Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [287]
His tribute was awkwardly worded but heartfelt. All the rage he had nurtured against Wilson gave way to something like admiration. Yesterday’s timid, selfish, cold-blooded sophist, the narrow and bitter partisan and debaucher of brains, had at last come to see things his way. Here, streaming across the front page of The Washington Post in double-width columns (juxtaposed with a dispatch that another U.S.-flagged steamer had been torpedoed, with eleven dead), was the oratory, impassioned yet rational, of a statesman whose mind was made up:
With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical nature of the step I am now taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerency which has been thus thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.
Wilson noted that among the steps he was requesting Congress to authorize were the extension of liberal financial credit to the Allies, a powering-up of American industrial resources, and an addition of at least half a million men to the army by means of a universal draft, with equally large increments to follow. “We have seen the last of neutrality,” he said. The United States had “no quarrel with the German people”—only with the autocratic oligarchy that had sent them to war without consulting them. Autocracy could not be allowed to pervert any postwar partnership of free nations. “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
Reportedly, this last line had not kindled the immediate ovation the President expected. But Senator John Sharp Williams, a Missouri Democrat who had served in Congress since the days of Grover Cleveland, had recognized it as the keynote of Wilson’s future foreign policy: an active, and if necessary forcible, imposition of American values upon “the world.” Williams had stood and applauded until his perception spread through both legislative bodies (the judiciary too, as represented by all nine members of the Supreme Court) and an enormous roar had built and built.
If Roosevelt had not delayed his departure from Punta Gorda, in order to harpoon the second largest devilfish ever measured, he could have gotten to Washington in time to witness this triumph—so much greater than any he had experienced as president. But he found himself, on the morning after, an out-of-towner with no business to do in a city electric with urgency. The newsmen who greeted him vanished after taking his statement. They had other leads to pursue. Congress was about to debate a war resolution, over Senator La Follette’s filibuster. Antiwar lobbyists were besieging the Capitol. Senator Lodge, of all people, was reported to have knocked one pacifist down.
Alice Longworth was on hand to take her father to lunch. He had a few hours to kill between trains, so they went to congratulate Lodge on his pugilism. The “Brahmin Bruiser” was away from his office. Roosevelt decided to pay a call on Woodrow Wilson.
The White House was closed to visitors without appointment, as it had been since the spring of 1913. But when the guard at the northwest gate saw who was sitting with Alice in her big car, he automatically waved it through. The driveway that had been theirs for seven and a half years uncurled; the familiar portico loomed up; the glass doors to the vestibule swung open. Ike Hoover emerged from the usher’s office. The time was a few minutes before three.
Roosevelt asked if he could see Wilson. Hoover regretted that the President was not at home: he had just gone to the West Wing for a cabinet meeting. Could the Colonel return later in the day? Roosevelt explained that he had no time,