John Passos - Mr. Wilson's War

Pétain spent the summer months driving from division to division, talking to officers and men, making promises, which he promptly carried out, of better conditions, more frequent leave. There would be no more random butcheries. The Americans were coming. Tanks were the instruments of victory. He reassured everybody: “We must wait for the Americans and the tanks.”

News of the coming declaration of war found Theodore Roosevelt fishing for “devilfish” in the Gulf of Mexico, in the company of a congenial Virginia tobacco trader named Russell Coles, whose hobby was sharks and rays. Coles had a houseboat anchored among the keys that fringe Charlotte Harbor as a base for fishingtrips after shark and manta. The giant rays occasionally seen off the Florida coast were known as mantas to the watermen, but T.R. found it more exciting to astonish the reporters by calling the ugly monsters “devilfish.” Boarding the launch that was to take him out to the fishing grounds from Punta Gorda he delivered himself of a tirade against pacifists.

The outing was a success. T.R. managed to thrust his harpoon a full two feet through the hard cartilage of one monster’s slippery back. The barbed iron held. After the launch had been towed a half a mile the four “twohanded” men of Cole’s crew hauled the thrashing batlike creature in to the point where it could be dispatched, amid great splashing and lunging and outpouring of greasy blood into the brine, by hacking and poking with a sharp steel lance specially designed for the purpose. When thoroughly dead the giant ray was found to measure sixteen feet eight inches from fin to fin. “Good sport but not the sort of thing to recommend to a weakling,” T.R. told his newspaper cronies.

After a few days of such relaxations, the politician in T.R. mastered the fisherman, and he decided it was time to head back into the theatre of action.

On the train that carried him north he had two pieces of news to ponder. Woodrow Wilson was asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany. That was all to the good.

The second piece of news boded ill for T.R.’s fondest hopes. Wilson’s Secretary of War was depriving his dear friend Leonard Wood of command of the Eastern Department where he’d done yeoman’s work organizing the Plattsburg camps, and getting the units under his command as ready for war as he could with the skimpy equipment at his disposal. He’d gone so far as to set some companies drilling with broomsticks when the War Department could not furnish rifles for them.

Wood, although publicly muzzled, had been second only to T.R. in private denunciations of the “peace at any price” policies of the President. Now the Administration was striking back by dividing General Wood’s command into three and suggesting that Manila, notorious as the repository for superfluous officers, might be a suitable field for his talents. Wood, as the ranking major general in the army, insisted on being given command of the new South-Eastern Department, with headquarters at Charleston, South Carolina, where he could at least go on training troops.

The meaning of this move was obvious. Wood was not to be considered for the command of an expeditionary force in Europe.

This shelving of the most popular military leader in the country threatened the scheme to raise a volunteer division, to which T.R. had been devoting his energies ever since the German announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare. Men from all walks of life including crowds of retired army officers had answered his call. One division wouldn’t hold them all. Now he was planning four.

The old dream of military glory had become an obsession. San Juan Hill wasn’t enough. Although not quite fiftynine T.R. had to admit that the fevers he contracted in the Amazon Basin and the bullet near his lung had damaged his old robust health. If he wasn’t well enough for field service he could at least infect others with his enthusiasm. He couldn’t help seeing himself, in spite of everything, leading one last charge, as a fitting climax to the strenuous life, and ending in a burst of glory with the flag planted on one last shelltorn hill.

On the train north T.R. determined on a personal interview with the President. He stopped off in Washington and called unannounced at the White House. The President was in a cabinet meeting. T.R. chatted for a while with his old friend the chief usher and then, before catching his New York train, drove up to the Hill to drop in on Henry Cabot Lodge.

The occasion of the call was to congratulate the other “scholar in politics” upon a successful bout of fisticuffs which the newspapers had reported as taking place in a Senate corridor, with a young pacifist who, in the course of an altercation about war policies, called the Massachusetts senator a coward. Lodge, though a far older man than T.R., hauled off and knocked the pacifist down. New England cheered. The pro-Allied press blew up the incident to heroic size.

Lodge himself was keeping mum about the affair. He did mutter something to a friend about how after a lifetime of public service “the public suddenly discovers I’m a great man when I commit a breach of the peace.”

“The dear old Brahmin,” T.R. exclaimed to one of his “newspaper cabinet,” “that’s just like him. The scholar in politics simply couldn’t bring himself to say he had indulged in a fist fight.”

The President and his advisers put their heads together as to what should be done about T.R. After exhaustive consultations with Baker and the Chiefs of Staff, Wilson had already decided to pass over Wood, and appoint John J. Pershing as commander of any American expedition that needed to be sent to Europe. Though Pershing stood in a poor light in the public press as a result of the failure of his efforts to catch Villa, it was well understood in the War Department that he had risked his military reputation through punctilious obedience to orders from Washington. To Wilson, Pershing looked like his man.

So long as Wood remained in the army he was subject to discipline, but T.R. was not only an ex-President and the most popular leader of the war party, but a possibility for the Republican nomination in 1920. He must be shelved, but gently. Wilson had to think of the support he needed in Congress to get his war measures through, particularly conscription, sure to be unpopular in many quarters. An interview was arranged.

A few days later T.R. reappeared in Washingtoa He put up at his daughter Alice Longworth’s house. As wife of a prominent member of Congress, and as a woman of sharp wit and spirit, her home constituted a last redoubt of the old Washington society of the days of John Hay and Henry Adams. Immediately the Longworth house became the center of political conjecture.

On April 10 at twelve o’clock Theodore Roosevelt appeared at the front door of the White House. He was in his usual gusty spirits. Tumulty met him in the Blue Room. He slapped Tumulty on the back and congratulated him on being the father of six. He was immediately ushered into the President’s office. Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt talked alone for fortyfive minutes. As he left T.R. was heard kidding Tumulty about having a staff job for him at his divisional headquarters in France, though it wouldn’t be a dangerous job; he could assure Mrs. Tumulty and the six children of that. Tumulty jokingly answered he had half a mind to accept.

On the White House steps T.R. found thirty waiting reporters surrounded by a crowd of some three hundred people. He flashed his teeth and his glasses and puffed out his chest for the photographers. He declared the interview was bully. The President was most courteous and attentive.

T.R. had assured Woodrow Wilson that the past was buried and that in this emergency he was giving him his complete support. He plead to be allowed to raise his division. He tried to be disarmingly jocose. If the President would let him go he’d promise not to come back. In any case, he declared he was in favor of the administration conscription bill, and would go right to work to see it was put through Congress.