Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [323]
He pretended to have recovered from Quentin’s death, but Edith knew better. “I can see how constantly he thinks of him,” she wrote Kermit, “… sad thoughts of what Quentin would have counted for in the future.”
A well-wisher the following afternoon made sure Roosevelt kept brooding, by delivering part of the seat of Quentin’s crashed plane.
Carnegie Hall was crammed beyond its legal capacity when he arrived there that night. Women composed at least half of the audience, and practically every prominent Republican in New York State sat on the podium. No sooner had the Colonel walked onstage than a voice yelled, “Unconditional surrender.” He grinned and waved his speech script in reply. As he prepared to speak, another shout came, “Rub it in, Teddy!”
He spoke for more than two hours, excoriating Wilson for turning the war from a moral to a partisan issue. “If the President of the United States is right in the appeal he has just made to the voters, then you and I, my hearers, have no right to vote in this election or to discuss public questions while the war lasts.”
Over the next few days, his condition deteriorated sharply, to the point that on the evening of 2 November, when he returned home after attending a Negro War Relief benefit with Archie, he found it difficult to walk for the pain in his legs. Next morning he tried to get up for breakfast, and found that he could not get one shoe on. At various times he was told he was suffering from multiple rheumatism, lumbago, sciatica, or gout. All he knew for certain was that he felt steadily worse. He remained bedridden, learning from newspapers that Turkey and Austria-Hungary were both out of the war. Moreover, Pershing had launched an offensive across the Meuse so ferocious that the First American Army was now recognized to be a force equal to any in the world. The papers did not report that Black Jack was encouraging the German Third and Fifth armies to retreat with liberal quantities of mustard gas. The British had simultaneously swept clear through to Ghent, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch’s forces were elsewhere engaged in driving every last “Boche” off French soil. In a magnanimous gesture, Wilhelm II had offered sixty of his personal palaces as treatment centers for victims of the Allied onslaught. Nevertheless, the German war cabinet was insisting that he abdicate.
On election day, 5 November, Roosevelt hobbled into the blacksmith’s shop that served as Oyster Bay’s polling place and cast his ballot. Edith accompanied him. For all his support of universal suffrage, she was still not able to vote. They had the satisfaction of hearing next morning that the Democrats had lost both houses of Congress, in a Republican triumph devastating to Wilson’s hope of dominating the postwar international scene. Speaker Champ Clark was dethroned. Political analysts put most of the blame on the President for demanding a vote of confidence. Roosevelt congratulated himself as “probably the chief factor” in preventing Wilson from doing “what he fully intended to do, namely, double-cross the Allies, appear as an umpire between them and the Central Powers and get a negotiated peace which would put him personally on a pinnacle of glory in the sight of every sinister pro-German and every vapid and fatuous doctrinaire sentimentalist throughout the world.”
He was equally contemptuous of the Kaiser, after reading on 10 November that Wilhelm II had resigned in the face of mass desertions and mutinies in all German services. The Red Flag was now flying in eleven German cities—even over the imperial harbor at Kiel—and the Reichstag was in danger of being taken over by a combination of socialist soviets. An armistice delegation representing its centrist majority was suing for peace in the Forest of Compiègne.
“If I had been the Kaiser,” Roosevelt snorted, “when my generals told me that the