Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [231]
I suppose that few of them now hold that there was value in the “peace” which was obtained by the concert of European powers when they prevented interference with Turkey [in 1894–1896] while the Turks butchered some hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women and children. In the same way I do not suppose that even the ultrapacifists really feel that “peace” is triumphant in Belgium at the present moment. President Wilson has been much applauded by all the professional pacifists because he has announced that our desire for peace must make us secure it for ourselves by a neutrality so strict as to forbid our even whispering a protest against wrong-doing, lest such whispers might cause disturbance to our ease and well-being. We pay the penalty of this action—or rather, supine inaction—by forfeiting the right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present.
The last two sentences were too provocative for Lawrence Abbott, who cut the one about Wilson, and deleted the sarcastic clause in the other. Roosevelt was not the only eminent person to speak out against the administration’s apathy on the Belgian issue—William Dean Howells and Senator John Sharp Williams of Mississippi were just as disapproving—but he was, after all, the President’s most visible political opponent, and might deter Wilson from coming around slowly to Belgium’s side.
Roosevelt emphasized that he was not advocating military intervention. Americans, he wrote, had no quarrel with any of the belligerents, although the Japanese (perpetually resentful of “yellow peril” prejudice in California) needed watching. The United States was therefore in a position to try to bring about peace. Whoever represented it in negotiations (he was careful not to ascribe that privilege exclusively to Wilson) should make clear that Congress would not tolerate any accord that compromised the national security.
The only possible good he saw coming out of the current conflict was a spread of democracy in Europe, or “at least a partial substitution of the rule of the people for the rule of those who esteem it their God-given right to govern the people.” He noted approvingly that socialist parties in the belligerent countries had all backed the decisions of their governments to fight. Having watched old Franz Joseph rinse and spit, and marveled at the Kaiser’s ignorance, and marched among all the monarchs now bridling at one another, he felt it would be a good thing if most of their crowns toppled.
Probably, after the war, there would be an increase in the number of international disputes submitted to justice, because justice was what democracy aspired to. But what court should administer it? Roosevelt, coming to the end of his long essay, echoed what he had said to the Nobel Prize committee about the impotence of the Hague tribunal. Work must begin at once to replace it with “an efficient world league” for peacekeeping. “Surely the time ought to be ripe for the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized military powers to back righteousness by force.”
RUMORS BEGAN TO CIRCULATE that private citizens lobbying for an American peace committee thought that Theodore Roosevelt would be the ideal person to press for a diplomatic settlement of the war. The New York Times reported that Oscar Straus was spending many hours with the Colonel, both in New York and Oyster Bay, and that both men were cagey about their discussions. Sources in Washington were quoted as acknowledging that Roosevelt had “a thorough knowledge of the conditions in Europe,” and enjoyed cordial friendships with many of the belligerent leaders, particularly Wilhelm II.
These qualifications also occurred to the editor of the mass-market New York World. He sent a representative, John N. Wheeler, to Oyster Bay to ask if the Colonel would be willing to go abroad as a war correspondent, at