: the Schlieffen Plan’s rotation, the cavalry sweeps, the cuts and thrusts of maneuvers at Tannenberg and in the Marne. Abandoned, too, was the delusion of the soldiers dug in that a trench was a temporary thing that would last only as long as it took for politicians to settle the misunderstandings of last summer. The war was going to be long, and mortal beyond calculation: a continuum of attrition, to be won by whichever power had the largest reserves of blood, bread, industrial plant, and patience. Germany had by now lost well over a million men, France almost that number. On the Eastern Front, 750,000 Russian, German, and Austrian soldiers had fallen in just six weeks.

Across the Atlantic, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt hunkered down in their own psychological ditches. They were two melancholy men counterposed on either side of a foreign issue that most Americans chose to ignore—in Wilson’s words, “
a war with which we have nothing to do.”
White House aides were alarmed at the President’s inability to recover from the death of Ellen Wilson, five months before. He was not the type to share deep emotion with anybody except Colonel House and the few women closest to him: his two daughters, his sister and cousins, and a clutch of married confidantes.
None could console him. From time to time grief forced Wilson to reveal that he felt “wiped out,” unable to think straight. The unremarkable Democratic vote in the recent elections made him feel that his domestic reform program had failed. He frightened Colonel House by saying he would not mind being assassinated.

Roosevelt appeared on the surface to be content. He insisted, as he had in late 1910 and 1912, that his politicking days were over (“I
never
wish to leave Sagamore again!”) and that his heart and mind were at ease. Family and friends used to such protestations saw that he was, on the contrary, unhappier than at any time they could remember. He had regained the seventy pounds of flesh he lost to malaria, and it was not the firm musculature of earlier years, but a fatness around the waist and neck that disgusted him. “I am now pretty nearly done out,” he confided to his former White House physician, Dr. Presley Rixey. “The trouble is that I have rheumatism or gout and things of that kind to a degree that make it impossible for me to take very much exercise; and then in turn the fact that I cannot take exercise prevents my keeping in good condition.” Like many another ovoid person, he did not relate his weight gain to compulsive eating.

Ted was concerned enough about him to call old Rough Riders and ask them to rally round. “
Father is in very bad shape. Won’t you come out and see if you can cheer him up.” Those who did tried the dubious therapy of encouraging Roosevelt to think of raising a volunteer division to fight in Mexico or, if need be one day, overseas. Edith lost patience with these fantasies. “
Both you men,” she said to her husband and Frank Knox, “are exactly like small boys playing at soldiers.”

She sat in glowing firelight, with needlework on her lap.

“It’s a lovely game. But as far as the Mexican trouble is concerned, Theodore, you know quite as well as I do that Mr. Wilson will never let you,
or
your division, get into it at all.”

William Allen White correctly diagnosed that the Colonel was suffering from power deprivation. As the ambivalent leader of a dying party, he no longer looked or sounded presidential. It was inconceivable, given what was happening in Europe, that he could ever again call upon straw-hatted idealists to stand and fight at Armageddon. In his despair that nothing was being done for the Belgians (or was it frustration at not being in control?), he was resorting increasingly to ugly language against Wilson and Bryan. His series of articles on the war had become near-libelous after the election. That infallible sign of Rooseveltian frustration, the tendency to castrate political opponents, had resurged: “
Weaklings who raise their shrill piping for a peace that shall consecrate successful wrong occupy a position quite as immoral as and infinitely more contemptible than the position of the wrong-doers themselves.… It comes dangerously near flattery to call the foreign policy of the
United States under President Wilson and Secretary Bryan one of milk and water.”

White tried to tease him back into the kind of civilized essay-writing that suited him best. “
Your cistern is dry on politics.… I understand that you have a contract with the
Metropolitan
. If I were you I would go strong on the discussion of modern tendencies in architecture with here and there a few remarks on Sir Oliver Lodge’s views on abnormal psychology, and I might take a swipe at the national moving picture censorship, but I would not have anything to do with friend Bryan or friend Wilson.”

Roosevelt did not rise to White’s humor. “
I am more like a corpse than like the cistern of which you spoke.” He laboriously explained that
Metropolitan
magazine was interested only in his views on “international, social and economic questions,” and would not permit him to write literary essays—much as he might want to. “Like you I make my living largely by my pen. I don’t care to go into work that will take me beyond the time when Quentin, my youngest son, is launched into the world, but that won’t be for three years yet.…”

He did not mention a financial threat that loomed ahead of him: the $50,000 libel suit he had brought on himself, last July, by accusing William Barnes, Jr., of aiding and abetting the “rotten” state government of New York. The case had been expensively delayed and relocated from Albany to Syracuse, on the ground that Boss Barnes’s dominance of the former city would preclude a fair jury. It was now due to be tried in April. Roosevelt knew from his libel suit against George Newett that even if he successfully defended himself, the costs he would incur were likely to be enormous. If he lost—and Barnes was a wealthy and formidable adversary—Quentin might have to be “launched” much sooner than 1918.

Metropolitan
was a large, lavishly illustrated monthly owned by Harry Payne Whitney, a racehorse breeder so blinkered with wealth that he did not seem to notice that its editor, Henry J. Whigham, had a radical bias that veered close to socialism. Roosevelt was willing to live with that as long as Whigham let him preach his own, more paternalistic brand of politics. The magazine, in addition, was a strong supporter of preparedness.

“
After this January,” he told White, “I shall do my best to avoid mentioning Wilson’s and Bryan’s names.”

AS THE NEW YEAR
progressed, however, he managed to mention them often, and harshly. Always his anger was directed at their interpretation of neutrality. They seemed to think it was a right that could be proclaimed, he wrote, whereas in fact it was only a privilege conceded by belligerent nations—for as long as those nations felt so disposed. Nor was it necessarily virtuous: “
To be neutral between right and wrong is to serve wrong.” Roosevelt felt that American
apathy about the war was solidifying, and decided to move quickly before it became a cement resistant to chipping. Taking advantage of the New York publishing industry’s extraordinary ability to print and distribute a bound book in little more than two weeks, he edited his ten war articles of the previous fall for publication before the end of January. He supplemented them with two newer pieces on military training and “utopian” peace plans.

“A
LARGE, LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED MONTHLY
.”
Metropolitan
magazine, TR’s main journalistic outlet from 1915 to 1918
.
(photo credit i20.1)

The resultant twelve-chapter volume, entitled
America and the World War
, was issued by Scribners. It made permanent the breach between him and the administration, and established him as Wilson’s doctrinal foil.
Critical reaction, when not dismissive, was divided. To Roosevelt’s chagrin, reviewers sympathetic to Britain, Belgium, and France accused him of favoring Germany. The reverse obtained with those who described themselves as “German-American,” a locution he detested.