Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [261]
Quentin had joined his brother at Harvard, and the diaspora of the Roosevelt children was now complete. Dispersed, too, were any present hopes that the Colonel may have entertained of prevailing in his campaign to warn Americans of their folly in supporting a President too proud to fight. It was obvious to all political observers that Wilson would run for, and probably win, reelection next year on the merits of a foreign policy that seemed to gratify 90 percent of the country—“waging peace.” Once again Roosevelt found himself shouting into a wind that bore his words back at him, mostly unheard.
And once again he turned to writing for solace. Quentin (who had already stocked his bookcase in Cambridge with copies of George Canning’s Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, Austen Layard’s Nineveh and Its Remains, and a life of Genghis Khan) was to be his literary correspondent, just as Kermit had once been the recipient of his presidential posterity letters. Roosevelt had been pleased to discover, during Quentin’s last year at Groton, that the boy was something of a scribe himself, the author of some imaginative prose pieces in the school magazine. “He is maturing rapidly, and is really a very successful person.”
As a token of their camaraderie as men of the pen, Roosevelt confided that Charles Scribner had declined first serial rights on two chapters of the new book “which I thought were the best.” He now had eleven chapters nearly ready. Many were pieces he had published as periodical articles, and since they all dealt with nature or literature in varying degrees, he decided to group them under the ungainly title, A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. He lavished particular care on an account of his visit to the Breton bird sanctuary last June. The result was the most eloquent of all his writings on conservation.
The extermination of the passenger-pigeon meant that mankind was just so much poorer; exactly as in the case of the destruction of the cathedral at Reims. And to lose the chance to see frigate-birds soaring in circles above the storm, or a flight of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset; or a myriad terns flashing in the bright light of midday as they hover in a shifting maze above the beach—why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.
“A FLIGHT OF PELICANS WINGING THEIR WAY HOMEWARD.”
Bird life on Breton Island, Louisiana, photographed during TR’s visit. (photo credit i22.2)
CHAPTER 23
The Man Against the Sky
The shadow fades, the light arrives,
And ills that were concealed are seen.
IN THE NEW YEAR of 1916 the one journalist in America who knew Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson equally well tried to sum up their essential differences. “With T.R.,” Ray Stannard Baker wrote, “the executive spirit comes first. The temptation for Wilson is to think and express too much—that of T.R. to act too much. Wilson works with ideas, T.R. directly with men.”
Expanding his comparison, Baker observed that whereas Wilson the rationalist sought to persuade by argument, Roosevelt “like an angry boy” wanted to shout down all those who disagreed with him. “In the present crisis T.R. is appealing to every kind of emotion … anything to stampede the nation into terror of war and great armaments.”
Baker worried that Germany’s continuing reluctance to atone for the Lusitania incident, combined with the arrogance of the British in searching and seizing American freighters destined for any ports but their own, had brought the freedom-of-the-seas issue to a head—and with it, such divisive questions as preparedness and military intervention, sure to be debated in the coming presidential campaign. Like most of his countrymen, Baker was opposed to any thought of going to war overseas, and hoped that Wilson was too. Offensive strategy was not the President’s forte: his