Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [305]
It was an audience largely ignorant of American foreign policy, and therefore unaware that not one of the Fourteen Points was new. Lansing had presented each of them in various diplomatic communications. But they gained in impact now by being presented all together, just when their relevance was broadest. Wilson said he wanted to see open peace negotiations; absolute freedom of the seas; radical disarmament; impartial settlement of colonial disputes; recognition of Russia’s right to shape its own future “unhampered and unembarrassed” by outside constraints; the evacuation by Germany of Belgium, Alsace, and Lorraine, and by Austria-Hungary of the Balkans; Serbian access to the Mediterranean; an ethnic redrawing of Italy’s northern frontier; national liberation of Ottoman provinces from Turkish rule; free passage through the Dardenelles; an independent Polish state with seaboard facilities; and—closest to his heart—“A general association of nations [with] specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”
The last point was yet another bang on the peace-league gong that Roosevelt and others had sounded over the years. This time, however, its reverberations refused to die. Creel printed the President’s speech for translation and distribution as far away as China and Lapland (and projection over German territory in scattershot “leaflet shells”), achieving a saturation of international opinion that made Woodrow Wilson, the former girls’-school teacher and parochial Presbyterian, look like the only visionary statesman in the world.
THE FOURTEEN POINTS registered seriously, if not favorably, on both sides of the Western Front. “Le bon Dieu n’avait que dix,” Clemenceau grumbled.* Britain balked at Wilson’s freedom-of-the-seas demand, which would compromise its blockade capability. France wanted stronger language to guarantee war reparations. Vague conciliatory noises came from Germany and Austria. But on the whole, the President seemed to have succeeded brilliantly in drafting a text negotiable by all the governments concerned. No immediate move could be expected toward the great peace conference he envisaged. If and when it happened, the United States had earned a coequal place at the table. Not a few political prophets saw Wilson himself sitting there as chief negotiant.
“I am sorry from the bottom of my heart for Colonel Roosevelt,” William Howard Taft said to a dinner companion. “Here he is, the one man in the country most capable of doing things, of handling the big things in Washington, denied the opportunity.… My heart goes out to him.”
Roosevelt emerged from his doldrums, as he had so often before, by launching into a period of manic public activity. Pausing only to write his January quota of articles for Metropolitan magazine and the Kansas City Star, plus an introduction to Henry Fairfield Osborn’s The Origin and Evolution of Life, he delivered ten speeches in nine days in New York, to audiences as diverse as the National Security League and the Boy Food Scouts of P.S. 40. Ray Stannard Baker caught up with him at a memorial service for Joseph Choate, and noted how his personality galvanized the somber proceedings. Witty and graceful, able both to conjure up the ghost of Sir Horace Walpole in the same breath as a Latin epigram (suaviter in modo, fortiter in re),* he seemed almost the Bull Moose of old. Jack Cooper’s Reducycle had trimmed his waistline by several inches. “Roosevelt remains a virile and significant figure in American life,” Baker wrote.