Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [457]
49 There is ruin Robinson, Collected Poems, 82.
CHAPTER 27: THE DEAD ARE WHIRLING WITH THE DEAD
1 Epigraph Robinson, Collected Poems, 355.
2 partying with the Ned McLeans Longworth, Crowded Hours, 266.
3 The Colonel agreed Wallace, Sagamore Hill, 1.30.
4 “If you wish to” TR, Letters, 8.1266–67.
5 Ted and Dick Derby Eleanor B. Roosevelt, Day Before Yesterday, 77–78; TR, Letters, 8.1266–67.
6 This imbalance The United States had declared war on Austria-Hungary on 7 Dec. 1917.
7 mud and Scheisse The latter was real. Torrential rains, combined with British bombardment of the clay fields around Passchendaele, destroyed the area’s intricate sewage system and turned the mud into a slough of human and animal waste.
8 On Saturday, 5 January Cooper, Woodrow Wilson, 321; Sullivan, Our Times, 5.446; Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, 482–83; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 470–71.
9 Wilson presented Lloyd Morris, Not So Long Ago (New York, 1949), 414; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, 471. For a newsman’s take on the hyperactive Creel, who may have been an inspiration to Joseph Goebbels, see Sullivan, Our Times, 5, chap. 21.
10 “A general association” WW’s original typescript text quoted in Daniel Boorstin, ed., An American Primer (Chicago, 1966), 2.772ff.
11 The last point Lloyd George had proposed many of the same ideas as WW, only three days before in London. Strachan, The First World War, 303–4.
12 “Le bon Dieu” Charles à Court Repington, The First World War: 1914–1918 (Boston, 1920), 472.
13 “I am sorry” Leary, notebook 8 (JJL).
14 ten speeches in nine days TR, Letters, 8.1493. For a charming account of TR’s tour of city child-welfare facilities on 16 and 17 Jan. 1918, see Sara J. Baker, Fighting for Life (New York, 1939), 176–82.
15 Witty and graceful Baker, notebook XV.42 (RSB). Offstage, Carl Akeley found TR to be consumed that night with a sense of doom threatening one or more of his sons.
16 Republican strategists A front-page story in the The New York Times, 24 Jan. 1918, reported that TR had again become “leader of the Republican Party.”
Biographical Note: The immediate reason for TR’s visit to Washington in Jan. 1917 was a crisis in confidence in the administration’s management of the war effort. He and Senator George F. Chamberlain, a respected Democrat and chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, had attacked Newton D. Baker’s War Department at a meeting of the National Security League in New York, Chamberlain sensationally announcing, “The military establishment of America had broken down.” The result was a short-lived bipartisan campaign, involving TR, to create a coalition war cabinet like that of Lloyd George’s government in Britain. However, Roosevelt Republicans—the old term could now be revived—had been trying since Nov. 1917 to get the Colonel to come to town and help them plot ways to break the Democratic monopoly of the government. “They were all of them anxious to have me take some position of leadership,” TR reported to William Allen White, “and equally anxious that … I should not think it committed them to making me the candidate in 1920.” He was being coy when he wrote this, because Senators Smoot and Bourne had already made clear that they wanted him to run for another term as president. Alice exulted in the prospect of a resurgent GOP. “My father president again and my husband speaker.…” Sullivan, Our Times, 5.74–75; TR, Letters, 8.1274, 1307; ERD to Richard Derby, 6 Dec. 1917 (ERDP); Cordery, Alice, 264.
17 He took Edith TR, Letters, 8.1276–77; Longworth, Crowded Hours, 264ff.; The Washington Post, 22–25 Jan. 1917 passim; Adams, Letters, 2.782; Cecil Spring Rice to Florence Spring Rice, 13 Sept. 1917 (CSR). Spring Rice, never popular with the Wilson administration, had been effectively sidelined as British ambassador since Balfour’s visit to Washington in the spring of 1917. He was succeeded by Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Lord of Reading, in the new year of 1918, allegedly on the grounds