Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [315]
There was a tumultuous standing ovation when Roosevelt walked onstage in a gray suit with black cravat. But it subsided the moment he laid his speech on the lectern and held up his hand. Isaac Hunt, an upstate delegate who had been his first ally in the New York Assembly, thirty-six years before, was chilled by the anguish on his face.
Roosevelt looked around the room, noticed a number of women on the floor for the first time in state party history, and hailed them as “My fellow voters, my fellow citizens, with equal rights of citizenship here in New York.” For the next hour, whenever he spoke off the cuff, he addressed himself to them. His typed text was a standard appeal for an end to hyphenated Americanism, a speeded-up war effort under Republican governance, and postwar preparedness. He wanted to see the current army extended so as to be able to completely overwhelm the Central Powers. “Belgium must be reinstated and reimbursed [applause]. France must receive back Alsace and Lorraine [applause]. Turkey must be driven from Europe [applause]; Armenia must be made free and the Syrian Christians protected and the Jews given Palestine [applause].”
He made no reference whatever to Quentin, except obliquely toward the end of his script, when he looked again at the female delegates and said, “Surely in this great crisis, where we are making sacrifices on a scale never before known, surely when we are demanding such fealty and idealism on the part of the young men sent abroad to die, surely we have the right to ask and to expect an equal idealism in life from the men and women who stay home.”
The words said little, but his listeners were transfixed by what he left unsaid. Before he got back to New York the following morning, Friday, an urgent effort was under way to draft him for governor. Taft, Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, and even William Barnes, Jr., subscribed to it. Roosevelt declared that he was not available. “I have only one fight left in me,” he told his sister Corinne, “and I think I should reserve my strength in case I am needed in 1920.”
She was alarmed. “Theodore, you don’t really feel ill, do you?”
“No, but I am not what I was.”
Later in the day he motored to Oyster Bay with Edith, Alice, and Ethel, who had come down from Maine. When they got home, a cable from Eleanor in Paris was waiting for them: QUENTIN’S PLANE WAS SEEN TO DIVE 800 METERS, NOT IN FLAMES. SEEN TO STRIKE GROUND. COULD HAVE BEEN UNDER CONTROL AS DID NOT SPIN. CHANCE EXISTS HE IS A PRISONER.
Flora Whitney was nowhere to be seen.
IT TURNED OUT that Flora had also received a cable from Eleanor—EVERY REASON BELIEVE REPORT QUENTIN ABSOLUTELY UNTRUE—and was clutching to it like an oar in a storm. Newspapers got hold of the story, and a new uncertainty built up through Saturday morning.
The Colonel, clutching himself at every “duty” that would keep him from breaking down, went ahead with a prearranged reception for some Japanese Red Cross officials. They were brought to Sagamore Hill by Henry P. Davison, chairman of the American Red Cross war council, and his son Trubee. The young man watched fascinated as Roosevelt took his guests on a trophy tour of the North Room, then delivered a speech of welcome, which he had evidently composed earlier in the week.
After the Japanese bowed their way out, bearing copies of the speech exquisitely calligraphed on rice paper, Trubee Davison took Roosevelt aside and asked, “What hope have you for Quentin?”
Roosevelt reached into his pocket. “Trubee, just twenty minutes before you arrived, I received this telegram from President Wilson.”
The telegram confirmed that Quentin had been killed in action. His death had been certified by German military authorities and broadcast by the Wolfe press agency in Berlin. A handwritten translation of the dispatch was brought to the Roosevelts later in the day:
On Saturday