Colonel Roosevelt (109 page)

TED AND KERMIT MET
him in New York and drove him out to Oyster Bay, where
Edith was brooding over a telephone call from Harvard. Quentin, her youngest and least martial son, was “coming down to get into the war.” She had been unable to dissuade him on the grounds of his bad back and his poor eyesight. He said he intended to train as a fighter pilot.

Archie had an announcement too. He was engaged to Miss Grace Lockwood of Back Bay, Boston, and wanted to marry her as soon as possible, in order to be available for service the moment Congress answered Wilson’s recruitment call.

Over the next few days, Sagamore Hill became something of a military personnel center as the Colonel prepared his four sons for postings. Frontline service in the new army was what they all wanted: none would sit behind a steel desk. Ted and Archie, with two terms at Plattsburg apiece, were sure of being commissioned as infantry officers.
Quentin might have trouble passing the aviation section physical, but if so, he was willing to go north and see if the less fussy Canadians would take him.

Kermit remained—as ever—a man difficult to place. Aside from being only half trained, he was temperamentally unsuited to the static warfare in
Europe. His father understood that. They had the bond that came of killing lions and elephants together, and of enduring months of green hell in Brazil. The same fever lurked in their respective systems, and something of the same wanderlust. Kermit’s war, Roosevelt felt, should be far-ranging, profiting from his restlessness and flair for languages. Perhaps the British could use him in Mesopotamia, where Sir Frederick Maude had just brilliantly captured Baghdad.

In the small hours of Good Friday, 6 April, the House of Representatives declared war on Germany, 373 to 50 (Miss Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, sobbing as she called “no”). Even Wilson was surprised at how rapidly the majority mood on Capitol Hill had changed from isolationism to intervention. At 1:11
P.M.
, he interrupted his lunch to sign the resolution, proclaiming: “
A state of war between the United States and the Imperial German government, which has been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared.” Mobilization telegrams flashed to every army post in the country, and cables to all American ships at sea.

Roosevelt stayed home that Easter weekend, composing an editorial for
Metropolitan
magazine in praise of Wilson’s change of heart. He did not apologize for the insults he had showered on the President in the past, saying only, “
Of course, when war is on, all minor considerations, including all partisan considerations, vanish at once.”

On Monday, 9 April, he decided to go south and call again at the White House. He did not telephone ahead and ask Wilson to receive him. “
I’ll take chances on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”

Joseph Tumulty heard he was coming nevertheless.
When, at eleven the following morning, Alice dropped her father off, the secretary was waiting, wreathed in smiles. Roosevelt disappeared into the Red Room and emerged forty-five minutes later, looking pleased but not triumphant. A couple of dozen reporters waited to hear what he had to say. Beyond, in Pennsylvania Avenue, sightseers pressed against the railings. A little group of suffragettes jiggled yellow pickets.

“
The President received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” Roosevelt told the newsmen. But when it came to repeating the substance of their conversation, he became uncharacteristically cagey. Turning to Tumulty, who remained at his elbow, he joked, “
If I say anything I shouldn’t, be sure to censor it.”

Uninhibited, he might have announced that he and Wilson had chatted easily, swapped anecdotes, and in short, gotten on as well as they had in May 1914. And he could have repeated his tension-relieving remark: “Mr. President, what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street if we can make your message good.” Instead, he dictated
a terse statement to the effect that he had asked for authority to raise a division of volunteer soldiers, many of them already trained and available—“such a division to be sent as part of any expeditionary force to France at an early moment.” The President, he said, had neither accepted nor rejected his request, and would come to a decision “in his own good time.”

Meanwhile, Roosevelt wanted it understood that his proposed division would not conflict with Wilson’s call for a universal, obligatory draft. The volunteers he sought would either be over twenty-five or excluded from regular conscription by the War Department. “
I have been in communication with Secretary Baker, but do not intend to call on him.”

Baker took the hint—or rather, yielded to an even heavier one from Franklin D. Roosevelt—that the Colonel would be
receiving visitors that evening in Representative Longworth’s townhouse on M Street. When he arrived he found the place mobbed. Roosevelt had been holding court all afternoon. The British, French, and Japanese ambassadors and a long list of legislators and policymakers, including the chairmen of the House and Senate military committees and officers of the National Defense Council, were being briefed on the Roosevelt Division in such detail that it might already be en route to Brest. Its chief recruiter came out in high spirits, thrust an arm through Baker’s, and led him upstairs to a private room.

“
I am aware,” Roosevelt said with winning frankness, “that I have not had enough experience to lead a division myself.” He had sensed that was one of Wilson’s doubts about his request. “But I have selected the most experienced officers from the regular army for my staff.” He was willing to serve under whatever commander the President might appoint, as well as the commander of the entire expeditionary force.

Baker felt himself being strongarmed, and would only say, as he had in their correspondence, that he was taking the proposal under advisement. The Colonel must appreciate that mobilization was a hugely complex process that could not be swayed by personal considerations.

Roosevelt returned to New York unencouraged. He tried to make the best of his interviews, saying to John Leary, “
I had a good talk with Baker—I could twist him about my finger, could I have him about for a while.” As for the President, “He seemed to take it well, but—remember, I was talking to Mr. Wilson.”

ON 12 APRIL
, having heard nothing from the administration, Roosevelt decided to appeal directly to Congress for legislation permitting volunteer soldiers to serve on the Western Front. He understood that a general deployment of Baker’s draft army was unlikely until the spring of 1918. But it was plain
that the Allies were desperate for reinforcements. Britain had already announced that it was sending a high-level mission to Washington, headed by Arthur Balfour, in an effort to speed up the dispatch of American war aid.

In an urgent letter to George Chamberlain (D., Oregon), chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Roosevelt wrote:

With, that he left for Boston, and Archie’s rushed-up wedding in Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

THE ROOSEVELTS KNEW
that this was probably the last time they would assemble as a complete family before war tore them apart. Their celebration on Saturday, 14 April, was muted. Quentin, serving as best man,
waited with Archie in the chancel, which was draped with the national and state flags. Ted, Kermit, and Dick Derby served as ushers. Theodore and Edith sat with Alice and Nick, Ethel and Belle, and several Roosevelt cousins. Saltonstalls, Aspin-walls, Websters, and Peabodys sprinkled both sides of the aisle. At noon, Grace Lockwood—sharp-featured and skinny in white satin—came down the aisle on the arm of her father. She was a graduate of the Navy League’s “female Plattsburg” in Chevy Chase, Maryland, so the patriotic bunting was quite to her taste, as were the glittering uniforms of many attendees from the Harvard Officers’ Reserve Corps.

Grace understood the necessity of a postponed honeymoon. For the next few weeks, Archie would have to remain close to home, pending assignment to active duty.

A DISPATCH TO
The New York Times
on the day after the wedding reported that a long-exiled Russian Communist leader, “Nikolai” Lenin, was en route to Petrograd from Switzerland. He had been given safe conduct across German railroads. Lenin and his fellow
Bolsheviki
were for universal peace, so they could accomplish their design to co-opt the Russian revolution.

This news (and
the hasty departure from New York City of Leon Trotsky) complicated the efforts of
Count Ilya Tolstoy to drum up American support for Prince Lvov’s provisional government. The son of the famous novelist was in the United States on a propaganda tour. He hoped that Theodore Roosevelt might be named head of an advisory commission that President Wilson planned to send to his country. The Colonel was otherwise preoccupied, but dictated a message for Tolstoy to take home: “Through you I send my most hearty congratulations and good wishes to the men who have led the Russian people in this great movement for democratic freedom.”

Describing himself as “a fellow radical,” he cautioned the Duma majority against the danger of “unbalanced extremists” who sought to go beyond democracy. “See that the light of the torch is not dimmed by any unwise and extreme action, and above all not by any of those sinister and dreadful deeds which a century and a quarter ago in France produced the Red Terror, and then by reaction the White Terror.”

Privately, he told John Leary that Russia’s flimsy new republic might soon fall apart. If the Bolsheviks managed to win or steal power in Petrograd, they would probably negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, so as to be able to consolidate themselves at home. That would leave the Reich, in turn, free to deploy all its Eastern armor along the Western Front.

“
If we do not wake up,” Roosevelt fretted, “Germany will have won this war, and then
we will
be in it.”