Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [249]
ONE CONSEQUENCE OF the sinking of the Lusitania was that Barnes v. Roosevelt was swept off the front pages of newspapers everywhere, even in New York. Suddenly the squabbles of libel lawyers in a salt town upstate sounded petty and irrelevant, in contrast to cable stories of five-ton lifeboats skidding down the decks of the tilted liner, crushing passengers by the dozen, and dead blue babies being fished from the sea like mackerel.
Roosevelt was not sorry for the distraction. He felt that his case was going badly, and disliked having millions of people read Justice Andrews’s rulings against him. He was, besides, angered to the point of frenzy by Wilson’s Philadelphia speech. According to The New York Times, some four thousand people, many of them German-born, had roared support when the President talked about being “too proud to fight.” Stocks had surged next day, and editorials nationwide rejoiced that the administration was keeping a cool head in the crisis. William Randolph Hearst blustered that Germany had every right to sink a ship flying an enemy flag. Taft expressed relief and support of Wilson, in a rebuff to Roosevelt that was lavishly praised by The New York Times.
The Colonel raged against them all in a letter to his most militant son:
Dear Archie:
There is a chance of our going to war; but I don’t think it is much of a chance. Wilson and Bryan are cordially supported by all the hyphenated Americans, by the solid flubdub and pacifist vote. Every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead, every man whose god is money, or pleasure, or ease … is enthusiastically in favor of Wilson; and at present the good citizens, as a whole, are puzzled and don’t understand the situation, and so a majority of them also tend to be with him. This is not pardonable; but it is natural. As a nation, we have thought very little about foreign affairs; we don’t realize that the murder of the thousand men, women and children in the Lusitania is due, solely, to Wilson’s cowardice and weakness in failing to take energetic action when the Gulflight was sunk but a few days previously. He and Bryan are morally responsible for the loss of the lives of those American women and children—and for the lives lost in Mexico, no less than for the lives lost on the high seas. They are both of them abject creatures, and they won’t go to war unless they are kicked into it.
He was overwrought, but this kind of language appealed to Archie. The youth was already asking permission to quit Harvard and serve in an American expeditionary force to Europe, should Wilson decide to send one. Roosevelt did not see that happening soon. He was sure, nonetheless, that America would eventually enter the war.
Like most Northeasterners, he sympathized with the Allied cause, and admired Britain’s decision to stand by Belgium and France. Nevertheless, there was much that disturbed him about the blockade policy of the Royal Navy, which Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, frankly described as a tactic to “starve the whole [German] population—men, women and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.”
Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, the Kaiser’s personal spokesman in the United States, complained in a public statement that Britain had made the North Sea a war zone long before Germany, “in retaliation,” applied a similar designation to the other waters around England and Ireland. American travelers had been repeatedly warned that any vessel suspected of transporting contraband in that theater would be destroyed, whether large or small or belligerent or neutral. The master of the Gulflight had been delivering oil to France. As for the Lusitania, New York