Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [83]
Roosevelt saw no chance of La Follette being nominated. “My present intention,” he wrote Ted, “is to make a couple of speeches for Taft, but not to go actively into the campaign.” He thought that Woodrow Wilson was the strongest Democratic candidate. Taft, in contrast, was “a flubdub with a streak of the second-rate and the common in him, and he has not the slightest idea of what is necessary if this country is to make social and industrial progress.”
As for foreign policy, he gave the President little credit. Arbitration treaties with Britain and France were fated to shred like leaves in any gale-force storm. Right now, a second “Morocco crisis” loomed between Germany, France, and Great Britain, as dangerous as the one that had nearly precipitated war six years before. France had recently expanded its military presence in Morocco, only to see a German gunboat, the Panther, appear at once in the Atlantic port of Agadir. This incursion into waters not normally considered part of Germany’s sphere of influence had, in turn, brought about massing of the Royal Navy in the English Channel. The British government was bound to make such a move, by virtue of its entente cordiale with France. But neutral observers were startled at the vigor with which David Lloyd George was insisting that “Britain should at all hazards maintain her place and her prestige amongst the great powers of the world.” Yesterday’s peace advocate and anti-imperialist had evidently come to share the dread of Sir Edward Grey that German naval expansionism in North Africa menaced the Suez Canal, and with it, access to India.
Britain’s unwillingness to see that France, not Germany, was the prime aggressor in the affair demonstrated, for Roosevelt, the fatuity of any faith in “judicial” peacekeeping. Great powers were not interested in behaving justly, when they could misbehave to their own advantage and get away with it. They wanted to dominate one another, either singly or in combination, at the first opportunity. Germany’s response to Lloyd George’s bluster had been to withdraw the Panther and replace it with the Berlin, a battleship three times larger.
Roosevelt raged in a letter to Henry Cabot Lodge against the inability of the President “and all the male shrieking sisterhood of Carnegies” to see that in any serious international dispute, might made for right. “If war is to be averted, it will be only because Germany thinks that France has a first-class army and will fight hard, and that England is ready and able to render her some prompt assistance. The German war plans contemplate, as I happen to know personally, as possible courses of action, flank marches through both Belgium and Switzerland.”
LIKE A PAIR OF sopranos deliberately setting out to irritate someone who disliked opera, Taft and Governor Wilson chose this moment to sing a duet in praise of pacifism. They did so in the September issue of The Christian Herald. “I yield to no one in my love of peace, in my hatred of war, and in my earnest desire to avoid war,” the President wrote. “If I have my way and am able to secure the assent of other powers, I shall submit to the Senate arbitration treaties broader in their terms than any that body has heretofore ratified.”
Wilson’s statement revealed a prose stylist adept at making graceful generalities, while avoiding any personal commitment: “I consider the present agitation for international arbitration and world peace a deep-seated and permanent thing, representing the fixed and universal desire of the human heart.”
Roosevelt published his own views on the subject in an editorial, “The Peace of Righteousness,” in The Outlook on 9 September. Its tone was forceful yet restrained, as was often the case with him after he had blown off steam in private correspondence. “I sincerely believe in the principle of arbitration,” he wrote, “… but I believe that the effort