Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [271]
That time had now come, Wilson said. “The government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue, and that unless the Imperial German government should immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, this government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the government of the German Empire altogether.”
He made clear that he was not asking, but expecting all legislators present to approve a decision which could well lead to war. He managed to do this with a winning combination of self-confidence and chagrin. As he folded up his script he caught the grave expression of William J. Stone, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and said, “I hope you do not feel as sad as I feel.”
The applause that accompanied his exit from the chamber was noticeably louder than that which had greeted him.
ROOSEVELT WAS ONE of the minority of Americans who did not admire the President’s masterly address. Even if Germany backed down, he said, it would only prove that Wilson should have forced the issue fourteen months before, thus saving the lives of many women and children, and making imperative a national preparedness program.
He seemed to realize that however the Wilhelmstrasse reacted, he had lost a lot of his rhetorical ground as a proponent of forceful policymaking. Which meant, he wrote his sister Bamie, “there is in my judgment hardly any chance that the Republican convention will turn to me.” He was not going to declare himself a candidate: his only message now was preparedness. There was a danger that even that theme had been co-opted by the wily President. “Mere outside preaching and prophecy tend after a while to degenerate into a scream … and I am within measurable distance of that point.”
On 4 May, just three days before the Lusitania anniversary, Count Jagow replied to the President’s ultimatum with a promise that German submarine commanders would henceforth honor the rights of all noncombatants at sea. In return, he expected America to insist that Great Britain show an equal respect for international maritime law. Secretary Lansing replied that the United States “could not for a moment entertain” such a presumption on its relations with another country. Helpless, Jagow lapsed into silence. Wilson’s triumph was complete. An early move among isolationist Democrats to oppose his renomination with Champ Clark faded.
And so, much more slowly, did the Progressive/Republican boom for Roosevelt. He took a flying trip to Detroit to assail Henry Ford’s pacifism, and at the end of May traveled to Kansas City to deliver a Memorial Day address apparently designed to antagonize every hyphenated citizen in the country. “I have been enthusiastically received,” he wrote Fanny Parsons, “—save for one playful Latin-American gentleman who threw a knife at me.”
Ray Stannard Baker visited Wilson in the White House and asked him directly whom he would prefer to campaign against in the fall—Roosevelt or Hughes.
“It matters very little,” said the President, serene as ever. “Roosevelt deals in personalities and does not argue upon facts and conditions. One does not need to meet him at all. Hughes is of a different type. If he is nominated he will have to be met.”
Wilson’s major address of the month, before the League to Enforce Peace, took up the theme Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Andrew Carnegie, Roosevelt, Taft, and many other oracles had sounded in their differing ways over the past six years: that of a new international organization with power to prevent all future wars. Such a body, he said, should respect the right of all members, small and large, to determine their own destiny, while remaining inviolate for one another. “So sincerely do we believe