Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [320]
One of the movies he had in mind was to be a McClure Productions six-reeler entitled The Fighting Roosevelts, starring three different actors as himself in boyhood, youth, and maturity. The draft script called for a dramatic final climax, with one of his sons dying on the Western Front—an ending that could obviously be reshot, should any more of them fall.
On 4 September, Archie, transferred back to the United States for advanced therapy on his paralyzed left arm, returned limping to Sagamore Hill. The splendor of his blue and gold sleeve stripes, denoting a year’s service at the Front, in no way impressed Archibald Roosevelt, Jr., whom Grace had rushed down from Boston to show to him. Little Archie was only five months old, so both father and son were strangers. They eyed each other with a mutual lack of interest, while the rest of the family party tried to adjust to “Big” Archie’s worryingly limp arm. Two operations in Paris had failed to reconnect the severed main nerve well enough to restore full mobility.
Archie had become skeletal during his long convalescence. His hollow cheeks drew back from protruding teeth, and he wore a new, habitual frown. He admitted to be suffering from a “bad case of nerves.” Even if doctors at the Columbia Base Hospital in the Bronx—who had granted him only temporary home leave—were successful in fixing his arm and digging the shrapnel out of his leg, they had warned him he might not be able to rejoin Ted’s regiment for another eight months. Which was all Archie wanted to do. Like many soldiers who had seen the worst of the war, he had become addicted to it.
“FALL HAS COME,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit on 13 September. “The dogwood berries are reddening, the maple leaves blush, the goldenrod and asters flaunt their beauty; and log fires burn and crumble in the north room in the evenings.”
Very slowly, he was recovering his joy in the natural world, after a summer of finding himself unable to think of much but mortality. Hearing that Ted had been nearly blinded and killed, Dick Derby thrown into the air by a shell, and seeing how “crippled” Archie was had compounded his grief over Quentin’s fate. However, all were safe for the moment, as well as Kermit, detached to an artillery school in Saumur. General Pershing had written to say that Ted was about to be promoted to a colonelcy. Two Colonel Roosevelts in one family, plus two decorated captains and one dead hero, added up to plenty of honor.
That did not help him feel any less sidelined, or any less beaten down physically and emotionally. The “gentleness” Corinne discerned in her brother struck others as exhaustion, if not desuetude: the Rooseveltian vigor di vita was gone. One day his literary colleague Mary Roberts Rinehart drove from New York out to Oyster Bay with him and Edith. “The Colonel sat with his chauffeur, saying nothing. Most of the time his head was bent on his breast, and I can still see his sturdy broad-shouldered figure, stooped and tired. For the first time he seemed old to me, old and weary.”
Roosevelt was loath to divide what was left of his energy between politics and war work, saying that he would tour in the fall only on behalf of Secretary McAdoo’s fourth “Liberty Loan” appeal. Extra military funds were urgently needed: the number of soldiers, sailors, and marines in service was now approaching three million, and the latest registration had increased the pool of potential draftees to an almost incredible twenty-four million—one and a half times as much as the total manpower of Britain and France. Roosevelt’s still-smoldering anger toward Woodrow Wilson was fueled by this evidence of how the nation could have armed itself after the sinking of the Lusitania, shortening the war and saving countless lives. Quentin’s included, perhaps.
The most he would do to help the GOP in its campaign to win back the Senate in November was volunteer a major address at Carnegie Hall, one week before the election, and write supportive letters