Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [434]
14 “would result in” TR, Letters, 8.826.
15 “The European world” The New York Times, 4 Aug. 1914. WW reckoned without the strong inherited patriotism of German-Americans. When the Reich declared war on Russia, the New York Herald ran a banner headline, ALLE DEUTSCHEN HERZEN SCHLAGEN HEUTE HOHER (“All German hearts beat faster today”). Sullivan, Our Times, 5.8.
16 When other powers Japan declared war against Germany on 23 Aug. and Turkey against the Allies on 11 Nov. 1914. Italy hesitated until 24 May 1915 before turning against its former Triple Entente partner, Austria-Hungary.
17 Theodore Roosevelt’s gift The Washington Post reported on this date, 5 Aug. 1914, that strategists in the nation’s capital regarded the Canal as “the biggest war menace that hangs over America and the western hemisphere.”
18 “God has stricken me” Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 334.
19 “Let us be” The New York Times, 6 Aug. 1914.
20 “I simply do not” TR to George S. Viereck, 8 Aug. 1914 (TRC).
21 Having lost See Morris, The Rise of TR, 229–31. TR sent WW a supportive telegram even before Ellen Wilson died. “Very deep sympathy. Earnestly hope reports of Mrs. Wilson’s condition are exaggerated.” TR to WW, 5 Aug. 1914 (TRP).
22 “It is not” TR, Letters, 7.790.
23 “The melancholy thing” TR, Letters, 7.794. Münsterberg (1863–1916) was one of the most eloquent of TR’s German-American friends attempting to recruit him as a spokesman for their cause. A pioneer industrial psychologist, antifeminist, and protégé of William James, he died suddenly in 1916 after publishing The Photoplay, the first major work of film theory.
24 The message he Papen, Memoirs, 14; TR, Letters, 8.1165.
25 Roosevelt bowed back TR, describing this visit later, dated it as occurring “within a week of the outbreak of the war,” and identified his caller only as “a young member of the German Embassy staff in Washington,” and “I think a Count.” (TR, Letters, 8.1165; Leary, Talks with T.R., 41.) But the evidence that it was Papen is, on top of these qualifications, compelling. In his memoirs, Papen mentions being entrusted with Wilhelm II’s goodwill message before being posted to the United States in the new year of 1914. He also states that he came to New York at this time, straight from an espionage visit to Mexico, in order to set up a base for further spying and propaganda work at the Manhattan headquarters of “a German firm in Hanover Street.” (Papen, Memoirs, 21, 31.) Papen left Galveston, Tex., at midnight on 4 Aug. 1914, and probably saw TR in New York on 7 Aug. TR was back in Oyster Bay the following day.
26 “In common with” TR, “The Foreign Policy of the United States,” The Outlook, 22 Aug. 1914.
27 daily in black headlines “The dispatches were as if black flocks of birds, frightened from their familiar rookeries, came darting across the ocean, their excited cries a tiding of stirring events.” (Sullivan, Our Times, 5.2.) See ibid., 1–46, and American Review of Reviews, Oct. 1914, for the impact of the war on American newspapers.
28 swamping even, on 15 August The Washington Post, e.g., put the canal opening on page 10. The Syracuse Herald gave it a slender column on page 2, beneath a banner headline: STUPENDOUS BATTLE BETWEEN GERMANS AND THE ALLIED FORCES IS NEAR AT HAND.
29 Diaghilev’s dancers At the Theatro Municipale in Rio on 22 Oct. 1913.
30 “It must indeed be” Baker, notebook III.74 (14 Aug. 1914 [RSB]).
31 On 19 August The New York Times, 28 Oct. 1913; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.43–44. WW’s phrase “impartial in thought” is often misquoted as “neutral in thought.”
32 Boredom gave way Richard Harding Davis, “The Germans in Brussels,” Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1914. Davis’s first version of this