Theodore Roosevelt [136]
months. Thanks to President Wilson, the most powerful of Democratic nations has refused to recognize the binding moral force of international public law. Our country has shirked its clear duty. One outspoken and straightforward declaration by this government against the dreadful iniquities perpetrated in Belgium, Armenia, and Servia would have been worth to humanity a thousand times as much as all that the professional pacifists have done in the past fifty years .... Fine phrases become sickening when they represent nothing whatever but adroitness in phrase making, with no intention of putting deeds behind the phrases.
After the American messages in regard to the sinking of the Lusitania had brought no apology, much less any suggestion of redress, Roosevelt said: Apparently President Wilson has believed that the American people would permanently forget their dead and would slur over the dishonor and disgrace to the United States by that basest of all the base pleas of cowardly souls which finds expression in the statement: "Oh, well, anyhow the President kept us out of war!" The people who make this plea assert with quavering voices that they "are behind the President." So they are; well behind him. The farther away from the position of duty and honor and hazard he has backed, the farther behind him these gentry have stood--or run.
Finally, Roosevelt stated with deadly clearness the position into which Wilson's vacillating policy had driven us:
The United States has not a friend in the world. Its conduct, under the leadership of its official representatives, for the last five years and, above all, for the last three years, has deprived it of the respect and has secured for it the contempt of every one of the great civilized nations of mankind. Peace treaties and windy Fourth-of-July eloquence and the base materialism which seeks profit as an incident to the abandonment of duty will not help us now. For five years our rulers at Washington have believed that all this people cared for was easy money, absence of risk and effort, and sounding platitudes which were not reduced to action. We have so acted as to convince other nations that in very truth we are too proud to fight; and the man who is too proud to fight is in practice always treated as just proud enough to be kicked. We have held our peace when our women and children were slain. We have turned away our eyes from the sight of our brother's woe.
"He kept us out of war," was a paradoxical battle-cry for one who in a very short time thereafter wished to pose as the winner of the greatest war in history.
But the battle-cry, it turned out, was used chiefly for political purposes. The year 1916 was a Presidential year and his opponents suspected that every thing President Wilson had done at home or abroad had been planned by him with a view to the effect which it might have on his reelection. Politicians of all parties saw that the war was the vital question to be decided by the political campaign. For the Democrats, Wilson was, of course, the only candidate; but the Republicans and the Progressives had their own schism to settle. First of all, they must attempt to reunite and to present a candidate whom both factions would support; if they did not, the catastrophe of 1912 would be repeated, and Wilson would again easily win against two warring Progressive and Republican candidates. The elections in 194 showed that the Progressive Party was disintegrating. Should its leaders strive now to revive its strength or should they bow to the inevitable, combine with the Republicans on a satisfactory candidate, and urge all the Progressives as a patriotic duty to support him?
All depended on Roosevelt's decision. After reflection, he consented to run for nomination by the Progressives. It soon became plain, however, that the Republicans would not take him back. The Machine did not want him on any terms: many of the Republicans blinding themselves to the fact that, as the number of votes cast in 1912 proved, Taft and not he had split the Republican Party, held Roosevelt
After the American messages in regard to the sinking of the Lusitania had brought no apology, much less any suggestion of redress, Roosevelt said: Apparently President Wilson has believed that the American people would permanently forget their dead and would slur over the dishonor and disgrace to the United States by that basest of all the base pleas of cowardly souls which finds expression in the statement: "Oh, well, anyhow the President kept us out of war!" The people who make this plea assert with quavering voices that they "are behind the President." So they are; well behind him. The farther away from the position of duty and honor and hazard he has backed, the farther behind him these gentry have stood--or run.
Finally, Roosevelt stated with deadly clearness the position into which Wilson's vacillating policy had driven us:
The United States has not a friend in the world. Its conduct, under the leadership of its official representatives, for the last five years and, above all, for the last three years, has deprived it of the respect and has secured for it the contempt of every one of the great civilized nations of mankind. Peace treaties and windy Fourth-of-July eloquence and the base materialism which seeks profit as an incident to the abandonment of duty will not help us now. For five years our rulers at Washington have believed that all this people cared for was easy money, absence of risk and effort, and sounding platitudes which were not reduced to action. We have so acted as to convince other nations that in very truth we are too proud to fight; and the man who is too proud to fight is in practice always treated as just proud enough to be kicked. We have held our peace when our women and children were slain. We have turned away our eyes from the sight of our brother's woe.
"He kept us out of war," was a paradoxical battle-cry for one who in a very short time thereafter wished to pose as the winner of the greatest war in history.
But the battle-cry, it turned out, was used chiefly for political purposes. The year 1916 was a Presidential year and his opponents suspected that every thing President Wilson had done at home or abroad had been planned by him with a view to the effect which it might have on his reelection. Politicians of all parties saw that the war was the vital question to be decided by the political campaign. For the Democrats, Wilson was, of course, the only candidate; but the Republicans and the Progressives had their own schism to settle. First of all, they must attempt to reunite and to present a candidate whom both factions would support; if they did not, the catastrophe of 1912 would be repeated, and Wilson would again easily win against two warring Progressive and Republican candidates. The elections in 194 showed that the Progressive Party was disintegrating. Should its leaders strive now to revive its strength or should they bow to the inevitable, combine with the Republicans on a satisfactory candidate, and urge all the Progressives as a patriotic duty to support him?
All depended on Roosevelt's decision. After reflection, he consented to run for nomination by the Progressives. It soon became plain, however, that the Republicans would not take him back. The Machine did not want him on any terms: many of the Republicans blinding themselves to the fact that, as the number of votes cast in 1912 proved, Taft and not he had split the Republican Party, held Roosevelt