Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [237]
OUR PEACEMAKER, THE NAVY
PREPAREDNESS AGAINST WAR
UTOPIA OR HELL?
SUMMING UP
It was unfortunate that Roosevelt, in his haste to cram together articles originally published separately, had not blended them into a more sequential argument. America and the World War had some passages of real power, especially in pieces written after the election, when all gloves were off. His call for a posse comitatus, or central police force of neutral nations, sounded all the more urgent now that the Hague tribunal had adjourned for the duration of the war. It was unfortunate, though, that he used the word posse, which invited jokes about his youth in the Wild West even though he construed it as Latin. He insisted that he was not advocating unilateral armed action by the United States, only its commitment (perhaps as the founding member) to a postwar peacekeeping league. “I ask those individuals who think of me as a firebrand to remember that during the seven and a half years I was President not a shot was fired at any soldier of a hostile nation by any American soldier or sailor, and there was not so much as a threat of war.… The blood recently shed at Vera Cruz … had no parallel during my administration.”
He poured scorn on Wilson and Taft for allegedly neglecting the navy since he left office. As a result, the Great White Fleet of 1909 was now underfunded and demoralized. The condition of the army was even worse: it numbered only 80,804 officers and men, half of whom were deployed overseas. Yet Wilson, in his latest message to Congress, had scorned preparedness and declared that the United States was secure. This enabled Roosevelt to demolish some of the approving comments that had followed:
Mr. Bryan came to his support with hearty enthusiasm and said: “The President knows that if this country needed a million men, and needed them in a day, the call would go out at sunrise and the sun would go down on a million men in arms.” … I once heard a Bryanite senator put Mr. Bryan’s position a little more strongly. [He] announced that we needed no regular army, because in the event of war “ten million freemen would spring to arms, the equals of any regular soldiers in the world.” I do not question the emotional or oratorical sincerity either of Mr. Bryan or of the senator. Mr. Bryan is accustomed to performing in vacuo; and both he and President Wilson, as regards foreign affairs, apparently believe they are living in a world of two dimensions, and not in the actual workaday world, which has three dimensions.…
If the senator’s ten million men sprang to arms at this moment, they would have at the outside some four hundred thousand modern rifles at which to spring. Perhaps six hundred thousand more could spring to squirrel pieces and fairly good shotguns. The remaining nine million men would have to spring to axes, scythes, hand-saws, gimlets, and similar arms.
In his summary chapter, looking back at the events of late July 1914, Roosevelt wrote, “I feel in the strongest way that we should have interfered, at least to the extent of the most emphatic diplomatic protest at the very outset [of the war] and then by whatever further action was necessary, in regard to the violation of the neutrality of Belgium.” He thus made it plain that had he been in the White House, he would have been willing to resort to force, on the same grounds that Britain had cited. Wilson would argue that the United States had no treaty obligation to do anything of the kind, but Roosevelt considered its endorsement of The Hague conventions of 1897 and 1907 to be binding. “As President,” he boasted, “I ordered the signature of the United States to these conventions.”
Elihu Root was no longer at his elbow to remind him, with a sarcastic smile, that his enthusiasm for both documents had been slight. But as Roosevelt pointed out in his peroration, there had been epic changes since then.
In the terrible whirlwind of the war all the great nations of the world, save the United States and Italy, are facing the supreme test of their history.* … Yet,