Biographies & Memoirs

CHAPTER 25
Dust in a Windy Street

He may have stumbled up there from the past,
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams,—
A flame where nothing seems
To burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;
And while it all went out
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt
May then have eased a painful going down
From pictured heights of power and lost renown.

HENRY ADAMS WAS JUST2 ABOUT to have dinner in Washington on the rainy evening of 2 April 1917 when he heard the hoofbeats of Woodrow Wilson’s cavalcade departing the White House and heading for Capitol Hill. By the time the old historian had finished eating, newsboys in Lafayette Square were already yelling out the story of their “extry” editions: the President had asked Congress to declare war on Germany.

Theodore Roosevelt’s slow train3 from Florida did not get into Union Station until noon the following day. By then he had read the full text of Wilson’s address. Surrounded by a huge crowd outside the platform gates, he dictated a statement to reporters: “The President’s message is a great state paper which will rank in history among the great state papers of which Americans in future years will be proud.”

His tribute was awkwardly worded but heartfelt. All the rage he had nurtured against Wilson gave way to something like admiration. Yesterday’s timid, selfish, cold-blooded sophist, the narrow and bitter partisan and debaucher of brains, had at last come to see things his way. Here, streaming across the front page of The Washington Post in double-width columns (juxtaposed with a dispatch that another U.S.-flagged steamer4 had been torpedoed, with eleven dead), was the oratory, impassioned yet rational, of a statesman whose mind was made up:

With a profound5 sense of the solemn and even tragical nature of the step I am now taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the imperial German government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerency which has been thus thrust upon it, and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

Wilson noted that among the steps he was requesting Congress to authorize were the extension of liberal financial credit to the Allies, a powering-up of American industrial resources, and an addition of at least half a million men to the army by means of a universal draft, with equally large increments to follow. “We have seen the last of neutrality,” he said. The United States had “no quarrel with the German people”—only with the autocratic oligarchy that had sent them to war without consulting them. Autocracy could not be allowed to pervert any postwar partnership of free nations. “The world must be made safe for democracy.”

Reportedly, this last line had not kindled the immediate ovation the President expected. But Senator John Sharp Williams, a Mississippi Democrat who had served in Congress since the days of Grover Cleveland, had recognized it as the keynote of Wilson’s future foreign policy: an active, and if necessary forcible, imposition of American values upon “the world.” Williams had stood6 and applauded until his perception spread through both legislative bodies (the judiciary too, as represented by all nine members of the Supreme Court) and an enormous roar had built and built.

If Roosevelt had not delayed his departure from Punta Gorda, in order to harpoon the second largest devilfish7 ever measured, he could have gotten to Washington in time to witness this triumph—so much greater than any he had experienced as president. But he found himself, on the morning after, an out-of-towner with no business to do in a city electric with urgency. The newsmen who greeted him vanished after taking his statement. They had other leads to pursue. Congress was about to debate a war resolution, over Senator La Follette’s filibuster. Antiwar lobbyists were besieging the Capitol. Senator Lodge, of all people8, was reported to have knocked one pacifist down.

Alice Longworth was on hand to take her father to lunch. He had a few hours to kill between trains, so they went to congratulate Lodge on his pugilism. The “Brahmin Bruiser” was away from his office. Roosevelt decided to pay a call on Woodrow Wilson.

The White House was9 closed to visitors without appointment, as it had been since the spring of 1913. But when the guard at the northwest gate saw who was sitting with Alice in her big car, he automatically waved it through. The driveway that had been theirs for seven and a half years uncurled; the familiar portico loomed up; the glass doors to the vestibule swung open. Ike Hoover emerged from the usher’s office. The time was a few minutes before three.

Roosevelt asked10 if he could see Wilson. Hoover regretted that the President was not at home: he had just gone to the West Wing for a cabinet meeting. Could the Colonel return later in the day? Roosevelt explained that he had no time, and left his card. He asked that Wilson be informed that he had come to congratulate him on “that remarkable state paper.”

Alice drove him back to the station. Starved as ever for his company, she volunteered to ride with him as far as Baltimore. Before he climbed into the train after her, Roosevelt admitted to a stray reporter, “I don’t know11 just what I’m going to do when I reach New York.” He said the next few days in Congress were crucial to his plans. “I can’t say anything more about organizing a division to go to the firing line until I find out something more about the policy of this government. I am sorry not to have seen the President.”

TED AND KERMIT MET him in New York and drove him out to Oyster Bay, where Edith was brooding12 over a telephone call from Harvard. Quentin, her youngest and least martial son, was “coming down to get into the war.” She had been unable to dissuade him on the grounds of his bad back and his poor eyesight. He said he intended to train as a fighter pilot.

Archie had an announcement too. He was engaged to Miss Grace Lockwood of Back Bay, Boston, and wanted to marry her as soon as possible, in order to be available for service the moment Congress answered Wilson’s recruitment call.

Over the next few days, Sagamore Hill became something of a military personnel center as the Colonel prepared his four sons for postings. Frontline service in the new army was what they all wanted: none would sit behind a steel desk. Ted and Archie, with two terms at Plattsburg apiece, were sure of being commissioned as infantry officers. Quentin might have13 trouble passing the aviation section physical, but if so, he was willing to go north and see if the less fussy Canadians would take him.

Kermit remained—as ever—a man difficult to place. Aside from being only half trained, he was temperamentally unsuited to the static warfare in Europe. His father understood that. They had the bond that came of killing lions and elephants together, and of enduring months of green hell in Brazil. The same fever lurked in their respective systems, and something of the same wanderlust. Kermit’s war, Roosevelt felt, should be far-ranging, profiting from his restlessness and flair for languages. Perhaps the British could use him in Mesopotamia, where Sir Frederick Maude had just brilliantly captured Baghdad.

In the small hours of Good Friday, 6 April, the House of Representatives declared war on Germany, 373 to 50 (Miss Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, sobbing as she called “no”). Even Wilson was surprised at how rapidly the majority mood on Capitol Hill had changed from isolationism to intervention. At 1:11 P.M., he interrupted his lunch to sign the resolution, proclaiming: “A state of war14 between the United States and the Imperial German government, which has been thrust upon the United States, is hereby formally declared.” Mobilization telegrams flashed to every army post in the country, and cables to all American ships at sea.

Roosevelt stayed home that Easter weekend, composing an editorial for Metropolitan magazine in praise of Wilson’s change of heart. He did not apologize for the insults he had showered on the President in the past, saying only, “Of course, when15 war is on, all minor considerations, including all partisan considerations, vanish at once.”

On Monday, 9 April, he decided to go south and call again at the White House. He did not telephone ahead and ask Wilson to receive him. “I’ll take chances16 on his trying to snub me. He can’t do it! I’d like to see him try it!”

Joseph Tumulty heard he was coming nevertheless. When, at eleven17 the following morning, Alice dropped her father off, the secretary was waiting, wreathed in smiles. Roosevelt disappeared into the Red Room and emerged forty-five minutes later, looking pleased but not triumphant. A couple of dozen reporters waited to hear what he had to say. Beyond, in Pennsylvania Avenue, sightseers pressed against the railings. A little group of suffragettes jiggled yellow pickets.

“The President received18 me with the utmost courtesy and consideration,” Roosevelt told the newsmen. But when it came to repeating the substance of their conversation, he became uncharacteristically cagey. Turning to Tumulty, who remained at his elbow, he joked, “If I say19 anything I shouldn’t, be sure to censor it.”

Uninhibited, he20 might have announced that he and Wilson had chatted easily, swapped anecdotes, and in short, gotten on as well as they had in May 1914. And he could have repeated his tension-relieving remark: “Mr. President, what I have said and thought, and what others have said and thought, is all dust in a windy street if we can make your message good.” Instead, he dictated a terse statement to the effect that he had asked for authority to raise a division of volunteer soldiers, many of them already trained and available—“such a division to be sent as part of any expeditionary force to France at an early moment.” The President, he said, had neither accepted nor rejected his request, and would come to a decision “in his own good time.”

Meanwhile, Roosevelt wanted it understood that his proposed division would not conflict with Wilson’s call for a universal, obligatory draft. The volunteers he sought would either be over twenty-five or excluded from regular conscription by the War Department. “I have been21 in communication with Secretary Baker, but do not intend to call on him.”

Baker took the hint—or rather, yielded to an even heavier one from Franklin D. Roosevelt—that the Colonel would be receiving visitors that evening22 in Representative Longworth’s townhouse on M Street. When he arrived he found the place mobbed. Roosevelt had been holding court all afternoon. The British, French, and Japanese ambassadors and a long list of legislators and policymakers, including the chairmen of the House and Senate military committees and officers of the National Defense Council, were being briefed on the Roosevelt Division in such detail that it might already be en route to Brest. Its chief recruiter came out in high spirits, thrust an arm through Baker’s, and led him upstairs to a private room.

“I am aware,”23 Roosevelt said with winning frankness, “that I have not had enough experience to lead a division myself.” He had sensed that was one of Wilson’s doubts about his request. “But I have selected the most experienced officers from the regular army for my staff.” He was willing to serve under whatever commander the President might appoint, as well as the commander of the entire expeditionary force.

Baker felt himself being strongarmed, and would only say, as he had in their correspondence, that he was taking the proposal under advisement. The Colonel must appreciate that mobilization was a hugely complex process that could not be swayed by personal considerations.

Roosevelt returned to New York unencouraged. He tried to make the best of his interviews, saying to John Leary, “I had a good24 talk with Baker—I could twist him about my finger, could I have him about for a while.” As for the President, “He seemed to take it well, but—remember, I was talking to Mr. Wilson.”

ON 12 APRIL, having heard nothing from the administration, Roosevelt decided to appeal directly to Congress for legislation permitting volunteer soldiers to serve on the Western Front. He understood that a general deployment of Baker’s draft army was unlikely until the spring of 1918. But it was plain that the Allies were desperate for reinforcements. Britain had already announced that it was sending a high-level mission to Washington, headed by Arthur Balfour, in an effort to speed up the dispatch of American war aid.

In an urgent letter to George Chamberlain (D., Oregon), chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, Roosevelt wrote:

Let us use25 volunteer forces, in connection with a portion of the regular army, in order at the earliest possible moment, within a few months, to put our flag on the firing line. We owe this to humanity. We owe it to the small nations who have suffered such dreadful wrong from Germany. Most of all we owe it to ourselves, to our national honor and self-respect. For the sake of our own souls, for the sake of the memories of the great Americans of the past, we must show that we do not intend to make this merely a dollar war. Let us pay with our bodies for our soul’s desire.

With, that he left for Boston, and Archie’s rushed-up wedding in Emmanuel Episcopal Church.

THE ROOSEVELTS KNEW26 that this was probably the last time they would assemble as a complete family before war tore them apart. Their celebration on Saturday, 14 April, was muted. Quentin, serving as best man, waited with Archie27 in the chancel, which was draped with the national and state flags. Ted, Kermit, and Dick Derby served as ushers. Theodore and Edith sat with Alice and Nick, Ethel and Belle, and several Roosevelt cousins. Saltonstalls, Aspin-walls, Websters, and Peabodys sprinkled both sides of the aisle. At noon, Grace Lockwood—sharp-featured and skinny in white satin—came down the aisle on the arm of her father. She was a graduate of the Navy League’s “female Plattsburg” in Chevy Chase, Maryland, so the patriotic bunting was quite to her taste, as were the glittering uniforms of many attendees from the Harvard Officers’ Reserve Corps.

Grace understood the necessity of a postponed honeymoon. For the next few weeks, Archie would have to remain close to home, pending assignment to active duty.

A DISPATCH TO The New York Times on the day after the wedding reported that a long-exiled Russian Communist leader, “Nikolai” Lenin, was en route to Petrograd from Switzerland. He had been given safe conduct across German railroads. Lenin and his fellowBolsheviki were for universal peace, so they could accomplish their design to co-opt the Russian revolution.

This news (and the hasty departure28 from New York City of Leon Trotsky) complicated the efforts of Count Ilya Tolstoy29 to drum up American support for Prince Lvov’s provisional government. The son of the famous novelist was in the United States on a propaganda tour. He hoped that Theodore Roosevelt might be named head of an advisory commission that President Wilson planned to send to his country. The Colonel was otherwise preoccupied, but dictated a message for Tolstoy to take home: “Through you I send my most hearty congratulations and good wishes to the men who have led the Russian people in this great movement for democratic freedom.”

Describing himself30 as “a fellow radical,” he cautioned the Duma majority against the danger of “unbalanced extremists” who sought to go beyond democracy. “See that the light of the torch is not dimmed by any unwise and extreme action, and above all not by any of those sinister and dreadful deeds which a century and a quarter ago in France produced the Red Terror, and then by reaction the White Terror.”

Privately, he told31 John Leary that Russia’s flimsy new republic might soon fall apart. If the Bolsheviks managed to win or steal power in Petrograd, they would probably negotiate a peace treaty with Germany, so as to be able to consolidate themselves at home. That would leave the Reich, in turn, free to deploy all its Eastern armor along the Western Front.

“If we do not32 wake up,” Roosevelt fretted, “Germany will have won this war, and then we will be in it.”

ON 15 APRIL HE heard from Secretary Baker that his request to serve as a volunteer commander in the war was denied for “purely military” reasons. The War College Division of the General Staff had recommended that no American troops be sent to Europe until they were sufficiently numerous, equipped, and trained. “This policy,”33 Baker wrote, “…  does not undertake to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would attach to a representation of the United States in France by a former President of the United States.” It was possible that pressure from the Allies might prompt the early dispatch of an American expeditionary force, but in that case, command positions would be given to regular officers “who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters, and have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war.”

Baker could not have made it clearer that he and Wilson considered Roosevelt to be an amateur soldier from the last century. The shock was enough to reduce the hero of San Juan Heights to temporary silence. He brooded for a week, then replied with an eighteen-page letter, rejecting Baker’s rejection. “My dear sir34, you forget that I have commanded troops in action in the most important battle fought by the United States army during the last half century.” He noted that field assignments were being showered on division and brigade commanders who did not have “one tenth” of his experience. Moving on to direct criticism, he ascribed the War Department’s current need for an emergency training program to its failure to initiate preparedness two and a half years before. If back then the Springfield munitions factory had been cranked into instant high gear, “we would now be a million rifles to the good.” Baker’s current advisers in formulating mobilization policy were “well-meaning men, of the red-tape and pipe-clay school … hidebound in the pedantry of that kind of wooden militarism which is only one degree worse than its extreme opposite, the folly which believes that an army can be improvised between sunrise and sunset.”

Baker mercifully did not reply, in words he already shared with a friend, that he wished to avoid “a repetition of35 the San Juan Hill affair, with the commander rushing his men into a situation from which only luck extricated them.” As gently as he could, he wrote, “For obvious reasons36, I cannot allow myself to be drawn into a discussion of your personal experience and qualifications.” Nor would he discuss those of his consultants, except to say that they were patriotic and high-minded officers. “The war in Europe is confessedly stern, steady, and relentless. It is a contest between the morale of two great contending forces.” Should the United States jump into the struggle with a division of “hastily summoned and unprofessional” volunteers, the Allies would be depressed and disillusioned, “deeming it an evidence of our lack of seriousness about the nature of the enterprise.”

Senator Chamberlain had similar doubts about sponsoring the Colonel’s amendment to the draft bill. Pressed by Henry Cabot Lodge, he allowed it to go forward under the name of Senator Warren Harding of Ohio. This move surprised political observers who remembered Harding as chairman of the 1916 Republican convention, disdainfully (with eagle profile) maneuvering to block Roosevelt’s nomination. But the eagle was far-sighted, and looking ahead37, saw no other likely nominee on the GOP’s horizon for 1920—unless it be himself. He was happy to do whatever was necessary to keep Party seniors happy.

On 24 April, Harding expanded the amendment to empower the President of the United States to appoint as many as four volunteer divisions of men not subject to conscription. The measure was optimistic in assuming that Wilson38 would override the policy of his own War Department. It did not name Roosevelt as a potential commander, but the ensuing agitated debate was as much about him as about the incompatibility of voluntary and drafted service. Lodge threw all his own prestige, as ranking minority member of the Foreign Relations Committee, into the fray on behalf of the Colonel.

“He is known39 in Europe as is no other American. His presence there would be a help and an encouragement to the soldiers of the allied nations.… For Heaven’s sake, is there any reason why he should not be given an opportunity, if he desires, to give his life for what he regards as the most sacred of all causes?”

While the debate40 continued—postponing, to the relief of many congressmen, a proposal to prohibit liquor consumption in the Capitol—Roosevelt worked to ensure the fastest possible dispatch of his sons to the war. He asked Spring Rice to find out if British army regulations would permit Kermit to enlist without compromising his American citizenship. And he fattened Newton D. Baker’s already bulky “Roosevelt” file with a request to help Quentin get into the army flying school at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

“It will give me41 pleasure,” Baker replied, “to think that your boy is there and a part of our establishment.”

The secretary’s pleasure was sincere. He had not enjoyed hurting a great man who was, palpably, aging but still full of ardor. Nor did he discount the power of the Roosevelt lobby on Capitol Hill. The passions unleashed in the Senate over the Harding amendment indicated that a vengeful Lodge could hinder the administration in its attempt to get the draft bill passed. Balfour’s British mission had arrived in Washington on 22 April, and a French one dominated by Marshal Joseph Joffre was due any day. Both statesmen were known to admire Roosevelt profoundly. It would be an embarrassment for Baker if a quarrel with him slowed the pace of American mobilization.

Quentin was summoned42 to Washington for examination as a candidate for flight training in the signal corps. Doctors at Walter Reed Army Hospital poured hot and cold water into his ears, dropped belladonna into his eyes, made him hop along blindfolded, and then, conveniently ignoring his shortsightedness, declared him fit for service. He was billeted, not to Fort Monroe, but to Hazelhurst Field, Mineola, Long Island, an easy motorcycle spin from Sagamore Hill.

BY THE FIRST WEEK43 of May, Roosevelt was receiving two thousand volunteer applications a day. Meanwhile, the administration’s draft bill passed both houses of Congress, but the Harding amendment was still so hot an issue it had to be settled by a House-Senate conference. The principal argument against letting Roosevelt have his division was that crackpot militiamen across the country might organize and demand that Wilson send them abroad too.

The leaders of the Allied missions were not encouraged by this discordance, judging from their looks and demeanor. Ellen Maury Slayden, the wife of an antiwar congressman from Texas, wrote a description of Arthur Balfour in her journal: “All the lines of him44 were drooping except his mouth, where there lingered a shadow of the usual British sneer at all things American, although somewhat chastened by their present desperate need for our help. His trousers drooped because they didn’t fit, each corner of his long-tailed coat seemed to have a weight in it, his arrow string tie was limp, and his turned-down collar so low that he might have worn a locket.”

The foreign secretary certainly was desperate, more so than Mrs. Slayden knew. His government was45 on the verge of bankruptcy, and would soon have to beg Washington for relief. Over the last six months its American debt, swollen by borrowing on Wall Street to keep the sterling-dollar exchange rate stable, had become an overdraft of $358 million. So much of what the Allies had bought in the way of food was being sent to the bottom by U-boats that a famine in Great Britain was no more than six weeks away. What London needed, even more than extra men, was extra credit. Touched as Balfour was to see Roosevelt rounding up volunteers willing to fight and die alongside Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s troops in Flanders, he had to accept the verdict of his chief military adviser, Lieutenant General George Bridges, that conditions there were “too serious … for untrained men or amateurs of any sort.” They agreed, in other46 words, with Baker, and Bridges telegraphed London to warn of the inadvisability of “any form of volunteer group from America.” Britain would have to wait—and bleed—until the U.S. Army was ready to send over an expeditionary force of regular soldiers.

“THE FOREIGN SECRETARY CERTAINLY WAS DESPERATE.”
Arthur Balfour (right) with René Viviani in Washington, April 1917. (photo credit i25.1)

Baker accordingly resisted Marshal Joffre’s pleadings47 for a Roosevelt division to be attached to his troops further south. Last month’s disastrous French offensive in the Soissons-Reims sector had cost 120,000 casualties and caused dozens of divisions to mutiny. Although this shameful news was being kept secret, Joffre had replaced his commander in chief, General Robert Nivelle, with General Henri-Philippe Pétain.

Roosevelt and Joffre48 were able to take stock of each other at a private dinner in Henry Frick’s mansion in New York on 9 May. Earlier in the day, the Colonel had been excluded from a city reception for the French mission, by order of the State Department. His rapprochement with the administration would appear to be over. Joffre—a big, beaming, pink-and-white man—was overjoyed to be seated next to an American who could speak his language. Afterward it was noticed that he had learned, in return, at least one word of English: “Bul-lee.

“He did not tell49 me anything I did not know, or suspect,” Roosevelt told Leary. “France does want our men. She wants them badly, more than she wants supplies.”

There was another50 dinner for the missions at the Waldorf two nights later. It was hosted by Governor Charles S. Whitman of New York, with Roosevelt seated well away from the guests of honor. But Balfour quietly arranged to come out to Sagamore Hill for “high tea” on Sunday the fifteenth. The State Department, alerted by a sudden deployment of secret service agents, was powerless to stop him.

For four hours, he and Roosevelt renewed their acquaintance: grayer and sadder statesmen than they had been when they were respectively prime minister and president. The war they had long seen coming both joined them and separated them now. Balfour confided that he found Woodrow Wilson’s White House to be lacking in urgency. Roosevelt talked of his frustrated desire to serve. Their only auditors, as they talked far into the night, were Balfour’s parliamentary assistant Sir Ian Malcolm, and a rookie pilot from Mineola, Private Quentin Roosevelt.

THAT SAME WEEKEND, Roosevelt received another letter from Secretary Baker. The House-Senate conference was moving toward approval of the draft bill with the Harding amendment intact, but Baker did not want Roosevelt to think this presaged well for his division. “Since the responsibility51 for action and decision in this matter rests upon me, you will have to regard the determination I have already indicated as final, unless changing circumstances require a re-study of the whole question.”

The only “changing circumstance” Roosevelt could see ahead was Woodrow Wilson’s empowerment, under the pending act, to summon up five hundred thousand volunteer soldiers. Roosevelt believed52 he could supply almost half that number out of the pool of applications he already had in hand—but what chance was there of the President turning to him, if it was so obviously Baker’s desire to do without volunteers altogether?

Almost none, according to a message from Cal O’Laughlin in Washington. “Tumulty tells me53 confidentially that the President will approve the army conscription bill, but that he will not exercise his authority for the acceptance of your division.”

On 18 May, Wilson signed the bill into law, inflicting compulsory registration for military service upon ten million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. The stroke of his pen made him the most powerful commander in chief in American history. In an extraordinary accompanying statement, he acknowledged that a clause in the Draft Act permitted him to give an independent command to Theodore Roosevelt. “It would be very agreeable54 for me to pay Mr. Roosevelt this compliment, and the Allies the compliment, of sending to their aid one of our most distinguished public men, an ex-President who has rendered many conspicuous public services and proved his gallantry in many striking ways. Politically, too, it would no doubt have a very fine effect and make a profound impression. But this is not the time … for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war. The business now at hand is undramatic, practical, and of scientific definiteness and precision.”

The statement was Wilsonian in sounding like a tribute but parsing as dismissal. Roosevelt, by implication, was an old military showman55 who would only strut the French stage in the manner of Debussy’s “Général Lavine—excentric.”

James Amos56 was with the Colonel when he received a follow-up telegram from Wilson explaining that the statement had been based on “imperative considerations of public policy and not upon personal or private choice.” Amos had never seen his boss so cast down. “He was truly in a black mood.”

For a day or two more, Roosevelt hoped that some intervention, such as an appeal from the French government, would make Wilson grant him his desperate desire. That was nothing less than death in battle: he knew he would not come back. Denied the consummation, he would have to cede it to one or more of his sons. “I don’t care a continental57 whether they fight in Yankee uniforms or British uniforms or in their undershirts, so long as they’re fighting.”

Kermit was at Plattsburg58, doing some last-minute training to qualify for a commission in the British army. Ted and Archie were there too, awaiting orders as major and second lieutenant respectively in the U.S. Officers’ Reserve Corps. Their father was not so downcast that he did not press for their transfer overseas, the moment Wilson announced that John J. Pershing was to be the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

“My dear General59 Pershing,” Roosevelt wrote, “I very heartily congratulate you, and especially the people of the United States, upon your selection.” There was no need to add that he had made Pershing’s present glory possible, having promoted him in 1905 over the heads of 835 senior officers. “I write you now to request that my two sons, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., aged 27,* and Archibald B. Roosevelt, aged 23, both of Harvard, be allowed to enlist as privates under you, to go over with the first troops.”

Pershing replied60 that it would be “a waste” for two such promising young officers to enlist, and undertook to find them places on his staff at no loss of rank.

With Quentin almost certain to be assigned to the general’s force as well (Baker talked grandly of an “army of the air”61 leading the American attack), Roosevelt’s next, painful duty was to dismiss all his volunteers. Those eligible for the draft might yet be lucky, and serve; but those ineligible needed to hear from him, rather than the President, that they were not wanted.

Before issuing a notice of general release, he discussed its wording with about twenty of his “ghost” commanders, including Seth Bullock, Jack Greenway, a former Rough Rider, and John M. Parker, a still-passionate Progressive. Parker was the only man, apart from Roosevelt, who had actually lobbied Woodrow Wilson in behalf of the division. He was able to quote the President’s exact words: “Colonel Roosevelt is62 a splendid man and patriotic citizen, as you say, but he is not a military leader. His experience in military life has been extremely short. He and many of the men with him are too old to render efficient service, and in addition to that fact, he as well as others have shown intolerance of discipline.”

John Leary attended the meeting. “Never, except63 in a house of death, have I noticed a greater air of depression. All except the Colonel showed it plainly. He, it was apparent to those who knew him best, felt worse than any other.”

The notice went out on 21 May. It was a somber summary of the division’s aims, but stated that “as good American64 citizens we loyally obey the decision of the Commander in Chief of the American army and navy.”

A WEEK LATER, Georges Clemenceau published an open letter to Wilson, appealing to him to change his mind about the volunteer division. “It is possible65 that your own mind, enclosed in its austere legal frontiers … has failed to be impressed by the vital hold which personalities like Roosevelt have on popular imagination,” Clemenceau wrote, in language unlikely to have been approved by the Quai d’Orsay. “The name of Roosevelt has this legendary force in our country at this time.” Poilus were asking why the Colonel had not been sent over. “Send them Roosevelt. I tell you, because I know it—it will gladden their hearts.”

Wilson did not reply. Roosevelt complained to fellow members of the Harvard Club that he had been cashiered by a jealous rival determined to deny him the right pro patria mori. “I told Wilson66 that I would die on the field of battle, that I would never return if only he would let me go!”

“If you could really convince the President of that,” Elihu Root said, “I’m quite sure he would send you at once.”

QUENTIN ROOSEVELT’S POSTING to Long Island filled Flora Whitney with joy. She and Quentin were besotted with each other, to the extent that they had secretly become engaged67. The Whitney estate at Old Westbury was near enough to Mineola for them to spoon whenever Quentin got an evening pass from Hazelhurst Field, and Sagamore Hill was available for weekend trysts. Edith Roosevelt had taken68 to Flora (as she had not to Grace). Knowing how little time the two nineteen-year-olds were likely to have together, she encouraged their closeness.

“Ah, Fouf,”69 Quentin wrote from camp, using Flora’s family nickname, “I don’t yet see how you can love me,—still I feel as tho’ it were all a dream from which some time I will wake … with nothing left to me but the memory of beauty and the wonder of it all.”

He was a year70 and a half younger than the youngest men who flocked to register on “Draft Day,” 5 June, and just as unready as she to face the horrifying fact that after six or seven more weeks of rapture, he might never see her again. It was difficult for Quentin to imagine himself flying solo before the end of the month. But that was the speed at which he was being flung into the air, in a lumbering, hard-to-control Curtiss Jenny that cruelly taxed his back. France was hopelessly calling for five thousand American pilots and fifty thousand aviation “mechanicians.” The U.S. Army (seventeenth in the world, packing only one and a half days’ worth of ammunition) had fewer than a hundred trained pilots. A story in The New York Times reported seventy-five British planes had been shot down in a single dogfight. Apparently, service aloft was more dangerous than life in the trenches.

The war had so71 long been regarded by Americans as something they were “kept out of” that its sudden, here-and-now reality was shocking, even to the Colonel’s children. On 17 June, just as Ethel was giving birth to a little girl, Ted and Archie came to Sagamore Hill to announce, in great secrecy, under the new Espionage Act, that they would be leaving for France in three days’ time. Quentin and Flora felt impelled to reveal their own secret at the family’s final gathering before the two regulars sailed. They were so barely grown up that Edith might have reacted in horror, except that all over the country, the accelerating pace of “mobilization” had made short order of maternal scruples. She gave them her blessing.

“HE WAS ASSIGNED TO THE NINETY-FIFTH AERO SQUADRON.”
Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt. (photo credit i25.2)

Flora was as sure72 as Quentin that their engagement was a commitment for life. Outside of that, and the flamboyant “freshness” with which she dressed, bobbed her hair, and rode horses, she was an insecure girl, tongue-tied when the Roosevelts quoted poetry to one another, and in awe of the public figures who constantly visited the Colonel. She adored her father, but Harry Whitney had the globetrotting restlessness of the wealthy, and she saw little of him. Her famous mother was interested only in art and artists. Roosevelt, in contrast, embraced Flora as he did anyone who passed Edith’s muster, radiating such affection that she understood Sagamore Hill would remain “home” to her, however long Quentin stayed away.

Ted and Archie73 sailed on the twentieth, with orders attaching them to General Pershing’s advance headquarters in Paris. Roosevelt was overjoyed to be able to boast that they were among the first in line for the Front. He pushed to have Kermit similarly placed in Mesopotamia, writing to Lloyd George, “I pledge my honor that he will serve you honorably and efficiently.” Early in July, an acceptance call came through from Balfour’s roving ambassador in New York, Lord Northcliffe. Kermit was tracked down in Boston, where he was sitting for a portrait by John Singer Sargent, and by mid-month he was gone too.

Quentin simultaneously74 graduated as a first lieutenant in the Flying Corps. He was assigned to the Ninety-fifth Aero Squadron, with orders to proceed overseas at once. Fanny Parsons watched him emerging khaki-clad from Christ Church after communion with his mother, and got a sick feeling they might never share the sacrament again. His departure was set for Monday, 23 July. He told Edith75 that he wanted to spend his last night with Flora, on the Whitney yacht. Helpless against the rush of events, she could hold him at Sagamore Hill only through Saturday.

Before going to bed that evening, she went to his bedroom and tucked him in.

FLORA WROTE QUENTIN a farewell letter to take with him.

Dearest …76

With every breath I draw there will be a thought of you and a wish for your safety, success and good luck.…

All I do from now will be for you.… There is nothing in me that could make you care for me as much as I care for you—and you couldn’t anyway, because it’s absolute worship on my part.

And be careful and don’t take any unnecessary risks—or do anything solely for bravado—please, please, dear?

On Monday morning77, Theodore and Edith went into Manhattan to see their youngest son off on the SS Olympia. Alice joined them at the Cunard dock. The Whitney family was there en masse. None of them knew Flora was engaged, but they were showing rare support for her and her soldier boyfriend.

The liner, war-painted troopship gray, was in no hurry to leave. Humid heat built up along the waterfront. Quentin seemed to want to do nothing but sit on a bale of hides holding hands with Flora. By lunchtime, his parents and sister could stand it no longer and said goodbye. They left the young couple in care of the Whitneys and drove home to Sagamore Hill. Alice sensed Roosevelt’s utter desolation.

She murmured78 to herself, The old Lion perisheth for lack of prey and the stout Lion’s whelps are scattered abroad.

* Ted was in fact twenty-nine.

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