Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [213]
I would call the attention of President Wilson and Secretary Bryan to the fact that this $40,000,000 represents the exact sum which Colombia lost when the United States government of that day refused to submit to blackmail. They now only propose to pay $25,000,000 blackmail. They had better make the job thorough while they are about it and give the whole $40,000,000. Otherwise they will still leave an opening for action by some future administration of similar mushy amiability toward foreign powers that have sought to wrong us.
He went on to indict the President’s Mexican policy, which he described as “a course wavering between peace and war, exquisitely designed to combine the disadvantages of both, and feebly tending first toward one and then toward the other.” One of Wilson’s occasional “spasms of understanding” had been to realize that allowing weapons and munitions to flow unhindered into Mexico would encourage countries supportive of Huerta, such as Germany, to gain a strategic foothold there. So Wilson, abandoning all pretense of neutrality, had resorted to sudden, irrational violence at Vera Cruz.
In doing so, he had sacrificed nineteen more American lives than Roosevelt had done in his Central American adventure of eleven years before. Which made it all the more grotesque that Secretary Bryan now sought to appease Bogotá for the sin of interventionism. The Colonel’s belittling images—figure of fun, mushy amiability, wavering, feebly tending, spasms of understanding—were effectively chosen. Wilson’s foreign policy had indeed been marked by vacillations and overreactions puzzling to anyone unaware that he and Bryan saw the world through evangelical spectacles. They regarded showy potentates, whether kings or corrupt power-grabbers like Huerta, with such contempt that they were ready to run guns in order to extend the reach of Christian democracy.
“We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind if we can find a way,” the President said, rhetorically including the American people in his pilgrim’s progress.
ROOSEVELT’S HOPE WAS THAT, by making a patriotic issue of the indemnity treaty, he could encourage Republicans and Progressives in the Senate to reject it. And since he was, in spite of himself, getting involved in politics again, what to do about the partisan division that he had caused in 1912? The Progressive Party had weakened badly since then, and so had he—not only physically but in terms of separatist will. Although he could never forgive Elihu Root and the other “thieves” who (he still believed) had stolen his renomination, he remained in his heart a Republican. He longed to see Progressivism lose its capital p, and become once again the liberal conscience of Abraham Lincoln’s party. Unfortunately, that was unlikely to happen as long as Old Guard relics like Boss Barnes of New York and Senator Penrose of Pennsylvania remained in control of the RNC.
He had just settled in at Sagamore Hill when William Draper Lewis, who was running for governor in Penrose’s home state, came to remind him that he had promised to speak in Pittsburgh on the last day of the month. The event was to be a double one, kicking off not only Lewis’s campaign but also a run for the U.S. Senate by Gifford Pinchot. It was to take place in Exposition Hall, so Roosevelt could not cite the doctor’s order he had received in London against speaking out of doors. He felt bound, in any case, to make a few carefully scripted appearances on behalf of candidates who had once campaigned for him.
Edith was sufficiently concerned about her husband’s fever attacks to demand that he submit to a complete medical examination before he did any more politicking. Dr. Alexander Lambert told him that his spleen was enlarged and that he was suffering from a “loss of vitality” ascribable to malaria. If he did not have at least four months’ complete rest, his ill health might well become chronic.