Theodore Roosevelt’s Neutralist Stance in 1914-1915:
The Strange Silence of ‘the Bugle That Woke America’
Paper read at the Annual Meeting of the
British Association for American Studies, Northumbria University, April 9-12,
2015
In 1909 the United States enjoyed enormous prestige and respect throughout the world and owed them to the fame and competence of its outgoing president. By combining an outstanding personality, novel ideas, a savvy apprehension of the ethnic prejudices of his time, and a rare talent for adapting to events and influencing their course, Theodore Roosevelt stood out as a brilliant chief executive and diplomatist, a realpolitiker who had injected new components into U.S. foreign policy such as the global scope of defense questions or the duties deriving from a strict adherence to the Monroe doctrine.[1] His fame and popularity were evidenced by his triumphal tour of Europe in 1910 following his African safari; everywhere he went—Rome, Vienna, Budapest, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo), Stockholm, Berlin and London—citizen Roosevelt was treated like a head of state and given red carpet receptions. [2]
Rooseveltian-style
diplomacy—ceaseless foreign policy activism—did not survive its talented
promoter. His departure from the White House effected a sort of “return to
normalcy” in time of peace. A champion without a cause, the former president
became the vigilant guardian of a legacy and furiously denounced deviations and
betrayals. His vehemence would culminate with the hysteria of the last three
years of his life when the Great War and Wilson’s policies prompted the same
bellicose delirium and fanaticism he had evinced in 1898-1900.[3]
The
division among Republicans in 1912 ensured Woodrow Wilson’s election, a
minority president whose alleged defects unsurprisingly qualified to become Theodore
Roosevelt’s bête noire. He was in his eyes “an adroit man,” with little
“intensity of principle or conviction,” whom he suspected of “flabbiness of moral fiber,” “a true
logothete, a real sophist,” for whom “elocution [was] an admirable substitute
for and improvement on action.” With
time and mounting exasperation the Roosevelt lexicon would become more
aggressive and vicious, more colorful, too. The 28th president was
perceived as a usurper for two reasons essentially: not only had he opportunely
arrogated to himself some of the ideas of the 1912 Progressives but he was also
infirm of purpose as a lover of peace of the Jefferson persuasion, a hero for
“the German-Americans and other hyphenated Americans, the professional
pacifists, the flubdubs and mollycoddles, all of whom [had] united in screaming
against preparedness and in applauding him […].”[4]
Adroitness did not necessarily imply statesmanship, especially when a man like
William Jennings Bryan was chosen as secretary of State; the Rough Rider feared
that “grape juice diplomacy” under Wilson would fare no better than “dollar
diplomacy” under Taft.[5]
As
underlined by Richard W. Leopold, Roosevelt influenced foreign policy after
leaving the White House more than any of his predecessors.[6]
From 1909 till his death on January 6, 1919, he was the most attentive censor
of both domestic and foreign policies. Ever questioned by a host of
newspapermen outside “Sagamore Hill,” his residence, the “sage of Oyster Bay”
always volunteered comments on current events with obvious relish, when he did
not actually anticipate queries.[7]
His prestigious past and his international fame made him an authority on
foreign policy and in a sense turned him into a sort of oracle of international
relations. His influence on diplomacy is of course difficult to gauge, but
obviously neither Taft nor Wilson could be indifferent to his censure, however
unfair. Admittedly, he tended to pontificate more and more without insider
knowledge[8]
and eventually gave in to dogmatism and prejudice, thus becoming “the
caricature of himself” at the end of his life.[9]
From
late 1914 to the end of his life Colonel Roosevelt[10]
for four years fought his last battle, a crusade in support of preparedness and
entry into World War I; he was “the bugle that woke America” and drove her to
intervene on the Allied side.[11]
Since his “undeclared futile war on Mexico” he had been convinced of Wilson’s
“criminal passivity” not only south of the Rio Grande, but also toward Germany.[12]
For months he was to hammer his denunciations of governmental inertia, of the
“pathetic folly” of pacifists, “these prophets of the inane” and their
teachings conducive to unnecessary bloodshed, and of military “unpreparedness”
causing useless loss of life, more losses than the arms of an enemy would
produce.
When
the war broke out between August 1 and August 4, 1914, Theodore Roosevelt was
not unduly upset, much like political circles in the United States and the
people at large. Europe was far away, America did not feel threatened, all the
more so as none of the belligerents was in any way hostile to her. Neutrality
seemed to be the obvious response from all Americans and President Woodrow
Wilson voiced that position on their behalf on August 4: “The United
States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to
try men’s souls. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action, must put
a curb upon our sentiments as well as upon every transaction that might be
construed as a preference of one party to the struggle before another.” [13]
This declaration of neutrality regarding Europe not only conformed to
diplomatic tradition, but also took into account a sizeable anti-British ethnic
electorate, the German-Americans and the Irish-Americans.
Roosevelt
then abstained from taking sides and said so in an article of August 22, 1914,
coldly observing after the invasion of Luxemburg and Belgium:
I
am not taking sides one way or the other as concerns the violation or disregard
of these treaties. When giants are engaged in a death wrestle, as they reel to
and fro they are certain to trample on whoever gets in the way of the huge,
straining combatants, unless it is dangerous to do so.[14]
Only
a wise preparedness policy could guarantee peace; arbitration treaties like
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s did not. Otherwise the same fate
would befall the United States. A month later, in the same magazine, he pursued
his analysis with the same chilly detachment. [15]
He showed himself delighted to be given an opportunity to lecture the
“ultra-pacifists” by an unexpected turn of events in Europe that confirmed the
validity of his long-held opinion of arbitration treaties that did not rest on
force. There were lessons to be learnt from this “hideous world-wide war.” To
begin with, regarding “the actions of most of the combatants,” “it [was]
possible sincerely to take and defend either of the opposing views concerning
their actions.” He wished it “explicitly understood” that he was not “passing
judgment one way or the other upon Germany” for what she had done to Belgium.
He was sorry for Belgium’s fate but the ruthless crushing of this small,
peaceful kingdom only illustrated the horrors attending any war. He went on to
say that he admired and respected the German people and was proud of the German
blood in his veins.[16]
He was just stating facts; the Reich had deemed it to its national interest to
violate Belgium’s rights. The move was “in accordance with what the Germans
unquestionably sincerely believ[ed] to be the course of conduct necessitated by
Germany’s struggle for life.” He recommended exactly the same attitude as the
28th president did:
It
is certainly eminently desirable that we should remain entirely neutral, and
nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides
one way or the other.[17]
In
his view impartiality, which in actual fact meant abandoning innocent nations
to their sad fate, was the price to pay on the one hand for preserving American
interests and on the other for preserving the United States’ unique position to
influence the reestablishment of world peace in the future. Unsurprisingly, he
reiterated his long-time principles and advised against any U.S. official
protest, whatever sympathy the country might feel for Luxemburg and Belgium,
“unless we [were] prepared to make that protest effective.” One of the lessons
he cynically drew from the war for the benefit of his countrymen was its tragic
illustration of the pertinence of his favorite proverb, “Speak softly and carry
a big stick,” noting that “persistently” only half of it had been quoted “in
deriding the men who wish[ed] to safeguard our National interest and honor.”
America should trust to its army and navy to defend its honor and vital
interests, not to arbitration and neutrality treaties that were mere scraps of
paper, unless backed by force of arms. The worst policy would be that of “peace
with insult” coupled with “the policy of unpreparedness to defend our rights.” [18]
He concluded with his umpteenth assault on the “ultra-pacifists” and the
foolish advocates of disarmament, repeating familiar arguments that went back
to his Naval Department days and adding a suggestion he first made in his Nobel
Peace Prize address in Christiania in 1910:
Disarmament
of the free and liberty-loving nations would mean insuring the triumph of some
barbarism or despotism, and if logically applied would mean the extinction of
liberty and all that makes civilization worth having throughout the world. But
in view of what has occurred in this war, surely the time ought to be ripe for
the nations to consider a great world agreement among all the civilized
military powers to back righteousness by force.
Such an agreement would establish an efficient World League for the Peace of
Righteousness.[19]
Theodore
Roosevelt’s “objectivity” at the beginning of the war and his refusal to openly
criticize Germany raise a number of questions. For one thing this attitude was
shared by the whole nation. Henry Cabot Lodge vacationing in England at that
time reacted in the same way. According to Walter Weyl the initial compassion
felt by Americans toward an anarchic Old World was not devoid of condescension,
if not of paternalistic arrogance.[20]
The behavior of these two partners in diplomacy was revealing as to the state
of public opinion, as pointed out by Robert Osgood.[21]
There may have been other motivations, underlined by Widenor and J. Lee
Thompson, among others, as well as Roosevelt himself. At the end of 1914 the
former president was immersed in the mid-term elections campaign, which
involved not only the renewal of the House of Representatives but also the
partial renewal of the Senate by universal suffrage,[22]
and he was trying to salvage the remnants of his Progressive “Bull Moose”
Party, which included many militant pacifists, hence his restraint and his
embrace of a policy of neutrality.[23]
Indeed, the domestic context imposed constraints on all politicians, starting
with the most eminent among them, President Wilson. The explanation, however,
is not very convincing. Roosevelt loved to polemicize and to speak his mind
whatever the consequences as he would in 1916, knowing full well that his vocal
condemnation of hyphenated Americans as traitors to their new country could
cost Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes the election, which it did. [24]
Nevertheless, Lodge and Roosevelt were among the very first to express their
support for the Allies, after an understandable initial embarrassment, for the
war in 1914 was an unprecedented cataclysm that defied the imagination. Still,
the ex-president became the butt of criticism because of his later efforts to
erase from his writings every trace of his hesitancy. Notwithstanding his
official biographer’s version[25],
his first public reactions were ambiguous, to say the least. Admittedly he did
not show any unseemly sympathy for the Reich, but he did not condemn it
straight away either. The same holds in the case of his belated indignation
about the violation of Belgian neutrality, which his contemporary detractors
did not fail to expose, like the famous debunker H. L. Mencken in a
ruthless posthumous rebuke.[26]
Nor did it escape some historians.[27]
The
evidence against him was no other than his Outlook
pieces of August 22 and September 23, 1914,[28]
especially the second one that he included with a few judicious alterations and
omissions in his America and the World War, published by
Scribner’s in January 1915.[29]
The revised article was no longer entitled “The World War: Its Tragedies and
Its Lessons,” but “The Belgian Tragedy.”
By that time Roosevelt had convinced himself that an official protest would
have been in order as soon as hostilities had broken out and that the U.S.
Government had been derelict in its duty by remaining silent. Now that the
mid-term elections were over he no longer felt any obligation of discretion
toward the Administration or his political friends; the latter had begged him
to spare the White House whose caution in Mexico and strict neutrality in
Europe they appreciated, but the former president thus having to force himself
had sworn he would regain the freedom to frankly express his views after the
election returns.[30]
The electoral disaster of the ephemeral Progresssive Party in 1914 no doubt
made him regret his self-censorship during the campaign, an exercise that went
against the grain in his case. Nothing, no one would prevent him from now on to
“smite the administration with a heavy hand.”[31]
And no argument would be beneath him to berate Woodrow Wilson “the pacifist”
for his lack of resolve following “the Belgian tragedy.” But it was important
for Roosevelt to make his own stance appear under a different light to defuse
predictable adversarial comments. Had he not advocated the same neutral
attitude in August and September 1914? Yet, in January 1915 he had for the past
two months shifted his ground: he deplored the lack of official protest in the
face of the unconscionable rape of a nation protected by an internationally
recognized status and he equated the White House policy of neutrality with
cowardliness, namely the refusal to aid small unoffending nations.[32]
The
ex-president can rightly be accused of opportunism; his first virulent attack
on the Administration was launched on November 8, 1914, five days after the
elections…[33].
Yet the sincerity of his pro-Allied sentiments cannot be questioned; as a
matter of fact Joseph Bucklin Bishop in his “authorized” biography of Theodore
Roosevelt did not fail to produce many letters, addressed for the most part to
foreign correspondents, which attest it.[34]
Beale for his part notes pertinently that a different posture would have been
surprising coming from a statesman who had been in his time the architect of an
Anglo-American rapprochement close to an informal alliance.[35]
Widenor points to Lodge and Roosevelt’s friendship with several British
political figures and underlines the latter’s influence on their commitment to
the Allied cause. After all, the Colonel’s initial perplexity and detachment
were shared by the whole nation and far from made him a supporter of the Reich.[36]
Who would have imagined in August 1914 that the conflict would go on for four
years and be the first holocaust in the history of modern warfare?
Nevertheless, Roosevelt was wrong in trying to give credence, for reasons of
expediency, to the idea that unlike Wilson he had from the start condemned
German atrocities in Belgium. He thus enabled his enemies to charge him with
hypocrisy when he decidedly sided with the Allies. This particular reproach is
justified, to the exclusion of any other. He should not be pilloried for views
that he did express more and more stridently for sure, but that he had clearly
outlined as early as September 1914. Two of them deserve to be mentioned; one
concerned the future peace:
A
peace which left Belgium’s wrongs unredressed and which did not provide against
the recurrence of such wrongs as those from which she has suffered would not be
a real peace. [37]
The
other had to do with the limits of neutrality:
There
is even a possible question whether we are not ourselves, like other neutral
powers, violating obligations which we have explicitly or implicitly assumed in
the Hague treaties.[38]
According
to William C. Widenor, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had widely
divergent philosophies of international relations that the Great War brought to
light dramatically. On the other hand Lodge and Roosevelt saw eye to eye in
foreign policy; by the end of 1914 they were certain that it was in the
interest of the United States to help the Allies win the war but they were
practically alone in thinking so—a shared vision, added to their shared hatred
of Wilson, which revived their friendship after the estrangement of the 1912
campaign. Widenor underlines their remarkable division of labor as adversaries
of the White House incumbent: Lodge discreetly created obstacles in the Senate
while Roosevelt tried to arouse public opinion.[39]
They both believed that an Allied victory would serve the cause of collective
security and international justice while the President favored a peace of
compromise and the abstention of the United States. In their view pacifism and
neutrality encouraged isolationism, and internationalism was at stake.[40]
Wilson’s
foreign policy is not the subject at hand here but in many ways it was
antithetic to Roosevelt’s, so much so that the Colonel fulminated against it
from 1914 to his death. His most serious grudge was about preparedness that the
28th president had neglected and even opposed.[41]
When the war broke out the Germans surpassed the U.S. navy that had ranked
second in the world by 1907 during Roosevelt’s presidency. The champion of the
“big stick” therefore undertook to raise public awareness of the need for and
urgency of a preparedness policy. “Preparedness”, obsessively hammered, became
the dominant theme of his speeches and articles but his recommendations fell on
deaf ears. His solitude increased his vehemence. The country, he realized, was
not even “near a mood of at least half-heroism.”[42]
His efforts were not in vain, however. In December 1915 Wilson “made
patriotism, preparedness, and a new shipping bill the key notes of his Annual
Message” whereas a year earlier he had mocked those “amongst us” who were
“nervous and excited.”[43]
Nevertheless,
as an advocate of realism and firmness, Roosevelt continued to preach in the
wilderness. Never in his career had he been so little in tune with grass roots
America.[44] In 1916 he
became an embarrassment for almost all of his political friends, the
Progressives that he had abandoned as well as the Republicans with whom he
wanted to make up. He had in fact no illusions about his future within the
Grand Old Party of which his supporters hoped he would again become the
standard bearer.
If
the country is not determined to put honor and duty ahead of safety, then the
people most emphatically do not wish me for President: for I will not take back
by one finger’s breadth anything I have said during the last eighteen months
about national and international duty or apologize for anything I did while I
was President.[45]
The
White House reaction to the German sinking of the Lusitania
marked the point of no return in Roosevelt’s strictures against the man “too
proud to fight” who nevertheless threatened to hold the Reich to “strict
accountability” for any sinking of American ships or loss of American lives.
Day after day, page after page, the Rough Rider choked with indignation: no,
the President did not “keep us out of war”, as evidenced by the Vera Cruz
expedition and the intervention in Haiti, and there was little chance of his
doing so considering that the country was unprepared militarily, which boded
ill for its relations with Berlin. Added to unpreparedness, timidity and
indecision could only generate contempt and invite aggression.[46]
When
the idea of a League of Nations began to be discussed here and there Theodore
Roosevelt could rightly claim authorship and denounce projects that did not
endow that organization with international police powers. Although he was never
quite clear about membership he consistently and cogently advocated the resort
to coercion in case of wrongdoing.[47]
He famously stated his conception of collective security on May 5, 1910, in his
Nobel lecture at Christiania (Oslo) during his visit to Norway after the
presidency.[48]
The
former president actually opposed Wilson on every issue during the Great War:
the significance of the conflict, the reasons and ways to intervene, the war
aims, and the nature of the future world order.[49]
His last message to the nation would sound like a political testament; three
days before his death he dictated what would be his last Kansas City Star
editorial, “The League of Nations”; it contained, unchanged, the diplomatic
creed of a lifetime: his distrust of empty phrases and fuzzy treaties, his
belief in the police duty of the great civilized powers, his attachment to the
Monroe Doctrine, and his conviction that preparedness was the surest guarantee
of international peace and justice.[50]
The epilogue would be the posthumous and symbolic victory of the Rough Rider
over the Princeton professor in 1919, the rejection of the Versailles treaty
and of the League of Nations by the U.S. Senate thanks to Henry Cabot Lodge.
[1]
William H. Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility: The Life and Times of
Theodore Roosevelt (1961, 1963, 1975; Newtown, Conn.: American Political
Biography Press, 1997), p. 181; William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge
and the Search of an American Foreign Policy (1980; Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1983), pp. 130, 133, 135, 147. See also
Serge Ricard, “Foreign Policy Making in the White House: Rooseveltian-Style
Personal Diplomacy,” Artists of Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
and Their Enduring Impact on U.S. Foreign Policy,
ed. William N. Tilchin and Charles E. Neu (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2006),
pp. 3-31.
[2]
Theodore Roosevelt had left the country to enable his successor, William Howard
Taft, to prove his worth under the best possible conditions. Cf. “I went out of
the country and gave him the fullest possible chance to work out his own
salvation.” Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 5, 1910, Lodge, ed., Selections
from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884-1918,
2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 2: 380. On his African safari and
European tour, which often hit the headlines, see Patricia O’Toole, When
Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), pp. 42-92; Edmund Morris, Colonel
Roosevelt (New York: Random House, 2010), pp. 3-78; J.
Lee. Thompson, Theodore Roosevelt Abroad: Nature, Empire, and the Journey of
an American President (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); O’Toole,
“Roosevelt in Africa,” A Companion to Theodore Roosevelt,
ed. Serge Ricard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 435-451;
Ricard, “A Hero’s Welcome: Theodore Roosevelt’s Triumphal Tour of Europe in
1910,” America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the“Discovery”
of Europe, ed. Hans Krabbendam and John M. Thompson (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 143-158.
[3]
His statesmanlike image would be tarnished. On this sad lapse into intolerance
that Rooseveltian historiography tends to neglect, see for example John M.
Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, 2nd ed. (1954;
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 157-158; Harbaugh, Life
and Times of TR, pp. 475-478; Serge Ricard, “World War One and
the Rooseveltian Gospel of Undiluted Americanism,” Hyphenated Diplomacy:
European Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1914-1984,
ed. Hélène Christol and Serge Ricard (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de
l’Université de Provence, 1985), pp. 19-30.
J. Lee Thompson, Never Call Retreat: Theodore Roosevelt and the Great
War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which covers
TR’s political activity from 1914 to his death on January 6, 1919, takes issue
with this opinion and glorifies his attacks on Wilson, his preparedness
crusade, and his call for joining the Allies in the conflict, thus ignoring his
contradictions and errors, like his initial refusal to take sides and his
diatribes against hyphenated Americans, pacifists, and the radical left which
he likened to Bolshevism.
Generally speaking, Theodore Roosevelt’s biographers since the turn of
the 20th century have been mildly critical if at all regarding that
period of his life: Nathan Miller,
Theodore Roosevelt: A Life (New York: William Morrow-Quill,
1992); H. W. Brands, T.R.: The Last Romantic
(New York: BasicBooks, 1997); Kathleen M. Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A
Strenuous Life (2002); New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Patricia
O’Toole, When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt after the White House
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005). His relentless Wilson-bashing is better
documented in Edmund Morris, Colonel Roosevelt
(New York: Random House, 2010).
[4]
Joseph B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time Shown in His Own Letters,
2 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1920), 2: 351, 386-387.
[5]
Roosevelt to Henry White, May 2, 1913, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt,
ed. Elting E. Morison, John M. Blum, et al., 8 vols.
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951-1954), 7: 724.
The prohibitionist Bryan had replaced champagne with grape juice at
diplomatic functions.
[6]
Richard W. Leopold, The Growth of American Foreign Policy: A History
(New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 240.
[7]
“Sagamore Hill” was his home in Oyster Bay, New York.
His impetuousness actually caused him to behave more like a judge than
an adviser. Besides, his legendary energy prevented him from retiring
peacefully in Oyster Bay after hunting in Africa and touring Europe. He
criss-crossed the United States, explored a Brazilian river, returned to the
Old Continent, and visited the West Indies.
[8]
J. Lee Thompson, TR and the Great War, shows, however,
that he was well informed and perfectly aware of the evolution of the military
and diplomatic contexts thanks to his numerous contacts and friends on both
sides of the Atlantic, notably Arthur Hamilton Lee, sent to the front by London
to inspect the medical services, Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice, then British
ambassador to Washington, Jean Jules Jusserand, ambassador from France, Foreign
Secretary Edward Grey and his successor Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George,
chancellor of the Exchequer and future prime minister of the United Kingdom,
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, General Leonard Wood, General John J. Pershing, and,
last but not least, cousin and nephew-in-law Franklin D. Roosevelt, President
Wilson’s assistant secretary of the Navy.
[9]
Ricard, “World War One and the Rooseveltian Gospel,” p. 22.
[10]
Colonel of the Rough Riders, his preferred title as ex-president.
[11]
Hermann Hagedorn, The Bugle That Woke America: The Saga of Theodore
Roosevelt’s Last Battle for His Country (New York: The John Day
Co., 1940). Emulating Hagedorn, J. Lee Thompson in his TR and the Great War
regards Roosevelt’s role as crucial, if not decisive, and contradicts those
historians who deem his attitude maniacal and his aggressiveness pathological.
See note 3 above.
[12]
Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt,
ed. Hermann Hagedorn, National Edition, 20 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1926),
18: 124-129; 19: 286.
[13] The
Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link et al.,
69 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966-1993), 30: 394.
[14]
Theodore Roosevelt, “The Foreign Policy of the United States,” The Outlook
107 (August 22, 1914): 1011-15 (cf. p. 1012). Italics are TR’s.
[15]
Theodore Roosevelt, “The World War: Its Tragedies and Its Lessons,” The
Outlook 108 (September 23, 1914): 169-178.
[16]
Roosevelt, “The World War,” pp. 169, 171, 172.
[18]
Ibid., pp. 173, 174, 175, 176. Cf. p. 176: “The
worst policy for the United States is to combine the unbridled tongue with the
unready hand.”
[21]
Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations:
The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century
(1953; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press-Phoenix Books, 1964),
p. 137.
[22]
For the first time since the ratification of the 17th Amendment in
1913 senators were elected by universal suffrage.
[23]
Widenor, Lodge, p. 189; J. Lee Thompson, TR and the Great
War, p. 44; Roosevelt to Lodge, December 8, 1914, Correspondence
of TR and HCL, 2: 449. In a press statement shortly before his
death, Theodore Roosevelt claimed that his only mistake “in connection with the
war” had been his support of President Wilson during the first sixty days of
the war. J. Lee Thompson, TR and the Great War,
p. 287.
Wilson was reelected. Obviously, Roosevelt’s sectarian speeches scared
off a great many German- and Irish-Americans who turned away from Hughes.
On his rhetorical approach to race, ethnicity, and national identity
issues, see Leroy G. Dorsey, We Are All Americans, Pure and Simple: Theodore
Roosevelt and the Myth of Americanism (Tuscaloosa: The
University of Alabama Press, 2007).
[26]
H. L. (Henry Louis) Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy,” in Prejudices: A
Selection, ed. James T. Farrell (New York: Random-Vintage,
1958), pp. 47-69.
Cf. p. 56: “It is hard, without an inordinate strain upon the
credulity, to believe any such thing, particularly in view of the fact that
this instantaneous indignation of the most impulsive and vocal of men was
diligently concealed for at least six weeks, with reporters camped upon his
doorstep day and night, begging him to say the very thing that he left so
darkly unsaid.”
On this controversy see Serge Ricard, “Mencken on Roosevelt: Autopsy of
an Autopsy,” The Twenties, Actes du G.R.E.N.A.,
Groupe de Recherche et d’Études Nord-Américaines (Aix-en-Provence: Publications
de l’Université de Provence, 1982), pp. 21-33.
[27]
Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography
(1931;New York: Harcourt-Harvest, 1956), pp. 404-409; Edward Wagenknecht, The
Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt, Introd. Edmund Morris
(1958; Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2009), pp. 316-321; Harbaugh, Life
and Times of TR, pp. 439-445. Wagenknecht, pp. 321-327,
even notes his belated conversion to interventionism.
[28] See notes 14
and 15 above.
[31]
Loc. cit.
[35]
Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power
(1956; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press Paperbacks, 1984),
p. 171.
[37]
Roosevelt, “The World War,” p. 169.
[43]
Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910-1917
(1954; New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), pp. 177, 183.
[49]
Cf. Serge Ricard, “Anti-Wilsonian Internationalism: Theodore Roosevelt in the Kansas
City Star,” From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism
and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy, ed.
Daniela Rossini (Keele, England: Ryburn Publishing-Keele University Press,
1995), pp. 25-44, and “Idéalisme wilsonien et réalisme rooseveltien: la
recherche conflictuelle d’un nouvel ordre mondial en 1918-1919,” Les
États-Unis face à trois après-guerres, ed. Pierre Melandri
and Serge Ricard, Annales du Monde Anglophone
14 (2nd semester 2001): 13-29;
For three very useful viewpoints by Wilson scholars on his involvement
in support of the Allies and his wartime influence, as well as his antagonism
to the 28th president, see John Milton Cooper, Jr., “Whose League of
Nations? Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and World Order,” Artists of
Power: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Their Enduring Impact on U.S.
Foreign Policy, ed. William N. Tilchin and Charles E. Neu (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 2006), pp. 163-180, Lloyd E. Ambrosius, “The Great War,
Americanism Revisited, and the Anti-Wilson Crusade,” A Companion to Theodore
Roosevelt, ed. Serge Ricard (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell,
2011, pp. 468-484, and Claire Delahaye, “Showing Muscle: Theodore
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and America’s Role in World War I,” America’s
Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the“Discovery” of Europe,
ed. Hans Krabbendam and John M. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
pp. 159-177.
[50]
Roosevelt, Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star,
pp. 292-295; Works, 19: 406-408. He also favored
compulsory military service.
