Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [258]
Roosevelt spent Wednesday, 25 August, touring the encampment and watching exercises along the lakeshore. The training program as laid out by Wood was intense, compressing four years of regular army education into four weeks of dawn-to-dusk discipline. Men of all ages were learning how to drill, shoot, and run with forty-pound bags on their shoulders, until the oldest and plumpest were half dead from fatigue. Among them were “Lieutenant” John P. Mitchel, playing hookey from his peacetime job as mayor of New York. He was flanked by his police commissioner and a platoon of the city’s finest. “Corporal” Robert Bacon, the former ambassador to France (and since Louvain, one of the most urgent interventionists in the country), marched with “Private” James D. Perry, bishop of Rhode Island; “Corporal” Dick Little, the Chicago humorist; “Sergeant” Alfred R. Allen of the University of Pennsylvania medical facility; “Private” Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair; and “Private” Richard Harding Davis, the only man present who knew what it was like to be held prisoner by German soldiers. The rest of the regiment, divided into two battalions of eight companies apiece, consisted largely of bankers, lawyers, retailers, and former college jocks.
Wood was an astute political operator, mindful that the Republican presidential nomination in 1916 was wide open, and that further submarine attacks on Americans abroad might well change popular attitudes to the war. As a Harvard man himself, as well as a Medal of Honor winner, Rough Rider, colonial governor, and former chief of staff, he did not lack qualifications. He knew that cartoonists around the country were mocking his trainees as “TBMs”—tired businessmen playing at being soldiers. For those reasons he had gone out of his way to make the course so rigorous that they could not think of quitting, for fear of disgrace. In time, Wood hoped, these recruits would form the core of a highly professional military reserve.
Only the older ones could remember the days when he and Roosevelt had been among the most glamorous heroes of the Spanish-American War. Now, posing for an official photograph, they were both graying and portly, their tunics straining at every button. But they remained as physically contrasted as ever—Wood personifying his own name with a stance that might have been carved out of hickory, Roosevelt talking, smiling, and swiveling in small shoes and cavalry chaps.
“BOTH GRAYING AND PORTLY, THEIR TUNICS STRAINING AT EVERY BUTTON.”
TR and General Leonard Wood at Plattsburg, 25 August 1915. (photo credit i22.1)
The Colonel was in a jovial mood. He chowed with the regiment at sunset, eating as heartily as if he had been a rookie himself. Expectations were high that he would deliver a rambunctious after-dinner speech. He did not disappoint, firing off salvos of his new favorite word, poltroon, and abusing “college sissies” and “hyphenated Americans” with tooth-snapping vigor. To general hilarity, an Airedale terrier interrupted him by rolling on the grass and displaying.
“I like him,” Roosevelt said. “His present attitude is strictly one of neutrality.”
It was tempting to segue to an attack on Woodrow Wilson, but he avoided any personal references, not wanting to make things difficult for Wood. The administration was in a state of high tension over the Arabic incident, and Wilson was not likely to react kindly to criticism emanating from an army-sponsored program.
Reporters following him were not discouraged. They waited until the Colonel was just about to board his train home, and asked him directly if he supported the President. While still declining to name names, he said that any peace-loving prose stylist living in a house once inhabited by Abraham Lincoln should