Teddy Roosevelt's Third Term, Part X

Theodore Roosevelt saw World War I coming from a long way off, but no one would let him fix it, or even fight in it.

He observed Germany’s military buildup first-hand during his 1910 world tour while spending some quality time with his pal Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also took note of the “easily-conquerable” countries like Belgium, which was easily conquered as soon as war broke out. ?

Woodrow Wilson was precisely the wrong man to be in the White House “during these days that are to try men’s souls.” The Roosevelt presidency thrust America out of isolation and set the stage for it to become a world power. The subsequent administrations retreated from foreign affairs as the economy boomed and Americans focused on building up domestic industry and making money.

President Wilson believed America “had no vital interests at stake” in Europe’s wars. A large part of the country’s population was descended from immigrants who came from the belligerent nations and still identified strongly as German, Irish, Italian, and others. Getting America involved in the war might risk national unity.

Teddy, no fan of what he called “hyphenated Americans,” believed that both of these positions were short-sighted. Europe was a huge market for American goods, and the financial systems of Britain and the U.S., united in the house of J.P. Morgan, among others, were profitably intertwined. To Wilson’s second argument, Teddy believed that when you became an American citizen you left your prior national identity behind like so much discarded luggage on America’s front porch.

When you took the oath of citizenship, you were an American. That was it. There was no room in the American heart for any other loyalty, as far as he was concerned. “My motherland and my fatherland and my own land are all three of them the United States,” he replied to a letter asking him to identify as an “Anglo-American.”

Much like his involvement in the Russo-Japanese war, Teddy saw World War I as an opportunity for leadership. Foreign policy was about self-interest, and war was the ultimate expression of selfishness. Taking on the role of the world’s peacemaker would significantly elevate America’s standing. Staying out of the fight and working to bring peace made the United States the only adult in the room. From there it could literally define the postwar world with itself in first place.

Woodrow Wilson got there eventually, first through neutrality and then with his Fourteen Points—his plan to end the war and define the peace—but it was too little, too late.

***

“Es is nichts” Archduke Franz Ferdinand said about the bullet wound he had just gotten in Sarajevo at the hands of his assassin. “It is nothing.”

He was pretty wrong about that.

Theodore Roosevelt was equally dismissive of a diagnosis he had received around the same time. He had lost his voice, his malarial attacks were increasing in frequency and duration, he had gained seventy pounds, and the doctor Edith insisted be brought in to examine him said that if he didn’t get “at least four months complete rest,” he would never be free of ill health. He was told, “You may expect to spend the rest of your days tied to a chair.”

When he was a sickly young boy, a doctor had come with the same dire warnings and Teddy ignored them, knowing that idleness was never going to be his thing. Now the world was careening toward war, and there was no way he was going to sit quietly in a dark room.

Especially not with Woodrow Wilson running things.

***

“The European world is highly excited,” President Wilson said, as German armies trampled Belgium and pointed their spear at France. “But that excitement ought not spread to the United States.”

Teddy replied privately to Arthur Lee, “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…and no real knowledge or wisdom concerning internal and international affairs as head of the nation.”

Presidential Retirement Safety Tip Number Two Hundred Fifty Seven: When you give up your shot at the Oval Office, you only get to watch from the sidelines.

“I am an ex-president,” Teddy told Arthur Lee, “and my public attitude must be one of entire impartiality.”

Let’s just see how long that lasts.

***

He got a letter from Sir George Otto Trevelyan in 1914: “It is of untold importance that you should have a leading part at this conjuncture…your mode of thought on international policy and your deep and wide interest in the history of the past, would be of immeasurable service now and hereafter.” The Englishman, who knew first-hand Teddy’s brilliance when it came to foreign affairs, wrote of his “earnest desire to see you at the center of the world’s affairs.”

Private citizens of influence lobbied for an “American peace committee,” thinking that “Theodore Roosevelt would be the ideal person to press for a diplomatic settlement of the war.” He had personal friendships with many of the leaders of the warring countries like the Kaiser of Germany, and his international stature was still high.

He was asked by the New York World to write a series of articles about the war.

“You will hear from me,” he replied.

***

Two things were in his way. Teddy, always an emotional fellow, vacillated between knowing he could play a significant role in world events, even as a former President, and believing that the American people had moved on without him.

After his Progressive party lost heavily in the 1914 midterm elections and he came in last in a poll of likely presidential candidates for 1916, he wrote William Allen White, “It is perfectly obvious that the bulk of our people are heartily tired of me.”

Teddy’s political shrewdness always deserted him when he was down in the dumps or could only imagine a bleak future. It was the case at the 1900 Republican convention when he was drafted into the Vice Presidency. It was true in 1908, when he handed the party and the White House over to William Howard Taft. It was true in 1912, when he split the Republicans and made Woodrow Wilson President. There had always been Americans who were “heartily tired” of him. At his best, Teddy went ahead anyway.

At his worst, he wallowed in self-pity.

He ignored two important facts about the 1914 post-midterm poll that depressed him so much:

Post-election polls are usually meaningless. And Woodrow Wilson had come in second.

***

Teddy got an early glimpse of Wilsonian foreign policy when his administration got involved in the Mexican Revolution. After the assassination of Mexico’s democratically-elected president in 1913, Wilson refused to recognize the legitimacy of his successor, which made Mexico’s presidency a free for all. He ordered troops into Mexico, and sent General John J. Pershing on punitive expeditions against Mexican forces that had crossed the border into the United States. But Wilson alternated between the sporadic and inconclusive use of force and a desire to not get involved in Mexico’s internal political struggles.

He took “so many steps forward and back with regard to Mexico that wags were talking of a new dance—the ‘Wilson Tango.”

Mexico was the preview of Wilsonian foreign policy; the problem was that the Great War in Europe was going to be the big show, and Teddy didn’t believe Wilson was up for it.

His son Ted rounded up some old Rough Riders to visit Teddy at Sagamore Hill to try and cheer him up. This was a huge mistake, as Teddy’s old friends believed in the “dubious therapy” of him raising a regiment to go fight in Mexico or the war in Europe. Teddy, who had always dreamed of being a general, jumped at the idea. Edith said, “You men…are exactly like small boys playing at soldiers.”

Teddy was in a bad spot. He wanted to fight Wilson and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan and their foreign policy “of milk and water.” He wanted to fight Pancho Villa in Mexico. He wanted to avenge the rape of Belgium. William Allen White believed “The Colonel was suffering from power deprivation,” and he was right.

This was the kind of thing that would not end well for Teddy.

***

He persisted with his desire to raise a regiment and go off to war. He became the nation’s principal proponent of preparedness. He knew that America’s involvement in the war was a foregone conclusion even before German U-boats sank the Lusitania and engaged in unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping. And before the Zimmerman telegram, where Germany, leaping into the power vacuum in Mexico Wilson had helped create, suggested an alliance where Mexico would invade the southwestern U.S. and take back the territory it had lost seventy years earlier.

President Wilson and Secretary Bryan said there was no need to increase the American army or navy, which both had declined since Teddy was in office. Bryan claimed that if the need arose, ten million American men would volunteer in a single day.

Teddy responded drily that only four hundred thousand of those men would have functioning rifles. Another six hundred thousand would have to use shotguns, and the remaining nine million would have to resort to “axes, scythes, hand-saws…and similar arms.”

Theodore Roosevelt once more found himself in the unpopular position of being both right and ignored. His friends noted that “his obsession with the war had darkened his personality.” He “once again…found himself shouting into a wind that bore his words back at him, mostly unheard.” His old friend Hamlin Garland visited him and found Teddy looking older and more subdued.

“He will never run for President again,” Garland said.

***

Woodrow Wilson, in his way, was slowly coming around to the inevitability of abandoning neutrality in the Great War. “We cannot remain isolated in this war,” he said, “for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our own shores. On the one side Mr. Bryan will censure the administration for being too militaristic, and on the other we will find Mr. Roosevelt criticizing us because we are too pacifist in our tendencies.”

The idea that the President was worried about Teddy’s influence might have lifted him out of his funk.

The President failed to understand that neutrality and isolation were not the same thing. American ships regularly went back and forth to Europe with vital supplies. American citizens were living and working in European war zones and hospitals. England had mined the North Sea and reserved the right to search any ship, no matter what flag it flew. Germany claimed the right to sink any ship that might be carrying military contraband. Being neutral was going to get Americans killed from all sides, and the country would be seen as helpless and toothless, a situation that was sure to drive Teddy nuts.

The sinking of the Lusitania in May of 1915 proved that point. Eleven hundred people died, including 120 Americans.

President Wilson had no comment. Teddy did.

“That’s murder,” he said. “This represents not merely piracy, but piracy on a vaster scale of murder than any old-time pirate ever practiced. It is warfare against the innocents traveling on the ocean…It seems inconceivable that we can refrain from taking action in this matter, for we owe it not only to humanity but to our own national self-respect.”

The White House said in a statement that the President “was pondering ‘very earnestly, but very calmly, the right course of action to pursue.”

When he did make a statement, Wilson did not mention the Lusitania. “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight,” he said.

Theodore Roosevelt, who had been fighting his whole life, had no such trouble.

“Every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease…is enthusiastically in favor of Wilson,” he wrote to his son Archie, who wanted to leave school and go to Europe to fight.

Teddy started a campaign to go with him.

***

A preparedness camp had been established in Plattsburg, New York. Teddy signed up two of his sons, Archie and Quentin, for it. His oldest son Ted had already committed.

Teddy planned out a regiment of “Super Rough Riders,” with himself as a major general. His naivete about the hard reality of modern warfare showed in his belief that horse cavalry could be effective against the whirlwind of iron at the Western Front. Machine guns had turned horse-mounted charges into “an amazingly effective form of group suicide.”

He went to the Plattsburg training camp, where he watched 1400 upper class men, including the mayor of New York, the city’s police commissioner, a former ambassador to France, and the bishop of Rhode Island drill with forty-pound packs under the supervision of General Leonard Wood, Teddy’s former commander. Wood, like Teddy, was torn between military service and the wide-open Republican presidential nomination in 1916. There is a picture of the two of them at Plattsburg, “their tunics straining at every button,” seeming older than their years.

On his way out of the camp, Teddy was asked by reporters if he supported the president. He replied that “any peace-loving prose stylist living in a house once inhabited by Abraham Lincoln should emigrate to China.”

I guess that’s a no.

***

The war in Europe was reaching a stalemate, with horrific casualties on both sides. President Wilson finally called for half a million men to mobilize. Teddy struggled to avoid insulting the President, and finally settled on calling Wilson a logothete, a term from the Byzantine Empire that “meant little more than a bureaucrat, or petty accountant in ancient Constantinople.”

Teddy found his star once more ascendant in 1916. His recent book on the war had been a surprise best-seller. As the war spread throughout the world, his warnings sounded prescient, especially now that they were being tepidly echoed by the presidential administration. Delegates to the 1916 Progressive and Republican conventions were starting to declare themselves for him. In a repeat of 1908, he sent telegrams demanding he not be considered as a candidate while at the same time leaving the door open: “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country had in its mood something of the heroic.”

The New York Times wrote, “Roosevelt’s hat again in the ring.”

Edith Roosevelt dreaded the idea of another presidential run. “It almost killed us last time!” she told a reporter.

As the nominating conventions picked up steam, Teddy couldn’t help but feel the stirring of presidential ambitions. He was told by a delegate, “I may make up my mind that we will have to nominate you.”

“Don’t you do it if you expect me to pussy-foot on any single issue I have raised,” Teddy replied, managing to say both yes and no at the same time.

President Wilson addressed Congress, finally using some tough talk about Germany. Leaders of the Progressive and Republican parties, each having felt betrayed by Teddy at one time or another, met in Chicago in June “to explore the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate.”

Teddy’s old friend Cecil Spring Rice noted that they all “hated Teddy like hell and wanted to get back at him, but [felt] that he was the only man who could save the country.” Many of the power brokers in the Republican camp—Leonard Wood, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Charles Evans Hughes wanted the nomination for themselves, so 1916 was proving to be a confused mess just like 1912. Ultimately, the convention nominated “without enthusiasm” Justice Charles Evans Hughes. A joke went around that, “no one wanted Hughes but everyone was for him.”

Teddy was once more down in the dumps. The world was on fire. The country, with either Wilson or Hughes destined for the White House, was “in the hands of two aloof and cagey deliberators. Wilson and Hughes were men who waited for events to happen and then reacted.” Teddy saw things coming, and got ready.

But as happened in 1912, Teddy allowed his candidacy, and his potential third term, to be derailed in the “smoke-filled room” of the nominating convention. He let party insiders, many with presidential ambitions of their own, talk him out of running, and he surely didn’t help himself by doing the same thing he accused Wilson of doing in Mexico: taking one step forward and two steps back.

He forgot that his true power came from the American people. In time of war, the best argument to get or retain the presidency was experience in office—it was an argument Teddy’s “fifth cousin by blood and nephew by marriage” would use decades later to win four terms in the White House. In 1916, only two men had the kind of experience the country knew it needed—Wilson and Roosevelt.

But Teddy allowed his emotions to get in the way, and his political shrewdness and canny assessment of the mood of the people was lost in a wave of self-pity. 1904 Theodore Roosevelt went after what he knew to be best for the nation. 1916 Teddy waited to be asked, not by the people, but by cynical party insiders. And he let his temper get the best of him.

As President Wilson had once said about Teddy, “The way to treat an adversary like Roosevelt is to gaze at the stars over his head.”

Woodrow Wilson’s chances in 1916 were looking pretty good.

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