Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [275]
Strength would appear to be required in Mexico, since General Carranza, the de facto ruler of that country, was objecting to Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa, and as a sign of displeasure, had just killed fourteen American soldiers. He had also taken twenty-three prisoners. Clearly Pershing was going to need massive reinforcements. Roosevelt donned the imaginary uniform of a major general and cast about for recruiters. “I don’t believe this administration can be kicked into war, for Wilson seems about as much a milksop as Bryan,” he wrote Seth Bullock. “But there is, of course, the chance that he may be forced to fight. If so, are you too old to raise a squadron of cavalry in South Dakota?”
He was concerned that Kermit, who was in New York pending reassignment to another foreign branch of National City Bank, was the only one of his sons who had not had the benefit of military training at Plattsburg in 1915. General Wood was running a similar camp this summer, and the other boys were already registered for it. Kermit could try to catch up with them by joining the “TBM” program in July.
Roosevelt underestimated the President’s willingness to go to war in Mexico. “The break seems to have come,” Wilson privately concluded. But before he and his new secretary of war, Newton D. Baker, could agree on a plan of action, Carranza released the prisoners and offered to negotiate terms that would permit Pershing to continue operations.
COINCIDENTALLY, AN ENGLISH infantryman going into battle on the Somme on the first day of July used Wilson’s phrase, the break, to describe his feeling, as twenty-one thousand men fell dead around him, that what was left of the pre-war world and its values had finally split and fallen apart. Memory was not erased so much as made irrelevant, in the face of Maxim-gun fire that drilled efficiently through line after line of uniforms. Even at Verdun (where French and German soldiers were now reduced to hand-to-hand combat in caves) there had never been such butchery as this.
CARRANZA’S PEACE GESTURE did not slow Roosevelt’s drive to raise a volunteer division. When the War Department heard about it, Secretary Baker was more amused than angry. On 6 July, having received an encouraging flood of applications, the Colonel formally requested authority to proceed with recruitment. His letter to Baker was less boastful and more detailed than the one he had sent President Taft at the time of the first Mexican troubles, and he dropped none of the distinguished names, military and civilian, he had already settled on for command posts. The influence of his younger son was detectable in a proposal to create “one motor-cycle regiment with machine guns … an engineering regiment, [and] an aviation squadron.”
Baker referred his letter to the adjutant general of the army, who replied, much as Taft had done, that “in the event of war with Mexico,” the administration would consider his offer.
Roosevelt, fretful and still coughing with dry pleurisy, had said nothing about wanting to fight anywhere else in the world. But his current reading included the military memoirs of Baron Grivel in French. He also wrote an article for Collier’s Weekly entitled “Lafayettes of the Air: Young Americans Who Are Flying for France.”
ON 4 AUGUST, Miss Flora Whitney, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the owner of Metropolitan magazine, came out in Newport. In local parlance, she was the “first bud” of the debutante season. Five hundred guests danced fox-trots in the blue-and-gold ballroom of the Whitney mansion on Bellevue Avenue,