Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [321]
AS HE TRAVELED WEST via Ohio to Missouri and Nebraska, he edited a selection of his recent journalism for book publication by Scribners. Charles Scribner was emboldened to invest in him yet again, on the strength of widespread sympathy engendered by newspaper syndication of “The Great Adventure.” Inevitably, that phrase became the title of the hardback release.
“It’s pretty poor business to be writing little books in these times of terrible action,” Roosevelt apologized in a letter to Belle, “but it’s all I can do, or at least all I am allowed to do by the people in power in Washington.”
Scribbling on dutifully, he used up the last of the triple-carbon notebooks that had served him so well in Africa and Brazil.
His speeches attracted large, affectionate crowds, but after nearly forty years of shouting at people he was no longer capable of saying anything new. It was enough for these tens of thousands of regular folks to say that they had “seen” the great Teddy. He still felt a kinship with them: it was they and their kind who had helped him become, in his own words, “at heart, as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” On his way home in early October, he spent the night in Billings, Montana, where once, as a dude ranchman from New York, he had knocked out a barroom bully. George Myers, his old cattleman, was on hand to visit with him at his hotel.
“Have you got a room, George?”
Myers shook his head.
“Share mine with me,” Roosevelt said, “and we’ll talk about old times.”
HE ARRIVED BACK EAST complaining of acute inflammatory pain in his left leg and both feet. Rheumatism was a disease he had long been afraid of, since it had racked his sister Bamie for most of her life, and made a hopeless invalid of his favorite presidential appointee, William Henry Moody. He had himself been bothered by it, on and off, since his last years in the White House, but never as sharply as now. If the two physicians he consulted—Drs. Walton Martin in Manhattan and George W. Faller in Oyster Bay—detected symptoms of rheumatic fever, a life-threatening pathology that often struck patients in October, they kept their concern from him. He was given conventional anti-inflammatory medicine and told to rest as much as possible.
Returning to Oyster Bay, he put himself in Dr. Faller’s care, and adjusted to the irony that he was once again prostrated, just when the presidency of Woodrow Wilson was nearing the zenith of its achievement. On the night he and George Myers had sat talking “about old times” in a hick town in Montana, the new Chancellor of Germany, Prince Maximilian of Baden, had asked the President ot begin negotiations for a “restoration of peace,” along the lines of his “Fourteen Points” agenda of last January.
Roosevelt’s tour had coincided, moreover, with the greatest combined offensive of the war: nine armies, including Pershing’s, assailing the Central Powers from Flanders all the way south to Palestine. The giant operation was still continuing, and Pershing was making a bloody mess of it in the Argonne, but an armistice on the Western Front was obviously imminent.
Britain and France did not want the President to negotiate anything less triumphant than unconditional surrender by each enemy in turn. Wilson declined to do what any belligerent wanted. Sure that he, alone and at last, held the fate of the world in his hands, he had responded with a “note of inquiry” asking Prince Maximilian to confirm whether Germany accepted all of the Fourteen Points—thereby endorsing the idea of a League of Nations—and to attest that a prince had constitutional authority to end a war waged by generals.
This sounded to Roosevelt like the prelude to another drawn-out period of “elocution” while more and more poilus, tommies, and doughboys died. “I regret greatly,” he said in a dictated statement, “that President Wilson has entered into these negotiations, and I trust that they will