Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [290]
With, that he left for Boston, and Archie’s rushed-up wedding in Emmanuel Episcopal Church.
THE ROOSEVELTS KNEW that this was probably the last time they would assemble as a complete family before war tore them apart. Their celebration on Saturday, 14 April, was muted. Quentin, serving as best man, waited with Archie in the chancel, which was draped with the national and state flags. Ted, Kermit, and Dick Derby served as ushers. Theodore and Edith sat with Alice and Nick, Ethel and Belle, and several Roosevelt cousins. Saltonstalls, Aspin-walls, Websters, and Peabodys sprinkled both sides of the aisle. At noon, Grace Lockwood—sharp-featured and skinny in white satin—came down the aisle on the arm of her father. She was a graduate of the Navy League’s “female Plattsburg” in Chevy Chase, Maryland, so the patriotic bunting was quite to her taste, as were the glittering uniforms of many attendees from the Harvard Officers’ Reserve Corps.
Grace understood the necessity of a postponed honeymoon. For the next few weeks, Archie would have to remain close to home, pending assignment to active duty.
A DISPATCH TO The New York Times on the day after the wedding reported that a long-exiled Russian Communist leader, “Nikolai” Lenin, was en route to Petrograd from Switzerland. He had been given safe conduct across German railroads. Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviki were for universal peace, so they could accomplish their design to co-opt the Russian revolution.
This news (and the hasty departure from New York City of Leon Trotsky) complicated the efforts of Count Ilya Tolstoy to drum up American support for Prince Lvov’s provisional government. The son of the famous novelist was in the United States on a propaganda tour. He hoped that Theodore Roosevelt might be named head of an advisory commission that President Wilson planned to send to his country. The Colonel was otherwise preoccupied, but dictated a message for Tolstoy to take home: “Through you I send my most hearty congratulations and good wishes to the men who have led the Russian people in this great movement for democratic freedom.”
Describing himself as “a fellow radical,” he cautioned the Duma majority against the danger of “unbalanced extremists” who sought to go beyond democracy. “See that the light of the torch is not dimmed by any unwise and extreme action, and above all not by any of those sinister and dreadful deeds which a century and a quarter ago in France produced the Red Terror, and then by reaction the White Terror.”
Privately, he told John Leary that Russia’s flimsy new republic might soon fall apart. If the Bolsheviks managed to win or steal power in Petrograd, they would probably negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, so as to be able to consolidate themselves at home. That would leave the Reich, in turn, free to deploy all its Eastern armor along the Western Front.
“If we do not wake up,” Roosevelt fretted, “Germany will have won this war, and then we will be in it.”
ON 15 APRIL HE heard from Secretary Baker that his request to serve as a volunteer commander in the war was denied for “purely military” reasons. The War College Division of the General Staff had recommended that no American troops be sent to Europe until they were sufficiently numerous, equipped, and trained. “This policy,” Baker wrote, “… does not undertake to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would attach to a representation of the United States in France by a former President of the United States.” It was possible that pressure from the Allies might prompt the early dispatch of an American expeditionary force, but in that case, command positions would be given to regular officers “who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters, and have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war.”
Baker could not have made it clearer that