Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [288]
Alice drove him back to the station. Starved as ever for his company, she volunteered to ride with him as far as Baltimore. Before he climbed into the train after her, Roosevelt admitted to a stray reporter, “I don’t know just what I’m going to do when I reach New York.” He said the next few days in Congress were crucial to his plans. “I can’t say anything more about organizing a division to go to the firing line until I find out something more about the policy of this government. I am sorry not to have seen the President.”
TED AND KERMIT MET him in New York and drove him out to Oyster Bay, where Edith was brooding over a telephone call from Harvard. Quentin, her youngest and least martial son, was “coming down to get into the war.” She had been unable to dissuade him on the grounds of his bad back and his poor eyesight. He said he intended to train as a fighter pilot.
Archie had an announcement too. He was engaged to Miss Grace Lockwood of Back Bay, Boston, and wanted to marry her as soon as possible, in order to be available for service the moment Congress answered Wilson’s recruitment call.
Over the next few days, Sagamore Hill became something of a military personnel center as the Colonel prepared his four sons for postings. Frontline service in the new army was what they all wanted: none would sit behind a steel desk. Ted and Archie, with two terms at Plattsburg apiece, were sure of being commissioned as infantry officers. Quentin might have trouble passing the aviation section physical, but if so, he was willing to go north and see if the less fussy Canadians would take him.
Kermit remained—as ever—a man difficult to place. Aside from being only half trained, he was temperamentally unsuited to the static warfare in Europe. His father understood that. They had the bond that came of killing lions and elephants together, and of enduring months of green hell in Brazil. The same fever lurked in their respective systems, and something of the same wanderlust. Kermit’s war, Roosevelt felt, should be far-ranging, profiting from his restlessness and flair for languages. Perhaps the British could use him in Mesopotamia, where Sir Frederick Maude had just brilliantly captured Baghdad.
In the small hours of Good Friday, 6 April, the House of Representatives declared war on Germany, 373 to 50 (Miss Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, sobbing as she called “no”). Even Wilson was surprised at how rapidly the majority mood on Capitol Hill had changed from isolationism to intervention. At 1:11 P.M., he interrupted his lunch to sign the resolution, proclaiming: “A state of war between the United States and the Imperial German government, which has been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared.” Mobilization telegrams flashed to every army post in the country, and cables to all American ships at sea.
Roosevelt stayed home that Easter weekend, composing an editorial for Metropolitan magazine in praise of Wilson’s change of heart. He did not apologize for the insults he had showered on the President in the past, saying only, “Of course, when war is on, all minor considerations, including all partisan considerations, vanish at once.”
On Monday, 9 April, he decided to go south and call again at the White House. He did not telephone ahead and ask Wilson to receive him. “I’ll take chances on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”
Joseph Tumulty heard he was coming nevertheless. When, at eleven the following morning, Alice dropped her father off, the secretary was waiting, wreathed in smiles. Roosevelt disappeared into the Red Room and emerged forty-five minutes later, looking pleased but not triumphant. A couple of dozen reporters waited to hear what he had to say. Beyond, in Pennsylvania Avenue, sightseers pressed against the railings. A little group of suffragettes jiggled yellow pickets.
“The President received me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,