Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [233]
Roosevelt had received similar reports, and worse, from Kipling and other witnesses better informed than his credulous daughter. All wanted to convince him that German soldiers on the warpath were Neanderthal in their savagery. The Colonel reserved judgment on most of their stories. Mutilated soldiers were what a nurse should be expected to see, thirty miles from the front in wartime. But Ethel had plainly only heard about handless little boys, as Kipling had only heard about rapes and mass executions. “My experience in the Spanish war has taught me that there is a tendency to exaggerate such outrages,” Roosevelt wrote him.
He granted that when millions were at war, “some thousands of unspeakable creatures will commit unspeakable acts,” but did not see that nationality was any constraint. He reminded Kipling that even so patriotic a historian as William Lecky had found that “frightful atrocities” were committed by English soldiers in the Irish uprising of 1798, and that in 1900, Britain’s current allies, the French and the Russians, had behaved abominably on the march to Peking. In an admission he would never have made before he met Natalie Curtis, he added: “I have known Americans do unspeakable acts against Indians.”
Ethel’s letter, all the same, brought the war home in a personal way that made him forget, at Princeton, his promise not to make it a campaign issue. The fact that the university’s former president was now President of the United States may also have prompted him to launch into an impassioned speech on preparedness that had his audience, mainly students, cheering vociferously.
ON 3 NOVEMBER, the Progressive Party lost all its state contests except in California, where Hiram Johnson was reelected. Only one Progressive kept his seat in the House of Representatives. Nationwide, the Party registered just two million votes—half its strength in 1912—to six million apiece for the two major parties. This was good news to the GOP, an effectively leaderless force that regained many of its defectors from 1912. But it was not good news to Woodrow Wilson, who had hoped those defectors would vote Democratic, as a show of confidence in him. He was still far from popular. A prolonged recession had disillusioned the electorate with New Freedom, and by extension, New Nationalism. In a post-election poll of nine thousand “leading men of the country” by The Lawyer and Banker, Wilson came second to Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane as their preferred Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1916. And Lane was far behind their favorite Republican, Charles Evans Hughes.
Of the twelve names polled, Theodore Roosevelt came in last, with only 11 votes to Hughes’s 1,584. Having made a career out of attacking precisely the combination embodied in the phrase Lawyer and Banker, he could not expect readers of such a magazine to rank him much higher, even if he was a declared candidate. Still, he had just participated in his third failed campaign in five years—confessedly an “utter and hopeless one” as far as Progressivism was concerned. His words from a past moment of triumph resounded hollowly: We, here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men.
Once again the Colonel returned to a Sagamore Hill deserted by politicians and reporters. Little Richard was pining for Ethel. So was he. She gave off and attracted more love than any other of his children. “I wish I could stroke your neck and hair,” he wrote her. Happily, both Derbys would be back home in time for Christmas. Alice was likely to be less difficult, this festive season, now that Nick had been reelected to Congress.