Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [260]
Springy and Jules regretted more than the loss of their beloved “Nannie.” They were mourning an era when their respective countries had been proud and inviolate and not hemorrhaging youth. Now all was disorder and death. Golden Rule diplomacy had given way to a new, scientific barbarism that burned libraries, dropped bombs out of the sky, cast babies into the sea, poisoned the very air that troops breathed, and—in its latest nihilistic advance—invented a flamethrower that vaporized men on the spot. War, once movement, had become stasis. Emperors had little sway. The world’s richest and most resourceful country would do nothing to stop its rivals from damaging one another to the point that they all had to be saved. Was that what Wilson was waiting for? Or was he just, as Roosevelt complained to Edith Wharton, a “shifty, adroit, and selfish logothete,” interested only in being reelected next year?
The man was unreachable to all of them, unreadable. In the first months of his presidency, Wilson had impressed the world at large as an inspiring new American voice, less preachy than Roosevelt, more self-confident than Taft. As James Bryce had remarked then, “Terse, clear and vigorous diction is extremely rare in this country.… When it is heard, and especially when it is accompanied by a certain imaginative or emotional color it produces an effect great in its proportion to its rarity.” The language was still terse, and clear when Wilson wanted it to be, but his preference for prose rather than speech, for stately notes laced with subtle qualifications and dispatched while he himself remained unseen, had vitiated his once full-bodied image. The President sounded, in short, not quite human.
“All these letters to Germany!” Roosevelt snorted to Julian Street. “Of late I have come almost to the point of loathing a bee-you-ti-ful, pol-ished dic-tion!”
Actually, the President’s most recent note to Count Jagow was more blunt than polished, going to the limit of diplomatic courtesy in stating that Germany’s failure, so far, to apologize and pay reparations for the Lusitania tragedy was “very unsatisfactory,” and that any further “illegal and inhuman” attack upon Americans traveling freely on the high seas would be regarded as “deliberately unfriendly.”
On 5 October, Wilson was rewarded with a partial capitulation by Germany. Ambassador Bernstorff stated that his government was prepared to pay indemnity for the American lives “which, to its deep regret, have been lost on the Arabic,” and announced that German submarines would in future operate under orders “so stringent that the recurrence of [such] incidents … is considered out of the question.”
Representatives of all shades of opinion hailed the news as a triumph for the President. The chorus of praise drowned out a few cautionary voices pointing out that Germany had still not atoned for the sinking of the Lusitania, nor had it abandoned its submarine strategy. Even so, Wilson had been successful in his negotiations so far—what Roosevelt scornfully called “waging peace”—and clearly deserved the support of the American people as he continued to demand guarantees of their neutrality and safety.
In addition to which, he now had a claim to their personal good wishes. On the day after the German concession, Wilson announced that he was engaged to Mrs. Edith Bolling Galt.
“I AM GIVING CERTAIN finishing touches to a book which Scribners will publish next spring,” Roosevelt wrote Quentin on 18 October. Outside his study window, the trees