Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [264]
He was applauded for his willingness to admit fault. Fourteen months was about the length of Roosevelt’s campaign to make him a more interventionist figure in world affairs. Wilson did not indicate who, or what, had taught him his new defense philosophy. But he said he was for the immediate recruitment of a five-hundred-thousand-man “Continental” army, which would be voluntary, federally controlled, and supplementary to the National Guard. He also wanted “a proper and reasonable program for the increase of the navy.”
Wilson proceeded westward in his first campaign swing since 1912. He ventured with considerable courage into the heartland of isolationism, via pro-German Milwaukee to Kansas City and St. Louis, Missouri, the two most antiwar cities in the country. Graceful, smiling, elegant, and humorous, he demonstrated over and again a mastery of persuasive oratory. His sentences seemed to flow as if unpremeditated, but journalists transcribing them noticed his wizardry in qualifying every phrase likely to thrill interventionists with another that reaffirmed his love of peace. “You have laid upon me,” he would tell a crowd, “this double obligation: ‘We are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep us out of this war, but we are relying on you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the nation unstained.’ ” In St. Louis, he said, “I don’t want to command a great army,” before vowing to build up “incomparably the greatest navy in the world.”
Roosevelt marveled at Wilson’s Bach-like ability to combine every theme with its own inversion. He was an equivocator himself, but this kind of skill mocked his clumsy habit of balancing one thing against the other. Half in awe, he analyzed fifteen presidential policy statements through 10 February, and found that Wilson had taken forty-one different positions on preparedness. “Each of these 41 positions contradicted from 1 to 6 of the others. In many of the speeches, the weasel words of one portion took all the meaning out of the words used in another portion, and those latter words themselves had a weasel significance as regards yet other words.”
Hitherto, Roosevelt had made free with epithets like “skunk” and “prize jackass” in his private references to Wilson. But he had avoided calling him names in public. The temptation became overwhelming to do so now, with an insult that sounded slanderous, but which no lawyer with a large dictionary could find actionable. He chose the splendid noun logothete, which he had recently tried out on Edith Wharton. It had vague connotations of word-spinning, but in fact meant little more than a bureaucrat, or petty accountant in ancient Constantinople. That gave him an ideal qualifier. When Fear God and Take Your Own Part came out in the second week of February, it contained Roosevelt’s latest and funniest contribution to political invective. He wrote that the President’s self-justifications in alternately trying to cow and cuddle up to bandits south of the border were “worthy of a Byzantine logothete.”
The publication of Fear God coincided with the first anniversary of Wilson’s demand for “strict accountability” from Germany for any armed action hurtful to the United States. Roosevelt did not fail to mention this in his opening pages. He added the names of seven ships, other than the Lusitania, that had been sunk in the interim, with some two hundred Americans aboard. “If any individual finds satisfaction in saying that nevertheless this was ‘peace’ and not ‘war,’ it is hardly worth while arguing with him.”
ON 11 FEBRUARY, he and Edith sailed for the West Indies on a little steamer, the Guiana. Caribbean waters were not immune to U-boat attacks, but Roosevelt was in need of sunshine and rest. The ideological