Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography,

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Roosevelt understood the harm which the German conspiracy was
doing among our people, not only by polluting their ideals, but
actually strengthening the coils which the propagandists had been
winding, to strangle at the favorable moment American
independence itself. We discovered then that the process of
Germanization had been going on secretly during twenty years.
Since England was the chief enemy in the way of German world
domination, the German-Americans laid themselves out to render
the English odious here. And they worked to such good purpose
that the legal officers of the Administration admonished the
American people that the English, in holding up merchant vessels
laden with cargoes for Germany, committed breaches against
international law which were quite as heinous as the sinking by
German submarines of ships laden with American non-combatants.
They magnified the loss of a cargo of perishable food and set it
against the ferocious destruction of neutral human beings.
Senator Lodge, however, expressed the clear thought and right
feeling of Americans when he said that we were more moved by the
thought of the corpse of an innocent victim of the Hun submarines
than by that of a bale of cotton.

These enormities, these sins of omission and commission, of which
Roosevelt declared our Government guilty, amazed and exasperated
him, and from the beginning of 1915 onward, he set himself three
tasks. He wished to expose and circumvent German machinations
over here. Next, he deemed it a pressing duty to rouse our
country to the recognition that we must prepare at once for war.
He saw, as every other sensible person saw, that as the conflict
grew more terrible in Europe and spread into Asia and Africa, we
should be drawn into it, and that therefore we must make ready.
He seconded the plan of General Leonard Wood to organize a camp
for volunteers at Plattsburg and other places; and what that plan
accomplished in fitting American soldiers to meet and vanquish
the Kaiser's best troops, has since been proved. President
Wilson, however, would not officially countenance any preparation
which, so far as the public was allowed to know his reasons,
might be taken by the Germans as an unfriendly act. Finally,
Roosevelt labored unceasingly to revive and make militant the
ideals of true Americanism.

That the Germans accurately gauged that President Wilson would
not sanction any downright vigorous action against them, was
sufficiently proved on May 7, 1915, when German submarines
torpedoed and sank, at two o'clock in the afternoon, the British
passenger steamship Lusitania, eastward bound, a few miles south
of the Point of Kinsale on the Irish coast. With her went down
nearly thirteen hundred persons, all of them non-belligerents and
more than one hundred of them American men, women, and children.
This atrocious crime the Germans committed out of their stupid
miscalculation of the motives which govern non-German peoples.
They thought that the British and Americans would be so
terrorized that they would no longer dare to cross the ocean. The
effect was, of course, just the opposite. A cry of horror swept
over the civilized world, and swiftly upon it came a great demand
for punishment and retribution.

Then was the moment for President Wilson to break off diplomatic
relations with Germany. The very day after the waters of the
British Channel had closed over the innocent victims, President
Wilson made an address in which he announced that "a nation may
be too proud to fight." The country gasped for breath when it
read those words, which seemed to be the official statement of
the President of the United States that foreign nations might out
rage, insult, and degrade this nation with impunity, because, as
the rabbit retires into its hole, so we would burrow deep into
our pride and show neither resentment nor sense of honor. As soon
as possible, word came from the White House that, as the
President's speech had been written before the sinking of the
Lusitania, his remarks had no bearing on that atrocity. Pride is
a wonderful cloak for cowards, but it never saves them. Perhaps
the most amazing piece of impudence in Germany's long list was
the formal visit described by the newspapers which the German
Ambassador, Bernstorff, paid to Mr. Bryan, the Secretary--of
State, to present to our Government the formal condolence of
Germany and him self at this painful happening. Bernstorff, we
know now, planned the sinking and gave the German Government
notice by wireless just where the submarines could best destroy
the Lusitania, on that Friday afternoon.

Ten days later, Mr. Wilson sent a formal protest to Germany in
which he recalled "the humane and enlightened attitude hitherto
assumed by the Imperial German Government in matters of
international right, and particularly in regard to the freedom of
the seas"; and he professed to have "learned to recognize the
German views and the German influence in the field of
international obligation as always engaged upon the side of
justice and humanity." If Mr. Bryan had written this, no one
would have been astonished, because Mr. Bryan made no pretense of
knowing even the rudimentary facts of history; but that President
Wilson, by profession a historian, should laud, as being always
engaged in justice and humanity, the nation which, under
Frederick the Great, had stolen Silesia and dismembered Poland,
and which, in his own lifetime, had garroted Denmark, had forced
a wicked war on Austria, had trapped France by lies into another
war and robbed her of Alsace-Lorraine, and had only recently
wiped its hands, dripping with blood drawn from the Chinese, was
amazing! Small wonder if after that, the German hyphenates lifted
up their heads arrogantly in this country, or that the Kaiser in
Germany believed that the United States was a mere jelly-fish
nation which would tolerate any enormity he might concoct. This
was the actual comfort President Wilson's message gave Germany.
The negative result was felt among the Allied nations which,
struggling against the German Monster like Laocoon in the coils
of the Python, took Mr. Wilson's praise of Germany's imaginary
love of justice and humanity as a death-warrant for themselves.
They could not believe that he who wrote such words, or the
American people who swallowed them, could ever be roused to give
succor to the Allies in their desperation.

Three years later I asked Roosevelt what he would have done, if
he had been President in May, 1915. He said, in substance, that,
as soon as he had read in the New York newspaper* the
advertisement which Bernstorff had inserted warning all American
citizens from taking passage on the Lusitania, he would have sent
for Bernstorff and asked him whether the advertisement was
officially acknowledged by him. Even Bernstorff, arch-liar that
he was, could not have denied it. "I should then have sent to the
Department of State to prepare his passports; I should have
handed them to him and said, 'You will sail on the Lusitania
yourself next Friday; an American guard will see you on board,
and prevent your coming ashore.' The breaking off of diplomatic
relations with Germany," Roosevelt added, "would probably have
meant war, and we were horribly unprepared. But better war, than
submission to a humiliation which no President of this country
has ever before allowed; better war a thousand times, than to let
the Germans go on really making war upon us at sea, and
honeycombing the American people with plots on land, while our
Government shamelessly lavishes praise on the criminal for his
justice and humanity and virtually begs his pardon."

* The advertisement was printed in the New York Times of April
23, 1915.

Thus believed Roosevelt in the Lusitania crisis, and many others
of us agreed with him. The stopping of German intrigues here, the
breaking-off of diplomatic relations, would have been of
inestimable benefit to this country. It would have caused every
American to rally to the country's defense. It would have forced
the reluctant Administration to prepare a navy and an army. It
would have sifted the patriotic sheep from the sneaking and
spying goats. It would have brought immense comfort to the Allies
and corresponding despondency to the Huns. For Germany plunged
into the war believing that England would remain neutral. When
England came in, to redeem her word of honor, Germany's frantic
purpose was to have us keep neutral and supply her with food and
munitions. Had she known that there was any possibility of our
actively joining the Allies, she would have hastened to make
peace. Our first troops could have reached France in the early
spring of 1916. They would not have been, of course, shock
troops, but their presence in France would have been an assurance
to the Allies that we were coming with all our force, and the
Germans would soon have understood that this meant their doom. By
the summer of 1916, the war would have been over.

Think what this implies! Two years and a half of fighting would
never have taken place. At least three million lives among the
Allied armies would have been saved. Russia would have been
spared revolution, chaos, Bolshevism. Some, at least, of the
myriads of massacred Armenians would not have been slain.
Thousands of square miles of devastated territory would not have
been spoiled. A hundred billions of dollars for equipping and
carrying on the war would never have been spent. All this is not
an idle dream; it is the calm statement of what would probably
have happened if President Wilson, after the Lusitania outrage,
had dared to break with Germany. History will hold him
accountable for those millions of lives sacrificed, for the
unspeakable suffering which the people of the ravaged regions had
to endure, for the dissolution of Russia, which threatened to
throw down the bases of our civilization, and for the waste of
incalculable treasure. President Wilson's apologists assert that
the country was not ready for him to take any resolute attitude
towards Germany in May, 1915. They argue that if he had attempted
to do so there would have been great internal dissension, perhaps
even civil war, and especially that the German sections would
have opposed preparations for war so stubbornly as to have made
them impossible. This is pure assumption. The truth is that
whenever or wherever an appeal was made to American patriotism,
it met with an immediate response. The sinking of the Lusitania
created such a storm of horror and indignation that if the
President had lifted a finger, the manhood of America, and the
womanhood, too, would have risen to back him up. But instead of
lifting a finger, he wrote that message to Germany, praising the
Germans for their traditional respect for justice and humanity.
And a long time had yet to pass before he made the least sign of
encouragement to those Americans who would uphold the honor of
the United States and would have this, the greatest of Republics,
take its due part in defending Democracy against the Huns'
attempt to wipe Democracy off the earth forever.

Having missed his opportunity then, Mr. Wilson could of course
plead that the country was less and less inclined to go to war,
because he furnished the pro-German plotters the very respite
they had needed for carrying on their work. By unavowed ways they
secured a strong support among the members of the National House
of Representatives and the Senate. They disguised themselves as
pacifists, and they found it easy to wheedle the "lunatic fringe"
of native pacifists into working for the domination of William of
Hohenzollern over the United States, and for the establishing of
his world dominion. The Kaiser's propagandists spread evil
arguments to justify all the Kaiser's crimes, and they found
willing disciples even among the members of the Administration to
repeat and uphold these arguments.

They told us, for instance, that their massacre served the
victims of the Lusitania right for taking passage on a British
steamship. They even wished to pass a law forbidding Americans
from traveling on the ocean at all, because, by doing so, they
might be blown up by the Germans, and that would involve this
country in diplomatic difficulties with Germany. Next, the
Germans protested against our selling munitions of war to the
Allies. Neither custom nor international law forbade doing this,
and the protest stood out in :stark impudence when it came from
Germany, the country which, for fifty years and more, had sold
munitions to every one who asked and had not hesitated to sell
impartially to both antagonists in the Russo-Japanese War. By
playing on the sentimentality of this same "lunatic fringe," the
German intriguers almost succeeded in driving through a bill to
stop this traffic. They knew the true Prussian way of whimpering
when bullying did not avail them. And so they not only whimpered
about our sending shells over to kill- the German soldiers, but
they whimpered also over the dire effects which the Allied
blockade produced upon the non-combatant population of Germany.
These things went on, not only a whole year, but far into the
second after the sinking of the Lusitania. Roosevelt never
desisted from charging that the person ultimately responsible for
them was President Wilson, and he believed that the President's
apparent self-satisfaction would avail him little when he stands
at the bar of History.

It may be that an entire people may lose for a time its sense of
logic. We have just had the most awful proof that, through a
long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the
German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical
standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We
know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the
influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has lost its
taste for generations together in art, and in poetry. We remember
that the Witchcraft Delusion obsessed our ancestors. It is not
impossible, therefore, that between 194 and 1918 the American
people passed through a stage in which it threw logic to the
winds. This would account at least for its infatuation for
President Wilson, in spite of his undisguised inconsistencies and
appalling blunders. A people who thought logic ally and kept
certain principles steadily before it, could hardly otherwise
have tolerated Mr. Wilson's "too-proud-to-fight" speech, and his
message to Germany after the sinking of the Lusitania, or his
subsequent endeavor to make the Americans think that there was no
choice between the causes for which the Allies and the Teutons
were fighting. Was it not he who said that Europe was war-mad,
and that America had better mind her own business, and look the
other way? Did he not declare that we were forced into war, and
then that we were not? That a President of the United States
should assert or even insinuate these things during the great War
for Humanity -and by Humanity I mean every trait, every advance
which has lifted men above the level of the beast, where they
originated, to the level of the human with its potential ascent
to heights undreamed of--is amazing now: what will it be a
generation hence?

Roosevelt watched impatiently while these strange phases passed
before him. He listened angrily at the contradictory utterances.
He felt the ignominy of our country's being at such a depth. He
knew Germany too well to suppose that she could be deterred by
President Wilson's messages. He saw something comic in shaking a
long fore-finger and saying, "Tut, tut! I shall consider being
very harsh, if you commit these outrages three more times.." To
shake your fist at all, and then to shake your finger, seemed to
Roosevelt almost imbecile. Cut off from serving the cause of
American patriotism in any public capacity, Roosevelt struggled
to take his part by writing. Every month in the Outlook, and
subsequently in the Metropolitan Magazine, he gave vent to his
pent-up indignation. The very titles of some of his papers reveal
his animus: "Fear God and Take Your Own Part"; "A Sword for
Defense"; "America First: A Phrase or a Fact?"; "Uncle Sam's Only
Friend is Uncle Sam"; "Dual Nationality"; "Preparedness." In each
of these he poured forth with unflagging vehemence the
fundamental verities on which our American society should rest.
He showed that it was not a mere competition in letter-writing
between the honey-worded Mr. Wilson and the sophisticated
Bernstorff or the Caliban-sly Bethmann Hollweg, but that God was
in the crisis, and that no adroitness of phrase or trick of
diplomacy could get rid of Him. He showed that there could not be
two kinds of Americans: one genuine, which believed wholly and
singly in the United States, and the other cunning and mongrel,
which swore allegiance to the United States--lip service--and
kept its allegiance to Germany--heart service. He lost no
opportunity to make his illustrations clear. On resigning as
Secretary of State after the sinking of the Lusitania, because
President Wilson insisted on mildly calling Germany's attention
to that crime, Mr. Bryan addressed a large audience of Germans.

Then Roosevelt held him up to the gaze of the American people as
a man who had no true Americanism. Lest I should be suspected of
misinterpreting or exaggerating Roosevelt's opinion of President
Wilson, during the first two years of the war, I quote two or
three passages, taken at random, which will prove, I hope, that I
have summarized him truly. He says, for instance:

Professional pacifists of the type of Messrs. Bryan, Jordan, and
Ford, who in the name of peace preach doctrines that would entail
not merely utter infamy, but utter disaster to their own country,
never in practice venture to denounce concrete wrong by dangerous
wrongdoers .... These professional pacifists, through President
Wilson, have forced the country into a path of shame and dishonor
during the past eighteen 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 responsible for the defeat in
that year. One heard also of some Republicans who, for lack of a
better reason, opposed Roosevelt because, they said, that
Roosevelt having put Taft into the Presidency, ought not to have
"gone back" on him. Yet these same persons, if they had taken a
partner into their firm to carry on a certain policy, and had
found him pursuing a different one, would hardly have argued that
they were in loyalty bound to continue to support this partner as
long as he chose. The consideration which weighed with a much
larger number, however, was that Roosevelt had so antagonized the
German vote and the Pacifist vote and all the other anti-American
votes, that he might not be a winning candidate. Accordingly, the
Republicans sought for somebody who would please everybody, and
yet would have enough personal strength to be a leader. They
pitched on Charles E. Hughes, former Governor of New York State,
and then a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. The
unwisdom of going to the Supreme Bench for a standard-bearer was
immediately apparent; because all the proprieties prevented
justice Hughes from expressing any opinion on political subjects
until he resigned from the Court. Hence, it followed that no
great enthusiasm could be aroused over his candidacy for
nomination since nobody knew what his policy would be.

The Progressives held their Convention in Chicago on June 5th,
the same day that the Republicans met there. Some of the
original, Simon-Pure Progressives disapproved of this collusion,
declaring that it represented a "deal," and that the Progressive
Party, which had come into existence as a rebuke of Machine
politics, ought never to soil itself by entering into a "deal."
Nevertheless, the will of the more worldly-minded prevailed, and
they probably thought that there would be a better chance to have
the Republicans nominate Roosevelt if he were already the nominee
of the Progressives. But they were disappointed. They nominated
Roosevelt and the Republicans Justice Hughes. Suspense followed
as to whether Roosevelt, by accepting, would oblige the
Progressives to organize another campaign. He sent only a
conditional acceptance to the Progressive Committee and, a few
days later, he announced publicly that he would support justice
Hughes, because he regarded the defeat of Wilson as the most
vital object before the American people. I find among my
correspondence from him a reply to a letter of mine in which I
had quite needlessly urged this action upon him. I quote this
passage because it epitomizes what might be expanded over many
pages. The letter is dated June 16, 1916:

I agree entirely with you. I shall do all I can for Mr. Hughes.
But don't forget that Mr. Hughes alone can make it possible for
me to be efficient in his behalf. If he merely speaks like Mr.
Wilson, only a little more weakly, he will rob my support of its
effectiveness. Speeches such as those of mine, to which you
kindly allude, have their merit only if delivered for a man who
is himself speaking uncompromisingly and without equivocation. I
have just sent word to Hughes through one of our big New York
financiers to make a smashing attack on Wilson for his actions,
and to do it immediately, in connection with this Democratic
Nominating Convention. Wilson was afraid of me. He never dared
answer me; but if Hughes lets him, he will proceed to take the
offensive against Hughes. I shall do everything I can for him,
but don't forget that the efficiency of what I do must largely
depend upon Hughes.

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