John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Ever since Wilson made him give up his scheme to lead troops in the European war, T.R. had been beating himself to pieces against a wall of frustration. He was fighting illhealth. His explorations in the Amazon basin had left him with an intermittent fever. The bullet lodged next his lung caused chronic bronchitis. “When I went to South America I had one captain’s job left in me,” he confided to Owen Wister. “Now I’m good only for a major’s … It doesn’t matter what the rest is,” he added hastily, “I’ve had fun the whole time.”

He showed occasional bursts of the old energy; like a fighting bull bemused by the capes of the toreros , he was still good for an occasional deadly charge. He’d see red in a Wilsonian phrase and show his old fire and dash for a while, but he would soon tire and trot back weakly to his wife, Edith, and to Sagamore Hill for a rest.

He was subject to fits of rage, as in his runin with Samuel Gompers in the summer of 1917, when they appeared on the same platform in Carnegie Hall to greet the democratic revolution in Petrograd.

The newspapers had been filled for three days with accounts of a murderous race riot in East St. Louis. Mobs, instigated, it was claimed, by union leaders, had attacked Negro families who had moved up from the south in search of work. Houses were set afire, men and women slaughtered as they ran out from the burning buildings; children died in the burning houses. The toll was twentynine dead, about ninety people badly hurt; three hundred shacks and houses and a large part of the business district burned to the ground.

T.R. could not shake off the horror of this attack on helpless people. When he was introduced, amid a storm of cheers, by Mayor Mitchel, he departed from his prepared speech to express his shame and grief that such a thing could happen in America.

Gompers asked for the floor and tried to explain that those really to blame for the race riots were the manufacturers, greedy for war profits, who had lured cheap Negro labor up to St. Louis to break down union wage scales.

T.R.’s face flamed red. He shook his fist under Gompers’ nose. “Justice with me,” he shouted, “isn’t just a phrase or a form of words. How can we praise the people of Russia for doing justice to the men within their boundaries if we in any way apologize for a murder committed on the helpless?”

Gompers was ashy pale. He murmured something about an investigation being carried out by the A.F. of L.

“I’d put down the murders first and investigate afterwards,” roared T.R., flailing with his arms.

Boos, hoots and occasional cheers rose from the audience. It was with difficulty that order was restored in Carnegie Hall.

The following winter T.R. spent several weeks in hospital with an abscessed leg. When the weather turned warm he was out again charging about the country, assailing the Administration’s conduct of the war and lashing up patriotic fervor with his talks on Americanism. Wherever he went he shook men’s faith in the Wilsonian rhetoric. His plain speaking on Negro rights helped alienate Negro voters in the northern cities from the Democrats.

The Colonel couldn’t go to war himself but he gloried in being represented by his four sons. Archie and Theodore Jr. were officers in the A.E.F. Kermit had enlisted with the British and came down with malaria in the Mespot. Quentin, the youngest, was training for aviation. “I putter around with the other old frumps,” T.R. wrote Quentin after getting out of hospital in the spring, “trying to help with the liberty loan and the Red Cross and such like.”

As the summer of 1918 advanced, news from the fighting front warmed his heart. Theodore Jr. distinguished himself at Cantigny and was now a lieutenant colonel in his own right. Archie was badly smashed up by a burst of shrapnel. He came home on leave long enough to appear with his arm in a cast on the platform beside his father when T.R. addressed the erstwhile German-American Liederkranz Society in New York.

T.R. conducted two successful speaking tours through the middlewest. He staged a public reconciliation with Taft at a political dinner in Chicago. His re-entry into national politics seemed assured. Many elements in the Republican Party looked to his leadership to dislodge the Democrats from Washington in 1920. He was only sixtyone. If his health would mend he might be President once more.

Late in July news came that Quentin, the youngest, in some ways his father’s favorite, had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai.

It hurt more than T.R. had expected. He threw all his energies into keeping his wife’s courage up. Unbowed he went to Saratoga, two days after the news came, to deliver the keynote address at the Republican state convention. All factions, even Boss Barnes whom he had lambasted in a libel suit, urged him to accept the Republican nomination for governor. Smiling he turned them down. He was out for bigger game.

On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson’s conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen Points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted.

(T.R. hadn’t been able to get Wilson’s war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.)

That night in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his great teeth and waving his arms with the legendary zest, T.R. seemed to his listeners his old riproaring self. He admitted to no one that he felt feverish and sick. The abscess in his leg was acting up. When he got home to Sagamore Hill he confessed to Edith that he was really not well. The day of the armistice they took him to Roosevelt Hospital in New York. He was weak and running a temperature and in great pain, suffering from what he described as sciatica.

Roosevelt’s old friend Henry White, a survivor from John Hay’s diplomatic corps, who had represented Roosevelt at the Algeciras Conference during the great days of his presidency, came, along with Elihu Root, to call on him at the hospital. White had just been appointed, as a sop to the Republicans, one of Wilson’s delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. White and Root wanted to consult T.R. on a program, but they found him too weak to talk.

He did pull himself together long enough to compose a few days later a careful denunciation of the President’s peace plans: “Our Allies and our enemies and Mr. Wilson himself should all understand that Mr. Wilson has no authority to speak for the American people at this time. His leadership has just been emphatically repudiated by them … Mr. Wilson and his Fourteen Points and his four supplementary points and his five complementary points and all his utterances every which way have ceased to have any shadow of right to be accepted as expressive of the will of the American people.”

By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill.

Theodore Roosevelt intended his last blast as a warning to the world that Woodrow Wilson’s peace terms, even before they had been fully elaborated, were likely to be repudiated by the voters back home. Though blinded by personal bitterness the old campaigner had not lost his political intuition. Somehow, while so skillfully driving a wedge between the populations of the central empires and their governments, the President had allowed himself to become alienated from large and essential segments of the American people. The cleavage was not yet completely apparent.