Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [250]
Roosevelt knew Dernburg, and five months before had agreed with him that a great nation “fighting for its life” must do what was essential to defend itself and feed itself. But he scoffed at Dernburg’s insistence that the rape of Belgium had been “an absolute necessity.” Nor did he see that any civilized power had the right to sink ships, whatever their cargo, by means of submarines unable to rescue innocent passengers.
Now that the inevitable calamity had occurred, Roosevelt felt that he had no alternative but to support English democracy against Prussian autocracy. It was not a palatable choice, given Britain’s own arrogance at sea. But at last report, Allied forces had not yet drowned any babies or torched any universities.
He decided that he and his sons would show publicly that they had a different idea of pride than Woodrow Wilson. A monthlong “preparedness” camp to train civilians for military duty was scheduled to take place in Plattsburg, New York, in August. Leaving Ted to sign up for himself, Roosevelt put down the names of Archie and Quentin. He promised that he would visit the camp personally and advertise it to the world in his journalism.
Meanwhile, Barnes v. Roosevelt dragged on into its fourth week.
THE PRESIDENT REGRETTED his gaffe in Philadelphia, and tried to get it deleted from the official transcript of his speech. He claimed that he been expressing “a personal attitude.” But to some ears, There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight had the same smug sound as his confession over the bodies of the marines who died at Vera Cruz: There are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire.
On 13 May, his note responding to the Lusitania disaster was cabled to James W. Gerard, the American ambassador in Berlin. Gerard had been expecting to be recalled, preparatory to a complete severance of diplomatic relations. Instead, he found himself charged with the delivery of a polite document appealing to the peaceable emotions of the Kaiser’s war cabinet.
Wilson stated that the situation was “grave.” He reported that several recent German attacks upon his countrymen at sea, traveling freely as was their privilege, had caused “concern, distress, and amazement” in the United States. Over a hundred Americans had died aboard the Lusitania; his administration was “loath to believe” that the U-boat commander responsible could have been obeying orders. The man must have been “under a misapprehension” of “the high principles of equity” for which Prussian war planners were famed. Making no mention of Belgium, the President praised Germany’s long-standing “humane and enlightened attitude … in matters of international right.” Surely Germans must agree that underwater attacks upon any merchantman, neutral or belligerent, were going “much beyond the ordinary methods of warfare at sea.”
He granted that the action of certain adversaries who sought “to cut Germany off from all commerce” had forced the Reich to resort to extraordinary countermeasures. But the United States was not responsible for either policy. It declined to surrender its travel and trading rights as a neutral nation. Wilson felt obliged to repeat that he held Germany “to a strict accountability for any infringement of those rights, intentional or incidental.” He was confident that the Imperial Government would “disavow” the attacks he complained of, make appropriate reparations, and promise that no such outrages would happen again.
The note won general approval, especially in Britain, when its text was