Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [442]
52 Two or three Bishop, TR, 2.375–76.
53 1,918 souls aboard The New York Times, 8 May 1915. The commonly accepted statistics of the Lusitania disaster are 1,959 passengers and crew, with 1,195 dead and 885 bodies unrecovered. Of the 139 Americans aboard, only 11 survived.
54 “That’s murder” Bishop, TR, 2.376.
55 I can only repeat Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, 8 May 1915, e.g. (AP dispatch).
56 Woodrow Wilson’s first Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 364. See also The New York Times, 10 May 1915.
57 “America has come” Edward M. House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols., Charles Seymour, ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), 1.434.
58 After going to church The New York Times, 10 May 1915.
59 Sitting down Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 364.
60 Late in the afternoon Ibid., 364–65.
61 He talked about Albert Bushnell Hart, ed., Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1918), 88.
62 Roosevelt was not sorry TR to Fanny Parsons, 6 May 1915 (TRC); TR to ERD, 12 May 1915 (ERDP); The New York Times, 11–13 May 1915; TR, Letters, 8.1328.
63 Dear Archie TR, Letters, 8.922. The Gulflight, though destroyed, was not actually sunk.
64 “starve the whole” Horace C. Peterson, Propaganda for War: The Campaign Against American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Norman, Okla., 1939), 83.
65 Dr. Bernhard Dernburg The New York Times, 9 May 1915.
66 New York’s own collector The cargo manifest also included an enormous quantity of boxes and barrels labeled “cheese,” “beef,” and “oysters,” whose contents may have been less nutritious than indicated. Dernburg was aware of more munitions aboard the Lusitania than he revealed, perhaps because he did not want to betray the presence in the New York port collector’s office of a spy reporting on arms exports. On 3 May 1915 the detective reported to Franz von Papen, the German intelligence officer who had visited with TR after the outbreak of the war (see above, 378–79), that the ship carried 12 crates of detonators, 6,026 crates of bullets, 492 cases of “military equipment,” and 223 auto wheels. (Papen, Memoirs, 42.) In the 1950s, the Royal Navy surreptitiously targeted the submerged hull of the Lusitania in a series of depth-charge “exercises” that shattered it almost beyond recognition. Nevertheless, in 2008 divers found the wreck bestrewn with 4 million rounds of .303 ammunition. Daily Mail, 20 Dec. 2008.
67 Roosevelt knew Dernburg TR, Letters, 8.857–61.
68 “a personal attitude” The New York Times, 12 May 1915.
69 his note responding The note, which was almost entirely the work of WW, was signed by Bryan as secretary of state.
70 Wilson stated that The New York Times, 14 May 1915.
71 Only the most cynical This is the thesis that Walter Karp argues at book length in The Politics of War. Most historians disagree, seeing WW as genuinely peace-minded in 1915–1916, if indeed (in Karp’s word) vainglorious later on. But the President’s flag-waving bellicosity toward Mexican provocateurs in the Tampico and Vera Cruz incidents of 1914 speaks volumes, as does his confession to Colonel House in Sept. 1915 that he had long wanted the United States to join the world war. (Intimate Papers, 2.84.) There is no doubt that the eventual entry of the United States into World War I was the logical, if attenuated, consequence of WW’s demand in Feb. 1915 for a “strict accountability” from Germany for violations of neutrality by its warships.
72 a green and gold fountain pen For the provenance of this instrument, see Ambrose Flack’s enchanting reminiscence, “Theodore Roosevelt and My Green-Gold Fountain Pen,” The New Yorker, 22 May 1948.
73 made a dignified witness Blakey, “Calling a Boss a Boss.” See also Stewart F. Hancock, Jr., “Barnes v. Roosevelt: Theater in the Courtroom,” New York State Bar Journal, 63.8 (Dec. 1991).
74 On Thursday, 20 May Shakespeare, Henry VIII, act 3, scene 2; The New York Times, 21 May 1915.
75 At 3:45 P.M. The New York Times, 23 May 1915.
76 “I will try” Ibid. It turned out that the jury had been unanimously in favor of TR all along, dividing 11