Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [229]
The war had wrought such havoc with ocean traffic that it was not possible to get to Buenos Aires from New York except by crossing to Liverpool and reembarking from there. Hence the double departure of the two young couples from New York on 26 September.
Edith said goodbye to them in bright, windy weather. The Colonel was off on another campaign tour, this time of the Midwest. She hated his absence and knew that he did too. Fortunately he had his voice back, and looked well again, although he complained often of rheumatism. Having encouraged him to found the Progressive Party in 1912, she could not complain about him taking, as he put it, “a violent part in the obsequies.” But with him gone, Quentin back at Groton, and Archie at Harvard, Sagamore Hill was a lonely place. Edith’s only company was a baby that slept fifteen hours a day. She occupied herself, as she had since childhood, with incessant reading.
As he traveled, Roosevelt pondered the text of an extraordinary letter from Sir George Otto Trevelyan:
I have something special to tell you. In the course of the last nine or ten months I have been brought into singularly intimate relations with a new class of American friends belonging to the Democratic party; and I have entertained here, or have received long and spontaneous letters from, old friends and acquaintances of the Republican party who did not support you at the last election. Three distinguished Democrats, two of them public men, and the other of exceptional literary and educational note … talked with me freely of your immense administrative power and success—as evinced in such questions as the Panama Canal, the Russian and Japanese war, the Labour troubles, and other like matters—and they all spoke of, and seemed to sympathize with, the widespread affection which your countrymen feel for you. The Republicans, men of the highest eminence, held the same [opinion]. They seemed in this respect to share the sentiment of a great mass of their party.…
The deduction I draw from these conversations and letters is a conviction that 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. I may be biased in this matter by my own regard for you, and my earnest desire to see you at the center of the world’s affairs; but, after all, that is on my part no ignoble motive.
Trevelyan had never quite recovered from being the recipient of the Colonel’s gigantic epistle describing his “royal” tour of Europe in the spring of 1910. It and dozens more in their long correspondence demonstrated a mastery of foreign affairs that made the old historian dream of having Roosevelt back in the White House. Other representatives, official and unofficial, of the belligerent nations exhibited a similar desire, as the war on all sides lost momentum and gained in ferocity. Each believed they had his sympathy. Count Albert Apponyi and Baron Hengelmüller, the retired Austrian ambassador to Washington, wrote pleading the causes respectively of Budapest and Vienna. Sir Edward Grey asked him to receive J. M. Barrie and A. E. W. Mason, two English writers touring America as propagandists for His Majesty’s Government. Rudyard Kipling reported that female Belgian refugees in Britain were thankful to have been only raped by German soldiers, not executed as well. “Frankly we are aghast at there being no protest from the U.S.” The antisemitic Cecil Spring Rice complained that Oscar Straus and other wealthy Jews were preaching pacifism at the White House, so that Wall Street would