Addicted to War: Theodore Roosevelt's Campaign for a Third Term

Warmongering in America, 1915. The more things change…

 

“There is but one man in America—just one—who is immune to the lessons of the European War—That man is Theodore Roosevelt.”

 Elbert Hubbard, The Fra: For Philistines and Roycrafters, April 1914. 

Historians and biographers always run the risk of becoming sympathetic towards their subjects, even if he or she is evil, wicked, venal, or just plain mean, and lately I admit that I have felt a twinge of sympathy toward Theodore Roosevelt. Toward the end of his life, the man was barreling toward the ignominy of being labeled a clown and a crank with such velocity that I was beginning to feel sorry for the battered old, make-believe cowboy. Then I read an account of his warmongering, fear inspiring, jingoistic rhetoric speech to students on October 31, 1914 at Princeton University and I readjusted my attitude. I returned to my unsympathetic standpoint of Roosevelt I had developed over years of research into the man and his character … a petty, self-promoting, win-at-any-cost, ego maniacal mountebank. The only thing authentic about the man was his anger and bitterness.

According to the 31 Oct. 1914 Rock Island Argus, Roosevelt warned the young and impressionable listeners, most of whom were males of the age when they are most vulnerable to militant enthusiasm, that the two unnamed Empires currently engaged in the European conflict had plans for seizing New York and San Francisco and hold the cities for ransom. He knew this to be true, he bellowed to the audience, because he had seen the plans with his own eyes . . .  

The U.S. would be easy pickings,  he told the crowd, because “our standing army is too weak to protect them. I have seen deliberate plans prepared to take both San Francisco and New York and hold them for ransoms that would cripple our country and give funds to the enemy for carrying on war.” His plan to counter this insidious plot to invade a feeble United Stated by anonymous European powers was for  “everyman may have to practice in marksmanship and have some military training” in the “earnest hope that we shall finally achieve international status by which there shall be a posse comitatus…to coerce any recalcitrant power.”

He refused to give any further information. He assumed, as he did during his Presidency, that just because he said a thing, the press would amplify it and people would believe it. The press, however, did not take him seriously and while the story got a few front-page mentions, it quickly fizzled out. Rabble-rousing assertions like the ones he made at Princeton were actually producing the opposite effect.  Roosevelt was having a hard time being taken seriously by the grown-ups, so maybe he felt he could reignite interest in those most vulnerable to militant enthusiasm, college kids. Yet, his remarks simply reinforced the popular belief, as the Arizona Williams News wrote on 5 November 1914, that Roosevelt had “heaped blunder upon blunder, made one wrong move after another, and his vision of returning to the White House has grown dimmer with each passing day.”

It is always sad to see anyone desperately attempting to hang on to the glory days of youth. Roosevelt, however, stretches natural sympathy to a breaking point. His former glory, more than most, was always stagecraft, supported by a myth created by him and maintained by those who found his persona useful.