Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [262]
“I can understand how a man like T.R. might hate and despise a man like Wilson,” Baker wrote, “thinking him a mere academic theorist with no ‘red blood,’ but, in my judgment, the future lies with the Wilsons.”
Roosevelt was regretfully of the same opinion. He believed that during his own presidency, he could have aroused Americans to whatever degree of righteous anger a foreign provocation might justify. But they seemed to have lost their moral fiber under the administrations of Taft and Wilson—so much so, they were prepared to forget about Belgium and the Lusitania. He confessed to Kermit that during the last year he had begun to feel like a locomotive in a snowstorm. “I have accumulated so much snow on the cow catcher that it has brought me to a halt.… The majority of our people are bound now that I shall not come back into public life.”
He would not mind that, if only they would listen to him and not insult him by thinking he cared only for war. “I’m a domestic man,” he told Julian Street. “I have always wanted to be with Mrs. Roosevelt and my children, and now with my grandchildren. I’m not a brawler. I detest war. But if war came I’d have to go, and my four boys would go, too, because we have ideals in this family.”
It was quite natural, he said, that men whose patriotism had atrophied would allow a soothsayer like Wilson to furnish them an excuse to stay home. But he still believed that his own, much more direct appeals to the national sense of honor would prevail in the end—even if he shouted away the last remnants of his former presidential dignity.
Street, an unabashed hero-worshipper, asked him if he thought he had genius.
“Most certainly not. I’m no orator, and in writing I’m afraid I’m not gifted at all.…” Roosevelt pondered the question further, then said with a smile, “If I have anything at all resembling genius, it is the gift for leadership.”
TRUE TO HIS vow to keep crusading, he wrote another war volume while still checking the proofs of A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open. It consisted largely of diatribes against the administration that he had already published in Metropolitan magazine, updated and notched several tones higher on the shrillness scale. The opening chapter was new, and carried criticism of Woodrow Wilson to the verge of personal insult. He entitled it “Fear God and Take Your Own Part” (a quote from George Borrow), and tried some hot passages out at a conference of the National Americanization Committee in Philadelphia on 20 January. The choice of location was deliberate: Wilson had made his infamous “too proud to fight” address in that city, before another immigration-minded audience. Roosevelt was evidently setting himself as the President’s ideological foil, just as Republicans and Progressives were negotiating the possibility of uniting behind a fusion candidate in the spring.
If by doing so he meant to signal his own availability, he could not have more effectively encouraged isolationists, pacifists, hyphenated Americans, and other interest groups to unite behind someone else. Even those of his hearers who did fear God might have wondered if the Colonel’s personal deity was not Mars. He advocated military training in the nation’s high schools, followed by compulsory field service; a chain of new, federally financed munitions plants, located inland so as to be safe from seaboard attack; an accelerated naval construction program; and enlargement of the current seventy-four-thousand-man army to a force of a quarter of a million. As always when reading from a typescript, he improvised freely, hurling regular insults at all persons lacking manly qualities.
The Washington Post awarded him four of its seven front-page lead columns the next morning (the other stories being a declaration by the King of Greece that nobody could win in Europe, a report of hand-to-hand fighting between Russians and Austrians on the Bessarabian front, and