Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [279]
Early the next morning, Sunday, SOS signals from the sea lane off Nantucket began to bombard radio receivers at Newport Naval Station. Six eastbound ships loaded with contraband had been sunk by the U-53, including a British liner carrying a large number of American citizens. All had been permitted to lower lifeboats before they were struck. Eighteen children were among the many in need of rescue.
Rear Admiral Albert Greaves, commander of the U.S. Atlantic fleet, dispatched all his available warships. Throughout the day, a crescendo of crackling in the radio office heralded the approach of Royal Navy destroyers looking for the U-53. But it was nowhere to be found. By nightfall, two hundred refugees had been brought to Newport, and were being luxuriously comforted by Beeckmans and Vanderbilts.
President Wilson remained noncommittal at Shadow Lawn, saying that he had no “official” knowledge of the sinkings. On Monday afternoon he issued a statement: “The country may rest assured that the German government will be held to the complete fulfillment of its promises to the government of the United States.”
Roosevelt followed up with a statement of his own. He sounded more sick at heart than outraged in affirming, “Now the war has been carried to our very shores.” The administration’s dismissive attitude to seaborne terrorism, going back to the Lusitania, had made it inevitable that something like this would happen. “President Wilson’s ignoble shirking of responsibility has been clothed in an utterly misleading phrase, the phrase of a coward, He kept us out of war. In actual reality, war has been creeping nearer and nearer, until it stares at us from just beyond our three-mile limit, and we face it without policy, plan, purpose or preparation.”
THE COLONEL’S PROMISED “swing” for Hughes—a high-speed tour of the West and Southwest—was marked by tumultuous, sometimes hysterical receptions. They left him unmoved. On his way back through Indiana, he turned fifty-eight. George Perkins and Henry L. Stoddard drove him back to Oyster Bay, raw-voiced and spent, in the small hours of 29 October.
“Old trumps,” he said as the car wound its way through Long Island fog, “let me tell you.… I’ve done my bit for Hughes.… I am positively through campaigning forever.”
“LET ME TELL YOU.… I’VE DONE MY BIT FOR HUGHES.”
TR on the campaign trail, fall 1916. (photo credit i24.3)
Yet he stayed at home only long enough to hear, two days later, that a pair of British steamers, the Marina and the Rowanmore, had been torpedoed in the Atlantic, with eight American travelers lost between them. The administration could argue—in fact, was arguing—that the U-53 had previously not broken international law in its sinkings off Nantucket. This double attack, however, proved that Germany had decided to ignore Wilson’s Sussex ultimatum of five months before.
The first of November found Roosevelt on a flying trip through Ohio. He felt he had to compensate for Hughes, who kept maundering about the tariff in order to avoid saying anything that might alienate antiwar voters. John Leary became concerned at Roosevelt’s red-faced fervor and told him that some reporters were saying he had arteriosclerosis.
“Just what is that?”
Leary explained.
“Well, they are right.”
His blood pressure was not reduced by an announcement that eleven of the nineteen Progressives who had helped him formulate his policies in 1912 were going to vote Democratic. On 2 November, Amos Pinchot publicly taunted him with an assertion that the Bull Moose platform had been “out-and-out pacifist.”
The Colonel contained himself for twenty-four hours, then wrote Pinchot, “Sir, when I spoke of the Progressive Party as having a lunatic fringe, I specifically had you in mind.”
That night he appeared at Cooper Union in New York. He was greeted with a whistling, stomping chorus of “We want Teddy!” that went on for ten minutes. There was not a single