Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [79]
Roosevelt denied the report as soon as it was published. A few days later, he sent the Tafts a silver wedding-anniversary gift. The President thanked him for it on 18 June, and from then on their estrangement was total.
SO—NARROWLY AT FIRST, then yawningly as the ideological landscape split—a double division began to run, not only between Taft and Roosevelt, but between dreamers of peace and Realpolitiker who believed that in time of war, treaties were not worth the parchment they were written on. In 1911, the average American voter could not remember Gettysburg, let alone feel what Henry Adams, relocated to Paris, described as “this huge big storm cloud gathering in Central Europe.” Adams prophesied that the cloud would one day burst over Austria and the Balkans, then move southeast to the Levant, sweeping away the Ottoman Empire. Roosevelt had explored much of that territory himself, both as a boy and ex-President. He was not sure that Western Europe would escape the cataclysm. The heads of state and other eminences he had met, in nation after nation from Italy to Norway, had betrayed, in their various, defensive ways, a general consciousness that some breakdown of civilization was on its way. Whether it happened soon, as Balfour and Spring Rice kept predicting, or held off for a decade, as Adams hoped, it was unlikely to be deflected by arbiters droning on at The Hague.
Roosevelt believed that the United States (if Taft could be stopped from signing away its strategic independence), would succeed Great Britain as the enforcer of world peace—“never mind against which country or group of countries our efforts may have to be directed.” It would do so, if necessary, with an armed hand. “We ourselves,” he told a German visitor to The Outlook, “are becoming more and more the balance of power of the whole globe.”
Like many men of martial instinct, the Colonel claimed to be peaceable. But it was plain to everybody that he loved war and thought of it as a catharsis. War purged the fat and ill humors of a sedentary society whose values had been corrupted by getting and spending. Waged for a righteous cause, it reawakened moral fervor, intensified love and loyalty, concentrated the mind on fundamental truths, strengthened the body both personal and political. It was, in short, good for man, good for man’s country, and often as not, good for the vanquished too. In celebrating its terrible beauty, Roosevelt often came near the sentimentality he despised among pacifists—so much so that some of his most affectionate friends felt their gorges rise when he romanticized death in battle.
He used the strongest language to emasculate men who hated militarism, or recoiled like women from the chance to prove themselves in armed action: “aunties” and “sublimated sweetbreads,” shrilly piping for peace. (The tendency of his own voice to break into the treble register was an embarrassment in that regard.) He noted with scorn that such “mollycoddles” as Governor Baldwin of Connecticut and Boss Barnes of New York supported the Judicial Settlement Society. Andrew Carnegie had established a multimillion-dollar Endowment for International Peace, and was lobbying the President to recognize it. “I feel,” Roosevelt wrote a fellow veteran of the Cuban war, “somewhat as if we were all threatened with death by drowning