Theodore Roosevelt (14 page)

TR went so far as to write, in a letter to Rudyard Kipling, whose jungle tales he admired despite their anthropomorphizing of animals, a habit he much deplored, that Wilson's family had fought on neither side in the Civil War. Did he wish to cover the wartime president with the shame of his own father who had bought a substitute in the earlier conflict? Yet he went on to add: “I have explained to my four sons that, if there is a war during their lifetime, I wish them to be in a position to explain why they did go to it and not why they did not go to it.”

He announced prior to the Republican convention of 1916: “It would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic—unless it feels not only devotion to ideals but the purpose measurably to realize those ideals in action.”

Evidently the country did not feel so inclined, for Hughes, whom TR described as “a man somewhat in the Wilson type” and a “bearded iceberg,” became the candidate, running without challenging the Democratic endorsement of Wilson as the man who had kept us out of the war.

Roosevelt is said to have gone so far as to have offered Elihu Root his old job as secretary of state if he was nominated and elected, but Root declined. He hoped, apparently, for the nomination himself. “Root had a chance to be Warwick,” TR sneered, “but he threw it away because he wanted to be king, which was impossible.”

Roosevelt, during the campaigns and after, continued his attacks on Wilson, hitting him again and again on two points: his failure to protest and retaliate sufficiently over the German submarine attacks on neutral shipping and on Allied nonwar vessels carrying neutrals, and for inadequate military preparation. His language became increasingly intemperate. He made merciless fun of Wilson's statement that there was such a thing as being too proud to fight; he accused him, in his reprimands to Germany, of shaking “his fist and then his finger,” and he sneered at his ideal of peace without victory:

Peace without victory is the natural ideal of the man who is too proud to fight. It is spurned by all men of lofty soul, by all men fit to call themselves fellow-citizens of Washington and Lincoln or of the war-worn fighters who followed Grant and Lee.

And listen to his play on the name “Shadow Lawn,” the Frank Woolworth estate in New Jersey loaned to Wilson as a summer White House in 1916:

There should be shadows now at Shadow Lawn, the shadows of the men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands: the shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not dare protect lest he should have to face danger, the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves, the shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits.…

When Germany's desperate decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in the hope that, even if it brought America into the war, the Allies could be knocked out before new troops could be brought across the Atlantic, and Wilson was at last compelled to ask Congress for a declaration of war, Roosevelt tried to make up to the president for some of the terrible things he had said:

Mr. President, what I have said and thought and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street, if now we can make your message good. Of course, it amounts to nothing if we cannot make it good. But if we can translate it into fact, then it will rank as a great state paper, with the great state papers of Washington and Lincoln. Now all that I ask is that I be allowed to do all that is in me to help make good this speech of yours—to help get the nation to act, so as to justify and live up to the speech, and the declaration of war that followed.

TR was determined to raise a company similar to the Rough Riders in 1898 and take it to France. To accomplish this he decided to appeal to the president himself. The interview was of course granted, and TR did his best to be pleasant. Wilson was cordial enough but noncommittal. He warned Roosevelt that the days of the charge of the Light Brigade were over and that modern warfare was a highly technical and not a romantic business. TR, voicing his discouragement to Wilson's friend and adviser Colonel House afterward, said: “After all, I'm only asking to be allowed to die.” House is supposed to have replied: “Oh? Did you make that quite clear to the President?”

Permission to form the regiment was, of course, denied. The army brass hardly wished to be saddled with an independent-minded and bossy ex-president and a troop of his admiring Rough Riders in the complicated and ugly business of trench warfare. Besides, Roosevelt himself was in no shape to assume any sort of command at the front; he was half-blind, overweight, and rheumatic, and would be dead in another two years.

It remained for him to supervise the departure of all his family overseas. The four sons were more than eager to go; all were Roosevelts to the core. Kermit was afraid the American armed forces would not get him into combat fast enough; he enlisted in the English army and was later given the British War Cross for gallantry in action as commander of a light-armored motor battery in the offensive against the Turks in Iraq.

Archibald (“Archie”) and Theodore Jr. (“Ted”) fought more conventionally as American officers in the trenches during the whole of the American involvement there. Archie was severely wounded thrice, and Ted was gassed. Both survived, however, to fight in World War II, and Archie received the Croix de Guerre. Quentin joined the army air force and was shot down behind enemy lines, the sole casualty of the family. Ethel became a nurse in France.

But TR's determination that all Roosevelts must serve in combat was not confined to his immediate family. On a visit to Washington he stayed at the house of his distant cousin and nephew-in-law, Franklin, who occupied, as assistant secretary of the navy, the same position that TR had at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War and also had a large family. TR greatly irritated his niece Eleanor by urging Franklin to follow in his footsteps, resign his office, and go to war, which Franklin, in his important military position, was certainly under no moral compulsion to do, though he had, according to Eleanor, already offered his resignation to the president and been refused. Did TR feel that his father's failure to serve in the army in the Civil War had placed every Roosevelt under a special duty to fight?

If that were so, the duty was again fulfilled by his three surviving sons twenty-three years later in World War II. Archie, as a lieutenant colonel in charge of a battalion in New Guinea, had been asked to pinpoint Japanese placements. He took a boat into the open water in full view of enemy gunners, and here is how Edward J. Renehan Jr. describes what happened:

As the cannon boomed away at him, Archie stood calmly on the deck of his little craft with binoculars and a map, marking down the flash points as they revealed themselves. On one of these excursions Archie noticed a frightened enlisted man hunkered down in the bottom of the boat saying a prayer. “Don't worry,” he told the boy, “you're safe with me. I was wounded three times in the last war, and that's a lucky charm.”

Ted, a brigadier general, participated in the invasion of Normandy with his son, another Quentin, and died a few weeks later of a heart attack at the front. Kermit, suffering from depression and alcoholism, died by his own hand in Alaska, but in uniform.

As the First World War dragged on and the carnage seemed never to end, TR began grimly to envisage the possibility that he might lose all his sons in it. At last he showed a softening in his requirement that everyone should remain permanently in battle stations, as exemplified in this appeal to Archie:

Of course, we wish you to get into the fighting in the line. That is the first thing to be done; you would never be happy if you hadn't done it, and neither would I in your place. If
after
you have been in the fighting line—whether for a short or long term matters not—you are offered a staff job
in which you can be more useful,
it would then be foolish to refuse it merely because it was less dangerous.

Archie must have sensed that this was a weak moment of his father's, for he never acted on it.

The death of Quentin, shortly before the end of the war, was a devastating blow to the Roosevelts. TR has been described as sitting desolate on the porch at Sagamore, murmuring over and over, “Poor Quinikins! Poor Quinikins!” But he could still write proudly to an old Rough Rider friend, Robert Ferguson:

It is bitter that the young should die, but there are things worse than death; for nothing under heaven would I have had my sons act otherwise than as they acted. They have done pretty well, haven't they? Quentin killed, dying as a war hawk should … over the enemy's lines. Archie crippled, and given the French war cross for gallantry. Ted gassed once … and cited for conspicuous gallantry. Kermit with the British military cross, and now under Pershing.

His own end was near, though he did not suspect it. Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, an old friend, visited him in the hospital. She wrote of his last days having been darkened by political defeat, embittered by inaction and hatred of Wilson. And then:

I saw him in the hospital shortly before the end came; he did not think it was near. As I was about to say good-bye he held my hand and said, very seriously, but with none of his old gay fire, “I seem pretty low now, but I shall get better. I cannot go without having done something to that old gray skunk in the White House.”

She wondered what would be his ultimate reputation in history. “Clio is biting her pencil while she looks for the final word.”

He did get out of the hospital but only to die in Sagamore in his sleep a few days later, just after the New Year of 1919, at the age of sixty. Archie cabled his brothers: “The old lion is dead.”

Did he believe in another life? We only know that he once wrote Holmes that we cannot tell what happens afterward: “I have no desire before my time has come to go out into the everlasting darkness.” It only mattered that there should be survivors “to whom it will be a pleasure to think well of us when we are gone.”

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