Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [263]
Wilson remained impassive. “The way to treat an adversary like Roosevelt,” he said, “is to gaze at the stars over his head.”
THE COLONEL LIKED his rabble-rousing chapter title so much that he decided to apply it to his whole war book. Fear God and Take Your Own Part was rushed to press in advance of A Book-Lover’s Holidays. Its main theme, preparedness, had become the issue of the hour.
For as long as Britain and France had seemed to be holding their own in Europe, the great majority of Americans who were pro-Allies had winked at Wilson’s policy of being “neutral in fact as well as in name.” They realized that, with Bryan gone, the word neutral implied a prejudice toward Germany on the part of the administration that stopped just short of provocation. Ominously, though, the winter so far had been a season of triumph for the Central Powers, now buttressed by Turkey. British forces were routed at Gallipoli, besieged in Mesopotamia, and outmaneuvered in East Africa. The Western Front was impregnably defended by Germany, and Serbia and Bosnia lay helpless in the grip of Austria-Hungary. At latest count, France had lost two and a half million men. Eight Russian armies were beaten back in the East, while Bolshevism smoldered like an underground fire beneath the palaces of St. Petersburg—or Petrograd, as that city now called itself. The Japanese were allies—of sorts—to Britain and France in the Far East, but since seizing Kiaochow had shown themselves to be rapacious for territory and natural resources. Roosevelt warned that their sophisticated new battleships posed a long-term threat to the U.S. Navy.
Almost to his disbelief, he found that an appreciable minority of Americans were beginning to listen to him. With the phrase world war replacing European war in everyday speech, he no longer sounded like the lonely saber-rattler of last May. Even pacifists had to agree that the globe was smaller and more dangerous, now that two oceans were mixing at Panama, and Zeppelins floating across the English Channel to bomb Londoners. Day by day, paper by paper, America’s editorial writers acknowledged the wisdom of taking at least some of the defense precautions shouted for by the Colonel.
And not only him: over the past half-year, several of Roosevelt’s literary friends had issued alarums as urgent as his own. Frederic Louis Huidekoper’s scholarly history, Military Unpreparedness, was the bible of the Plattsburg movement. Owen Wister’s bestselling The Pentecost of Calamity, an anguished dirge to the death of German liberalism, compared the obliteration of the University of Louvain to the fate awaiting democracy itself, if Prussians in jackboots were to despoil the rest of Europe. Edith Wharton’s Fighting France testified to the willingness of millions of poilus to die for the culture enshrined at Reims and Chartres.
Hearing these voices, Woodrow Wilson became a reluctant convert to the cause of preparedness. His enthusiasm for men in uniform remained slight, but he acknowledged the need for increased defense spending, if only to reassure Americans that he would keep the country secure. The moment had come, he announced at a dinner of railroad executives in New York on 27 January, for decisive action. “Does anybody understand the time?”
Wilson paused for effect. A gigantic Stars and Stripes hung tentlike over his head, covering the entire ceiling of the Waldorf ballroom. His new wife watched adoringly from an upper gallery. “Perhaps when you learned,” the President said, “that