Chapter 1
A Great Tragedy Impends
June to August 1914
The twentieth century looms before us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger people will pass us by, and will win for themselves dominion of the world. Let us . . . boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty, well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word, resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals . . . Above all, let us shrink from no strife, moral or physical, within or without the Nation . . . for it is only through strife, through hard and dangerous endeavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true national greatness.
—“The Strenuous Life,” TR speech at Chicago, April 1899
In the late spring of 1914, Roosevelt sailed again for Europe, arriving at Cherbourg on June 4 aboard the RMS Olympic. This trip had two main objectives: The first was to attend the wedding of his son Kermit to Belle Willard, the blonde socialite daughter of Joseph Edward Willard, the American ambassador to Spain. Besides this family obligation, this voyage also allowed the Colonel to accept an invitation to speak before the Royal Geographic Society in London to answer those who still disputed his claim to have charted earlier that year in South America an unknown “River of Doubt” as long as the Rhine.1 It was in fact remarkable that Roosevelt was making the Atlantic voyage at all. Only a few months before he had almost died in the Amazonian jungles, at one point instructing Kermit, who came along as he had on the African safari four years before, to leave him behind and save himself and the remnants of their small party. TR’s wife Edith felt herself still too ill and emotionally distraught over the death of a cousin to make the journey to Europe, so he was accompanied instead by his daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth.2
Before going on to Spain, the Colonel had time for two days in Paris, where he saw a variety of friends and politicians. On June 6, after lunch with Gabriel Hanotaux, the former foreign minister, TR called on the French president, Raymond Poincaré. Roosevelt was also the dinner guest of soon-to-be-replaced American Ambassador Myron Herrick, an old Republican ally. The next day, after breakfast with the novelist Edith Wharton, a distant cousin of his wife’s, the Colonel departed for Madrid, where he stayed with his new in-laws at the embassy and carried out several days of sightseeing with Alice before the June 11 civil ceremony that united Kermit and Belle. Theodore reported to Edith that he had never seen “two people more in love with one other,” and he believed that the newlyweds had “as good a chance of happiness as any two lovers can have.”3 TR then went on to England, where he spent the remaining week of the European sojourn. This would be the last of his many visits to the island nation. Of course, he did not know this, nor did he, or any of his many close friends, suspect that within two months Britain and her Empire would be drawn into what came to be called the Great War, later the First World War, the most horrific conflict the globe had ever seen.4
For over a decade, Roosevelt had been an admirer of the British Empire and a proponent of cooperation and friendship between the two great English-speaking peoples, later dubbed the “Special Relationship.”5 Over that time, for strategic and other reasons that suited both nations, Anglo-American relations had become more cordial, in part as a consequence of the brief Spanish-American War.6 Roosevelt had not always felt as warmly, but British support for the United States in the “Splendid Little War” reversed Roosevelt’s previous opinion. The attitude of England, he told his friend Arthur Lee, whom he had first met in Cuba in 1898 when Lee was British Military Attaché, “worked a complete revolution in my feelings and the attitude on the continent at that time opened my eyes to the other side of the question.” After the war, TR felt “very strongly” that the English-speaking peoples were “now closer together than for a century and a quarter, and that every effort should be made to keep them together; for their interests are really fundamentally the same, and they are far more closely akin, not merely in blood, but in feeling and in principles, than either is akin to any other people in the world . . . Our two peoples are the only two really free great peoples.”7
On his arrival at London in June 1914, Roosevelt was welcomed by a group of dignitaries and friends, which included the Archbishop of Canterbury and American Ambassador Walter Hines Page, whose outlook in foreign policy matters had more in common with TR than the Democratic administration that had appointed him and whose advice, consequently, President Woodrow Wilson often ignored.8 After taking lunch with Page at the embassy, the Colonel stayed at the London house of Arthur Lee, who, after being made an honorary Rough Rider in Cuba, had retired from the army and been elected to the Commons, where his constant defense of the United States got him dubbed the “MP for America.” His American wife, Ruth, née Moore, had inherited a banking fortune that allowed the pair a comfortable lifestyle including a country house, Chequers Court, which they later generously bequeathed to the nation for the use of its prime ministers.
The Colonel had told the Lees that he wanted a quiet visit with “no functions of any kind and seeing none but a few of his oldest and closest friends.” But in practice the visit was “very otherwise.” The Lee house at 10 Chesterfield Street was besieged by popular interest, and Arthur was soon reduced to exhaustion by his efforts to “repel boarders” in the shape of “self-invited lion-hunters, pertinacious press men and photographers, who, like Oliver Twist, were always asking for more.”9 Even though he was supposed to be an “extinct volcano,” every day Roosevelt held court for twenty newspapermen. The public insisted on knowing what he did, and the reports were cabled all over the world. The press notables he saw included Lord Northcliffe, the self-made founder of the Daily Mail, owner of the Times of London, and soon to be the loudest critic of his government’s war effort.
Roosevelt also met, not for the first time, with prominent politicians from both leading parties, including Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, the lone aristocrat in a cabinet made up mostly of lawyers. Grey shared with Roosevelt a passion for the outdoors, and when TR had visited in 1910 the two had shared a rainy daylong walk in the foreign secretary’s home county, spotting birds and listening to their calls. Grey gave a luncheon for the Colonel at his house in Eccleston Square, which Asquith and Lloyd George attended. The prime minister, who was unused to being outtalked and overshadowed, recalled that Roosevelt “held the floor practically the whole time and talked to & at us as tho’ we had been a public meeting or (occasionally) a Sunday school.” What was it, Asquith wrote to a friend, that made “all Americans so intolerably long-winded & so prone to platitude?” He appraised TR as a “second rate man with overflowing vitality, and now & then quite a passable sense of humour—full of egotism, but au fond (I should think) a good fellow.” Lloyd George noted that when Roosevelt “declaimed trite statements,” such as “I believe in liberty, but liberty with order,” Asquith “glowered at him with a look of curiosity,” and he thought TR saw it. The meal, in Lloyd George’s opinion, was “hardly a success.”10
The Colonel fared somewhat better, at least in Arthur Lee’s estimation, with the leaders of the Conservative opposition, who took the name Unionists in these years for their championing of a continued constitutional union with Ireland. In London, TR saw among others the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, the party leader Andrew Bonar Law, the imperial proconsul George Curzon, and the militant Ulster leader Sir Edward Carson. With the last in particular, Roosevelt had a private conversation about the Irish Home Rule crisis, which that summer dominated the attention of the country and threatened to tear apart the United Kingdom. It must have been an interesting talk, as TR had believed for some time that granting Ireland Home Rule within the British Empire was the right and proper thing to do. Lee, hardly an unbiased witness, recorded that his friend made a “complete conquest as usual of everyone” except the dour Bonar Law, who commented to Lee that that he found Roosevelt “very common-place.” This, Lee went on, “must have been the first time T. R. had ever been charged with that particular defect.” But Lee found it “irresistibly humorous” coming from Bonar Law, “the very quintessence of everything that was most bourgeois and drab.”11
Lee also organized a lunch and talk that included Balfour—like Roosevelt, an intellectual who also happened to be a consummate politician—as well as scholars from Oxford and Cambridge. TR enjoyed the occasion greatly despite the fact that Balfour refused to talk on the intended subjects. Consequently the luncheon became, in Lee’s words, a “most amusing exhibition of a gazelle eluding a bulldog.” Lee found Roosevelt’s versatility quite extraordinary while noting that he was sometimes accused of being an “egoist and taking the center of the stage too much.” This, in Lee’s opinion, was “merely a symptom of his astounding vitality,” and it needed to be remembered that probably no man had “to live his daily life so much in the limelight.” Taking center stage had become “almost subconscious with him.”
The only way the Colonel could get even a temporary respite from the attention of the world was to “disappear in some unexplored continent,” and before leaving London, he spoke before the Royal Geographical Society on his recent adventure on the River of Doubt.12 The talk was given at the Civil Service Commission Theater on Bond Street, which that night was jammed with traffic as more than a thousand Society members tried to gain entrance to a hall built for eight hundred. Even Sir Edward Grey had a devil of a time, finally scaling a stone wall and sneaking in through a side door before taking his seat on the stage. Ruth Lee noted that the lecture, which recounted TR’s four-hundred mile canoe journey, was given entirely without notes in a conversational tone and was a great success. It contained “very few technicalities and just the right sense of humour—avoiding the large ‘I’ with great dexterity.”13 A message from the arbiter of the society, Sir Clement Markham, acknowledged that Roosevelt had made a “very important contribution to our geographical knowledge by discovering this longitudinal valley between the Tapajós and the Madeira.”14
The Colonel also spoke of his expedition during a country house party at Chequers Court, the Lees’ country home, where he traced out the waterway’s course on a huge map spread out in the Great Hall. Those invited included TR’s daughter Alice, the Conservative writer and publicist F. S. Oliver, editor of the Spectator John St. Loe Strachey, Owen Seaman of Punch, the Anglo-Irish MP and agricultural reformer Horace Plunkett, and Britain’s most-respected old soldier, Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar. For the previous decade, in an effort to spur a British counter to the German “nation in arms,” Roberts had led a preparedness movement in England that called for the enlargement and modernization of the small British army through some form of universal service.15 However, this found little success in the face of Britain’s deeply held tradition of reliance on the Royal Navy and a small volunteer army. TR was charmed by the diminutive war hero and before too long would himself be called “America’s Lord Roberts.” At Chequers, Ruth Lee recorded that TR was “in his greatest form and perfectly dear . . . We talked upon almost every subject, history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, natural history and human nature.” At the end of dinner, it “would have required a surgical operation to remove the women from the table,” so everyone stayed there and had coffee.16
Figure 1. TR and Alice in London, June 18, 1914
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library
Before he left England, TR attended a luncheon at the American embassy that included Colonel Edward M. House, Woodrow Wilson’s closest advisor and confidante. In Europe on an unofficial peace mission meant to improve relations between England and Germany, Wilson’s “silent partner” met with many notables in both countries, including Sir Edward Grey and Wilhelm II.17 Wilson’s personal envoy had some difficulty in Germany explaining that his rank had been bestowed by the governor of Texas for political services and that he had no military experience. The Kaiser, in House’s estimation, “had all the versatility of Roosevelt with something more of charm, something less of force.” During their thirty-minute conversation, Wilhelm spoke “kindly and admiringly” of England and declared that the Americans, Germans, and British were “kindred peoples and should draw closer together.” When House asked why Wilhelm refused to sign the arbitration treaty offered by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, the Kaiser replied that Germany would never endorse such a document, which called for a “cooling off” period of up to a year. His country’s strength lay in “being always prepared for war at a second’s notice.” Surrounded by enemies and with the “bayonets of Europe directed at her,” Germany would not “resign that advantage and give our enemies time to prepare.”18 In the end, House’s quest on behalf of Wilson proved as quixotic as that of Roosevelt’s four years before for Andrew Carnegie.
In the intervening years Carnegie had not given up his peace crusade or the hope that the German Emperor might yet be brought to his side in the struggle. After the failure of TR’s peace mission to Germany, Carnegie had put his faith in President William Howard Taft, and with Taft’s blessing at the end of 1910 he had used $10,000,000 in United States Steel bonds to fund the Carnegie Endowment for Peace still at work today.19 Elihu Root, who had been TR’s secretary of state, had become the endowment’s first president and would hold the position for the next 15 formative years. In 1912, for his labors in the vineyards of international arbitration, Root had joined Roosevelt as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. (That same year their friendship ended when Root chaired the Republican convention that nominated Taft over TR.) The next year Carnegie had led a delegation to Germany for the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wilhelm’s reign. On his way to Berlin, Carnegie had passed through Belgium, noting its beauty and that it could never be attacked, because Germany, France, and England guaranteed its neutrality. When they met in Berlin, the boisterous Kaiser, wagging his index finger, exclaimed, “Remember Carnegie! Twenty-five years!—and twenty-five years of peace! If I am Emperor for another twenty-five years not a shot shall be fired in Europe!”20
When Roosevelt departed England for home from Southampton on the SS Imperator on June 18, 1914, Lee found the temporary valet he had assigned to TR, Fern, with “tears trickling down his cheeks.” When he asked what the matter was, the man replied that in all his thirty years of service he had “never met such a gentleman as ’im.” Evidently, Lee commented, Fern and Bonar Law had “different standards of human values.”21 Colonel House also returned to America that month, and before he departed, Ambassador Herrick confided “something of T. R.’s mental and physical activities.” Herrick predicted that Roosevelt was “getting ready to go back home and to give the Democrats a thoroughly unhappy time.” House responded that he was sure TR “could do nothing that would distress us so much at it would his fellow Republicans.”22 Prescient words, but Roosevelt would spare neither party in the following months.
On June 24, the Colonel once again returned to his sanctuary Sagamore Hill, the family home at Oyster Bay, Long Island, and was there reunited with his beloved Edith, the center of his world and the perfect complement to Theodore. More clear-eyed and wary in her outlook, Edith’s composed nature moderated his exuberance in domestic and political matters. She was a combination of advisor and loving companion.23 “Teedie” and “Edie” had grown up in the same wealthy New York circles and had been childhood sweethearts; her best friend was his sister Corinne. But while away at Harvard he had become enchanted by and married the beautiful Alice Lee, who took Edith’s place, temporarily at least, in his heart. Alice’s tragic death in 1884, soon after the birth of their first child, came within 12 hours of the passing of ...