Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [257]
If, on the other hand, it was resolved to tolerate no more Lusitanias, it should begin at once to build an army that did not take second place to that of Argentina, and embark on a program of universal military service like Switzerland’s. Preparedness was all. “No nation ever amounted to anything if its population was composed of pacifists and poltroons, if its sons did not have the fighting edge.”
He was listened to with respect by twenty thousand people, but they were unconvinced by his alarmism. It was the same when he repeated himself in San Diego.
“Colonel,” somebody asked him, “are you not inciting us to war?”
Eyes and teeth flashing, Roosevelt talked about going to Döberitz with the Kaiser. “If you had heard and seen what I saw when I was in Germany, you would feel just as I do.”
He headed home at the beginning of August with a clearer idea of the breadth and depth of American apathy about Europe. Then, in mid-month, the New York World published the first of a series of reports of secret German activities within the United States.
The article described plans to buy up all American plants exporting chlorine, so as to prevent France from matching the Reich’s poison-gas capability; sedition and sabotage in munitions factories; a vast secret propaganda campaign; and, most chillingly, the construction of time bombs programmed to blow up American ships. Several of the plotters were men known to Roosevelt, including Count Franz von Papen, the emissary who had brought him greetings from Wilhelm II the year before. The government at once moved to have Papen recalled to Germany. On the nineteenth, another British liner, the Arabic, was torpedoed as it sailed from Liverpool to New York. Two Americans died as it went down.
“The time for words on the part of this nation has long passed,” Roosevelt said in a public statement. “The time for deeds has come.”
A few days later he went upstate to visit the Plattsburg preparedness camp, where Ted, Dick Derby, Willard Straight, and a large number of friends were in their third week of military training. In egalitarian fashion, they called themselves “citizen soldiers,” but the tone of the gathering was distinctly Ivy League.
Ted noted with approval that more than half of his 1,400 fellow trainees were Harvard graduates. “I suppose some Yale men would fight if there was a war, but it is more clear than ever that Yale is the great middle class college, and the middle classes are not naturally gallant.”
Roosevelt was amused to see that his eldest son had only the rookie rank of “sergeant,” whereas Archie and Quentin, who had attended an earlier, five-week course for students, were graded as officer material. Ted’s clubby, pipe-puffing smugness was a running family joke. But there was no denying his will to succeed. Having entered business in a carpet mill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was now earning six figures as the coming young man at Bertron, Griscom & Co.
Sixteen rows of tents stretched for half a mile on the grounds of an army base that beautifully overlooked Lake Champlain. Roosevelt gazed with a historian’s eye at an ancient embankment at the eastern end of the reservation, and across the water to the Green Mountains of Vermont. He had minutely described the Battle of Plattsburg in his first book, The Naval War of 1812. Then, as now, he had been an apostle of preparedness: A miserly economy in preparation may in the end involve a lavish outlay of men and money which after all comes too late to do more than partially offset the evils.
The camp was run by Major General Leonard Wood, his fellow veteran of the Santiago campaign, and now commander of the U.S. Army’s Eastern Department. Wood, too, was a passionate preparedness man. He believed that young men of eighteen and over should be subjected to “universal, compulsory, military training … for two months a year for four years.” President Wilson