Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [439]
7 “Both you men” Quoted by Knox in Looker, Colonel Roosevelt, 164.
8 “Weaklings who raise” TR, Works, 20.77–78 (not included in the original New York Times article of 1 Nov. 1914, but added for republication in Jan. 1915).
9 “Your cistern” William Allen White to TR, 28 Dec. 1914 (TRP).
10 “I am more like” TR, Letters, 8.870–71. TR’s new contract, dated 5 Dec. 1914, required him to “use the Metropolitan Magazine exclusively for three years as your medium for articles on the great social, political, and international questions.” He would receive $25,000 annually for a minimum contribution of 50,000 words. Extra articles would be paid for at the same rate, and he could write on other subjects for other periodicals. Copy in AC.
11 Metropolitan was a large Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America, 240, describes Metropolitan as “a right-wing socialist periodical.” This paradox is endorsed by Antony C. Sutton in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (Studies in Reformed Theology, 2001, chap. 11, http://www.reformed-theology.org/). Sutton notes Metropolitan’s connection, via Whitney, with the House of Morgan and the liberal financier Eugene Boissevain. He argues that many American plutocrats in the early Bolshevik era, eager to bring down foreign imperialism, aided revolutionary forces in Russia either directly, through cash contributions, or indirectly, by patronizing anti-Tsarist propaganda at home. Editor Whigham’s brand of politics allowed him to employ such relative conservatives as TR and Finley Peter Dunne as well as the outspoken Communist John Reed.
12 “After this January” TR, Letters, 8.871.
13 “To be neutral” Ibid., 8.903.
14 The resultant twelve-chapter volume America and the World War is reprinted in TR, Works, 20.1–216.
15 Critical reaction “In our hour of need,” St. Loe Strachey complained in The Spectator (6 Feb. 1915), “we should have expected a better understanding.”
16 England is not TR, Letters, 8.867.
17 “I ask those” Ibid., 20.105–6. TR’s oft-repeated claim that no shot was fired at a “foreign” foe during his presidency depended on the classification of Filipinos as territorial wards of the United States.
18 He poured scorn TR, Works, 20.94; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.207. Of the stateside army, most troops were required to man coastal defenses, leaving a mobile land force of fewer than 25,000. Ibid.
19 Mr. Bryan came TR, Works, 20.212–13.
20 “I feel in the” Ibid., 20.194 (italics added).
Historical Note: One of the great what-ifs of American history is the course World War I might have taken had TR been returned to the White House in 1912. He speculated often on the subject himself. “If I had been President,” he wrote Cecil Spring Rice late in 1914, “I should have acted on the thirtieth or thirty-first of July, as head of a signatory power of the Hague [conventions] … saying that I accepted [them] as imposing a serious obligation which I expected not only the United States but all other neutral nations to join us in enforcing. Of course I would not have made such a statement without backing it up.” (TR, Letters, 8.821.) In Diplomacy (New York, 1994), 29–50, Henry Kissinger argues that TR would have taken the U.S. into the war for strategic reasons, on the ground that a victory for the Central Powers, and the consequent weakening of Britain’s hold on the North Atlantic, would have threatened the world