Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [217]
In New York State we see at its worst the development of the system of bipartisan boss rule.… It is impossible to secure the economic, social, and industrial reforms to which we are pledged until this invisible government of the party bosses working through the alliance between crooked business and crooked politics is rooted out of our governmental system.
In New York State the two political machines are completely dominated, the one by Mr. Barnes, the other by Mr. Murphy.* The state government is rotten throughout in almost all its departments, and this is directly due to the dominance in politics of Mr. Murphy … aided and abetted when necessary by Mr. Barnes and the sub-bosses of Mr. Barnes.
Barnes immediately sued him for libel and $50,000 in damages.
ON THE SAME NIGHT that Roosevelt was served with his legal papers in Oyster Bay, the foreign minister of Serbia was handed a note from Austria-Hungary. It was far harsher than the one he had received the previous October. His government was given forty-eight hours to guarantee a purge of all terrorist organizations operating on Serbian soil, ban anti-imperial propaganda, condemn its own army for Black Hand connections, and accept Austrian participation in an internal investigation of the murder of Franz Ferdinand.
The terms of this ultimatum (which had been issued at the impatient urging of Wilhelm II) were so provocative that it amounted to a declaration of war. In mid-Atlantic, Commodore Theo Kier of the Imperator heard the news by radio and directed his liner home to Hamburg under full steam.
Serbia rejected the ultimatum cannily, by accepting all its demands except the one for a participatory investigation. This committed Austria-Hungary to a declaration of war on the reprehensible, not to say illegal ground that it had been denied permission to infringe the rights of a sovereign nation. Germany was challenged to court the same obloquy, if it made good on its promise to support Austrian aggression.
On Saturday, 25 July, Tsar Nicholas II waited for Serbia to mobilize in its own defense. Then, reacting much more quickly than the Kaiser had expected, he ordered a partial mobilization of the Russian army. He knew that if he made it total, he would doom his own dynasty. A force consisting largely of discontented peasants was not likely to return, brutalized, from a foreign conflict and remain subservient to Romanoff rule. Nicholas had been threatened with a domestic revolution in 1905, before he allowed Theodore Roosevelt to mediate an end to the Russo-Japanese War. But no conciliatory figure was in sight now. Slav honor was Slav honor, and the Teutons had abused it enough.
When Wilhelm II heard the news from St. Petersburg, he said, more in surprise than dismay, “Then I must mobilize too.”
One by one, like electrical systems activated from a central switchboard, the powers compelled to respond to a crisis in the Balkans began to generate heat. Serbia mobilized even before Austria-Hungary did. In London, Sir Edward Grey warned of a “European war à quatre”—a four-way conflict with Russia, Germany, and France being drawn into Austria’s provincial problem. He begged his counterpart on the Wilhelmstrasse, Count Gottlieb von Jagow, to push for a mediatory conference between the first three nations and his own. Although it was plain from his tone that Britain would not stand idly by if France was menaced, Jagow’s reply was evasive.
At 11:10 A.M. on 28 July, Austria declared war on Serbia. The British ambassador in Vienna reported that its citizens were “wild with joy” at the announcement. Some even got an erotic charge