Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [265]
The difference this time was that some of the supplicants were coming from conservative quarters. It had been observed on Wall Street that Roosevelt the Metropolitan columnist was no longer the progressive ideologue he had been in his early days at The Outlook. His attitudes toward corporatism and inherited wealth had definitely inched rightward since he became aware, around the time of Plattsburg, that many bankers and industrialists (above all arms manufacturers, raking in mountains of Allied money) were as keen on intervention as he was.
Roosevelt still talked about federal control of competition, sounding like one of his shellac discs from 1912. But the kind of restraints he now spelled out in print were so pro-business they could have been—and possibly were—dictated by George W. Perkins. Government commissions, he now held, would ensure “ample profit” for industrial investors and greater efficiency “along German lines.” If certain corporations engaged in foreign trade were “Americanized” (a euphemism for nationalized), their earnings would increase, and they would be more responsive when their resources were urgently called for.
Another sign of Rooseveltian recidivism was the Colonel’s new willingness to treat the new-money crowd with respect. Through Metropolitan magazine, he had made friends with Harry Payne Whitney, the kind of sporty millionaire he once despised. He allowed Judge Elbert H. Gary of U.S. Steel and seventeen fellow plutocrats to fete him privately in New York, and was also guest of honor at a secretive luncheon at the Harvard Club, hosted by the publishing magnate Robert Collier. Downtown rumors alleged that “Teddy” was being groomed for another presidential run, this time as a Republican.
Roosevelt told the truth about the meetings to his latest confidant, John J. Leary, Jr., of the New York Tribune, on the understanding that he not be named as a source. “Behind it all, I believe, was a desire of these men—all Americans, men who have done things and are doing big things, men who have a stake in the country—to take counsel together on the big problem of national preparedness.” Far from asking or accepting their political support, he had told them that if the GOP in 1916 adopted a “hyphenated” platform, or nominated a candidate on the strength of “mongrel” promises, he, Theodore Roosevelt, would campaign for the reelection of President Wilson. “And, by Godfrey, I mean it!”
Leary understood the Colonel’s adjectives to refer to anything or anyone that compromised America’s duty to defend democracy around the world. Wilson at least half-recognized that duty now. “I dislike his policies almost to the point of hate,” Roosevelt said, “but I am too good an American to stand by and see him beaten by a mongrel American.”
IF EDITH HOPED that a seven-week cruise would take her husband’s mind off Europe, she forgot that most of the islands of the Lesser Antilles belonged to Britain or France, and were therefore as obsessed with the war as he was. As the Guiana steamed south, it frequently encountered armored cruisers of the Royal and French navies. A constant guard was being maintained against reincarnations of the German raider Karlsruhe, which had terrorized the entire Caribbean in 1914, before blowing up mysteriously off Barbados.
When Roosevelt stepped ashore on Martinique on 22 February, he found himself on French soil. The island was a département of the Republic and, in local opinion, indistinguishable from it. Fort-de-France had just been advised, by cable, of a German attack on the city of Verdun that was going beyond all previous extremes of military violence. The governor of Martinique welcomed Roosevelt with commensurate solemnity, and thanked him for his long crusade for the Allied cause. Not