Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [254]
A swim was proposed one day, as the yacht drifted between two islands under the burning midday sun. Captain Sprinkle of the motorboat effectively cautioned that there was a large shark in the water. The critters tended to operate like U-boats, off landfalls.
Early the following evening, 10 June, a commission mail boat hove to alongside Roosevelt’s yacht, moored off Battledore Island, and the pilot shouted hot news from the Associated Press office in New Orleans: William Jennings Bryan had resigned as secretary of state. The President, apparently, had rejected his urgent pleas for a peaceable compromise with Germany over its submarine policy.
Roosevelt went into an instant frenzy. “This means war.” He demanded to be returned to the mainland, so that he could take the next train north and sign up for military service. But night had come on, and his companions had islands they still wanted him to see. The pilot came aboard and offered to relay any comment he cared to make back to the AP. Under the dim light of a lamp swinging in the cabin, Roosevelt scribbled a statement on coarse yellow paper: Of course I heartily applaud the decision of the President, and in common with all other Americans who are loyal to the traditions handed down by the men who served under Washington, and by the others who followed Grant and Lee in the days of Lincoln, I pledge him my heartiest support in all the steps he takes to uphold the honor and the interests of this great Republic which are bound up with the maintenance of democratic liberty and of a wise spirit of humanity among all the nations of mankind. Theodore Roosevelt.
He could have given second thought to a change in political attitude that was sure to be received with incredulity in Washington. But he allowed the pilot to go off with it next morning. Within twenty-four hours, his praise of Woodrow Wilson was a front-page story as far away as Fairbanks, Alaska.
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN was replaced by Robert Lansing, a rigidly correct bureaucrat who could not have been more of a contrast to the departing Commoner. Bryan had been agonizing since early February over the President’s haughty policy toward Germany. He knew, as few people did, that Lansing—formerly counselor at the State Department—was the original author of the phrase strict accountability, in a note draft that Wilson had approved. Those two words, Bryan felt, were seeds of war for the United States. They would eventually crack and grow. How, he asked, could Germany not feel discriminated against, in the face of the administration’s callow capitulation to the British naval blockade? What did a neutral power expect, if its citizens insisted on traveling aboard vessels as vulnerable as the Lusitania? As he put it, in a bitter reproach to the President, “Why be shocked at the drowning of a few people if there is to be no objection to starving a nation?”
Wilson was not used to that kind of bluntness, and Bryan had probably sealed his fate there and then. He was not a partisan of Germany. For all his much-mocked “grape juice diplomacy,” he had been the only high official in Washington who sincerely believed that Americans should be (in Wilson’s glib formula) “impartial in thought as well as in action … neutral in fact as well as in name.” The truth was that the administration’s anglophilia stopped just short of alliance. When Wilson pictured Europe, he saw Oxford’s dreaming spires. He could no more have sat on a charger at Döberitz, discussing field tactics with the Kaiser, than he could have held his own in the Hungarian parliament. “England is fighting our fight,” he told Joseph Tumulty. Lansing was strongly pro-Ally. Ambassador Walter Hines Page sucked up to Sir Edward Grey with the obsequiousness of an Andrew Carnegie. Colonel House took Texan satisfaction in being invited to stay on English country estates, and regularly advised Wilson that Germany was a menace to Anglo-American relations.
A hail of vituperation beat on Bryan’s bald