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By Root 3256 0

this was militarism gone mad: the Triple Entente had no choice but to fight. If Germany defeated France and took over her colonial possessions, the strategic and economic balance of the whole Occident would be upset. What particularly disturbed Roosevelt was the possibility of Germany being defeated and disarmed. This would be a double tragedy, because in his opinion, the United States would one day need Germany as an ally against the power that had always worried him most—Japan. Furthermore (and here his guests agreed with him), a collapsed Reich “would result in the entire western world being speedily forced into a contest with Russia.”

President Wilson saw no such eventuality. “The European world is highly excited,” he told reporters visiting him for comment, “but the excitement ought not to spread to the United States.” He said that he would issue a proclamation of neutrality soon. Americans should have “the pride of feeling” that one great nation, at least, remained uninvolved and stood ready to help the belligerents settle their differences. “We can do it and reap a great permanent glory out of doing it, provided we all cooperate to see that nobody loses his head.”

Wilson spoke with considerable self-control, not revealing that his ailing wife apparently had just days to live.

By Wednesday, furor teutonicus was general both east and west of the Central Powers. The front page of The New York Times required so many headlines to summarize all the cable dispatches from Europe that there was scarcely room for body text:

KAISER HURLS TWO ARMIES

INTO BELGIUM AFTER

DECLARING WAR.

—

LIEGE ATTACK REPULSED

—

German Guns Are Reported to

be Bombarding Both That

City and Namur.

—

BELGIANS RUSH TO ARMS

—

Parliament Acclaims King’s

Appeal and Votes $40,000,000

for National Defense.

—

FRENCH BORDER CLASHES

—

Stronger German Forces Crossing

the Border Near

Mars-la-Tour and Moineville

—

RUSSIANS ATTACK MEMEL

—

The most momentous bulletin of all confirmed that since eleven the previous evening, a state of war had existed between Great Britain and Germany. Seventeen million soldiers of eight nations were now at arms. When other powers joined in, as they surely would (Italy, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire had yet to align themselves) and some of the world’s biggest navies began to clash at sea, the conflict would become global. If even tiny Switzerland was mobilizing, how long could the United States delude itself that engines of foreign war would not sweep west across the Atlantic? And pass into the Pacific via the soon-to-be-opened Panama Canal, Theodore Roosevelt’s gift to the battleships of all nations?

ON 6 AUGUST, Ellen Wilson died. “God has stricken me,” the President wrote privately, “almost more than I can bear.”

In the circumstances, Roosevelt’s first statement on the war attracted little attention. Issued that day from his new office at 30 East Forty-second Street in Manhattan, it was as neutral-sounding as anything Wilson had said. “Let us be thankful beyond measure that we are citizens of this Republic, and that our burdens, though they may be heavy, are far lighter than those that must be borne by the men and women who live in other and less fortunate countries.” He pledged himself and his party to “work hand in hand with any public man” or combination of citizens “who in good faith and disinterestedly do all that is possible to see that the United States comes through this crisis unharmed.”

If this sounded like an endorsement of the President and his administration, Roosevelt felt that as a patriotic American he could say neither more nor less. “I simply do not know the facts.”

Having lost a wife to Bright’s disease himself, he understood Wilson’s anguish. But empathy did not stop him confiding to Arthur Lee that he had deep doubts about the administration’s ability to defend the United States. Just as Europe was becoming a battleground, the President and his “prize idiot” of a secretary of state were continuing to tout the peacekeeping potential of arbitration treaties. “It is not a good