Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [238]
For us to assume superior virtues in the face of the war-worn nations of the Old World will not make us more acceptable as mediators among them.… The storm that is raging in Europe is terrible and evil; but it is also grand and noble. Untried men who live at ease will do well to remember that there is a certain sublimity even in Milton’s defeated archangel, but none whatever in the spirits who kept neutral, who remained at peace, and dared side neither with hell nor with heaven.
WISTER WAS ONE of several friends who saw, with varying degrees of alarm, that Roosevelt’s obsession with the war had darkened his personality. David Goodrich, a fellow veteran of the Santiago campaign, went riding with him, and noticed that he kept swinging his half-blind head as he scoped out the icy countryside. He was playing the German game of Kriegsspiel—imagining battlefields and figuring out how to deploy troops across them. Hamlin Garland visited him in his new office at Metropolitan magazine and found him distinctly older in looks and demeanor. His eyes were dull, and his manner subdued. “He will never run for President again,” the novelist lamented. “That he may never lose his sense of humor is my prayer.”
Finley Peter Dunne, a fellow contributor to Metropolitan, caught the Colonel on a more spirited day, dictating an article to a stenographer. Dunne was put off by the hectoring tone of his sentences, so at odds with the literary grace he was capable of. At a pause in the dictation, Dunne told Roosevelt he felt his recent pieces were unworthy of him.
TR (laughing) They read all right to me.
DUNNE But you’re no judge. You are damaging your reputation as a writer. Look at those wonderful things you wrote about your experiences in South America.
TR Oh well (laughing), you must suit your implement to your subject. A pen is all right for a naturalist, with a poetic strain in him.
DUNNE A what?
TR A poetic strain. You didn’t know I had it, but I have and I can use it at times. But when you are dealing with politics you feel that you have your enemy in front of you and you must shake your fist at him and roar the Gospel of Righteousness in his deaf ear.
Shortly afterward, Dunne left Metropolitan to write for Collier’s. He took with him the memory of Roosevelt marching up and down, “striking his palm with a clenched fist and shouting an article that no one but himself ever read.”
WOODROW WILSON MAY HAVE been isolated by grief that February, but he was not immobilized by it. He fully understood that he had to do something soon to revise his definition of neutrality, in the view of growing tensions between the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. “We cannot remain isolated in this war,” he said to Joseph Tumulty, “for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our own shores. On the one side Mr. Bryan will censure the administration for being too militaristic, and on the other we will find Mr. Roosevelt criticizing us because we are too pacifist in our tendencies.”
On 4 February, the German government issued a shipping advisory so menacing that Wilson had to reply in a similar tone. The issue was America’s protectionist policy toward England, under which it exported prodigious quantities of munitions there for war use. Technically, such cargo was contraband and subject to seizure by German warships. But since the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic, the arms flow might have been on a conveyor belt. Britain had begun to take further advantage of her naval superiority to seize American vessels carrying non-contraband goods to Germany. Sir Edward Grey insisted with a straight face that because the Reich had placed flour, wheat, and corn in official