SUPPORT AND SACRIFICE

When Roosevelt died, European newspapers recounted his extensive biography from sickly childhood; to service in the War of 1898; to his time as a politician, explorer, rancher, author, and conservationist. Each national press churned out generic biographical tributes, but among Allied newspapers, honors tended to go beyond Roosevelt's broad biography. His vocal advocacy of U.S. intervention in the World War endeared him greatly and his death served as a poignant reminder of the U.S. contribution. The 1919 peace negotiations at Versailles that began shortly after his passing reinforced the themes of war and peace in Roosevelt's life just as Europeans took stock of their own experiences of the war.

Although Roosevelt had long protested against U.S. neutrality and criticized the Wilson administration's reluctance to join the Allied efforts, his first reaction to the outbreak of war did not demonstrate eagerness for American involvement. Not until November 1914 did he become a passionate supporter of the Allies. This flip-flop, as historian William Harbaugh put it, “is both enlightening and confusing.”Footnote ¹⁴ Despite German aggression in Belgium, Roosevelt initially articulated a steadfast support for neutrality. “I am not taking sides one way or the other,” he wrote in his regular editorial in Outlook magazine in the summer of 1914. “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.”Footnote ¹⁵ In private, however, Roosevelt revealed to European friends that he detested the breach of Belgian neutrality and maintained that, if he sat in the Oval Office, the United States would not relegate itself to the sidelines. The contradiction in his private and public statements, TR admitted, stemmed from his status as a former president. He insisted his true opinion must remain concealed and that he should appear, at least publicly, impartial.Footnote ¹⁶

Two other motives underwrote this determination to restrain his views. First and foremost, Roosevelt led the Progressive Party in 1914 and electoral strategy occupied his every thought; the Progressives sought to build on state and congressional victories in 1912. The party—a diverse coalition including pacifists and noninterventionists—relied heavily on Roosevelt's leadership for unity. He brought the party national recognition and his image functioned to hold together disparate interests and recast its platform into an easily identifiable and publicly palatable message. As steward of the party, he refrained from any mention of intervention to ensure the Progressive's contests against Republicans and Democrats remained competitive. The issue of war had the potential to wreck the tenuous stability of the party, especially considering that public debate over intervention and neutrality had not coherently developed in the early months of the conflict.

The second reason for Roosevelt's early restraint emanated from his appreciation of executive power and came from his own experiences as president. Regardless of the apparent rivalry with President Wilson, Roosevelt believed the president's diplomacy deserved patience to develop and reap results.Footnote ¹⁷ Much in the same way Roosevelt grappled with intervention and public opinion, he recognized Wilson faced the same electoral problems. So partly from necessity and partly out of respect for the office of the presidency, he avoided the war question.

These circumstances changed by November 1914. The Progressive Party failed to win the state contests that seemed likely victories. They lost a third of their congressional seats, mainly to Republicans. Consequently, the election results left Roosevelt unencumbered politically, and he began a gradual shift back to his once-beloved GOP. Additionally, Roosevelt's attitude toward Wilson deteriorated after the election. By the winter of 1914 he had given up any hope that Wilson's diplomacy could succeed in bringing about peace among the belligerents. Unshackled from these constraints, TR's first public attacks began the weekend after Election Day. In a nationally syndicated editorial he chastised the efforts of “Messrs. Wilson and Bryan, when taken in connection with our refusal to act,” referring to the U.S. promise to defend Belgian neutrality, as “the highest point of slightly mischievous fatuity which can be attained in international matters.”Footnote ¹⁸ The attacks on Wilson, his administration, and the neutrality policy only increased in frequency and acridity, culminating in a 1915 book that compiled his editorials on the subject.Footnote ¹⁹ This firmly set Roosevelt apart from noninterventionists and, above all, Wilson.

Alongside the public attacks, Roosevelt critiqued the president in private conversations and correspondence with foreign dignitaries. He regularly communicated with European ambassadors he counted as friends, including Cecil Spring Rice of Britain, George Bakhméteff of Russia, and Jules Jusserand of France. To each his message was clear: “If I were willing to let myself grow cast down, I should be pretty well cast down at the fact that in this great crisis America, because of having unworthy leaders, has played an unworthy part.”Footnote ²⁰ Roosevelt even urged the Allied Powers to reach out to the American public directly. In a letter to James Bryce, the former British ambassador to the United States, Roosevelt “hoped that in the strongest and most unequivocal fashion [the British] would have appealed to the American people now as Henry Ward Beecher appealed to the English people during the Civil War.”Footnote ²¹ His desire for transatlantic cooperation and Allied intervention never materialized; Bryce and other European diplomats feared alienating the Wilson administration and avoided direct pleas to the American public.

After the Germans torpedoed and sunk the RMS Lusitania in the spring of 1915, killing over one hundred Americans, Roosevelt engaged in persistent public and private outrage against U.S. neutrality. In a letter to Arthur Lee, then Lord Kitchener's personal commissioner, Roosevelt condemned the Wilson government: “if we had done what we ought to have done after the sinking of the Lusitania, I and my four boys would now be in an army getting ready to serve with you in Flanders or else to serve against Constantinople.”Footnote ²² His convictions—communicated to friends and officials with great passion—boosted the morale of the war-weary Allies but made Roosevelt political enemy-number-one from Wilson's perspective.

Figure 2.

Theodore Roosevelt pondering a crystal ball with Woodrow Wilson's face. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIG-acd-2a05454.

The acrimony between the two men appeared most publicly after Wilson delivered his War Message to Congress, and the United States took up the fight against the Central Powers. In a meeting with the president, Roosevelt sought dispensation to raise a division of troops to fight in the war. Far from his youthful fitness, Roosevelt was dulled by an array of injuries and ailments, and Wilson rejected his request. The decision seemed political and spiteful, even if the logic rested on TR's diminishing health. European friends rushed to Roosevelt's defense, recalling his pro-Allied stance and attempting to repay the favor, none more so than French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, who urged Wilson to reconsider in an open letter. “Allow me to say in all candor, that at the present moment there is in France one name which sums up the beauty of American intervention. It is the name Roosevelt, your predecessor, even your rival, but with whom there can now be no other rivalry than heartening success,” Clemenceau wrote.Footnote ²³ The letter subtly, but noticeably, insulted Wilson. “It is possible that your own mind, inclosed in its austere legal frontiers, which has been the source of many noble actions has failed to be impressed by the vital hold which personalities like Roosevelt have on popular imagination,” the Frenchman asserted. “The name of Roosevelt has this legendary force in our country,” he instructed, “believe me—send them Roosevelt. I tell you because I know it will gladden their hearts.”Footnote ²⁴ Clemenceau's British counterpart, David Lloyd George, similarly criticized Wilson's decision, though less candidly, and instead secretly planned with Roosevelt for a visit to Europe “to inspire the war-weary British armies.”Footnote ²⁵ Ultimately, both leaders gave up on enlisting the former president. Clemenceau failed in his appeal to Wilson, and Lloyd George gradually came to the view that a visit from Roosevelt would only serve to alienate the president.

In death, Roosevelt's resolute support for the Allies led many to consider him the greatest American proponent of the cause. In France, his promotion of U.S. intervention almost always accompanied the news of his death in press reports, and this facet of his life dominated even the broadest biographical tributes. French Senator Alexandre Bérard told his countrymen that Roosevelt was “the apostle of the cause of right on the other side of the Atlantic.”Footnote ²⁶ One Parisian evening newspaper called him the “champion of the cause of the Entente,” asserting that Roosevelt supported the French “without waiting for the decision of his fellow citizens.”Footnote ²⁷Le Temps, the French newspaper of record at the time, celebrated “the zeal and ardor which with he advocated for [France] at the hour of the supreme ordeal” and praised his “noble conviction, eloquence and enthusiasm with which he pleaded for intervention.”Footnote ²⁸ “History will render justice to the considerable role, not the official, which Mr. Roosevelt fulfilled in leading his country to range itself on the side of the Entente,” Le Radical wrote.Footnote ²⁹ Americans mourned TR in myriad ways; some recalled him as a progressive, a conservationist, and an activist president. The French, however, overwhelmingly remembered him as their American partner in the Great War.

Across the English Channel, the sentiment was similar. On February 9—a national day of mourning and tribute to TR in the United States—Britain held a corresponding nationwide commemoration as an act of solidarity. Westminster Abbey prepared a special memorial service “which for the first time in history displaced evensong.”Footnote ³⁰ Archdeacon William Carnegie in his sermon said of Roosevelt: “From the first he felt no hesitation. A great wrong had been done and he protested against it in no uncertain terms…. He spent himself in his efforts sacrificing his life as surely as if he had laid it down on the battlefield.”Footnote ³¹ The British politician and historian George Otto Trevelyan made every effort to have the history books remember Roosevelt as an Allied hero. He wrote to TR's official biographer, Joseph Bishop Bucklin, that the most “thoroughly satisfying … letter which I ever wrote” to him was drafted in 1914 about the war. “I wrote as a private individual Englishman, to the greatest of all Americans in a moment of dire stress, sure of his views, confident of his noble character.” Trevelyan insisted that Bucklin include the letter in his biography because it would remind the world “how he viewed the matter” of Allied support.Footnote ³² Arthur Lee, a Roosevelt confidante, summed up the British view best in his published memorial in the London Times: “More than any man or other agency he was responsible for arousing the fighting conscience of the American people and for bringing them into the war.” Lee pronounced, “To him the Allies owe a debt that is only beginning to be realized.”Footnote ³³ Accurate, or not, Lee's tribute typified the British sentiment at the time of TR's death.

The other Ally of the “big three,” the Italians, also celebrated Roosevelt's advocacy of intervention. As one former Italian ambassador to the United States said of his countrymen, they revere Roosevelt's “youthful ardor,” but more they “vehemently and with excitement acknowledged his sacrifice in the cause of justice and freedom of peoples in the great world war.”Footnote ³⁴ Robert Underwood Johnson, who at the time of Roosevelt's death was running New York City's Italian war relief funds, wrote TR's wife Edith a similar opinion. “Not only his country, but the world is acclaiming the public services and the high character of the one dearest to you,” he told her.Footnote ³⁵ Italians, like the French and British, did not overly concern themselves with Roosevelt's achievements and failures as president. The proximity of the war's end led them to focus on his role as America's war booster. The Allies hardly ignored the other features of his life, but these seemed peripheral and paled in comparison to his reliable support for Europe's most devastating crisis to date.

Most of these tributes carefully avoided criticizing Wilson. French newspaper Le Journal paid its respects while explicitly writing that such feelings do not mean to “offend Mr. Wilson or [Secretary of State Robert] Lansing,” but instead “render justice to he who opened the way” to intervention.Footnote ³⁶ Nevertheless, Wilson's arrival in Europe and the death of TR led to comparisons. In such assessments Roosevelt often fared the better. “The chief difference,” Le Gaulois wrote, “consists in that Roosevelt estimated that the duty of a chief was to lead, while his adversary believed that his duty was to follow.”Footnote ³⁷ Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris characterizes Wilson's popularity in 1919 and his reception in Europe as “a hysteria that far eclipsed the welcome given to Roosevelt in 1910” and asserts that Europeans “greeted [Wilson] as the savior of Western Civilization.”Footnote ³⁸ Yet evidence of TR's popularity at the time of his death abounds, often coming at the expense of Wilson, and not merely on the grounds of policy differences.

The Allies hastened to recall Roosevelt as a leader with genuine empathy for the incredible gravity of events. They believed he shared the same sense of sacrifice that the war brought, that he shared the same heartfelt sensitivity of personal loss over blood spilt on the battlefields. Although TR was excluded from fighting in the war, all four of his sons served. Ted Jr.—Roosevelt's oldest son—enlisted and earned promotion to lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army's First Infantry Division. Ted saw substantial frontline combat, including time in the trenches, where he suffered from exposure to mustard gas and a gunshot wound to his leg. For his service he was cited for gallantry, leaving the war with a Silver Star and Purple Heart.Footnote ³⁹ In fact, all of TR's sons earned commendation in the war. Kermit fought in the Middle East as a captain in the British Army and received the British Military Cross for valor in an armored attack on Baghdad. Archie served with Ted in France, and after being shelled in the trenches sustained shrapnel injuries to his arms and legs and admitted suffering from “shell shock.” The French decorated Archie with their highest honor, the Croix de Guerre. TR's youngest son, Quentin, also earned the Croix de Guerre as a pilot in the new American Air Service, but he never returned home. In an aerial dogfight over France in July 1918, a German plane shot and instantly killed Quentin. His plane crashed near the village of Chamery, where German soldiers buried the body with military honors.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figure 3.

A U.S. soldier pays respects at Quentin Roosevelt's grave, Chamery, France. Stereoview print in author's collection.

The Allies viewed the death of Quentin and the service of Archie, Kermit, and Ted as obvious indications of TR's deep personal understanding of what they suffered in the war. Emile Boutroux, professor of history at the Sorbonne, told the French press that TR loved “all of France greatly … for whom he has given two of his sons,” referring to Archie's substantial injuries and Quentin's death.Footnote ⁴¹ In a more intimate letter to Roosevelt's wife, Boutroux told of “how the French mourn for Mr. Roosevelt” and how the “sentiment was singularly profound and deep” because in French “soil is the grave of one of his sons.” This sacrifice, Boutroux wrote to her, “has manifest[ed] a feeling so sublime” among the Allies.Footnote ⁴² The French daily newspaper Le Gaulois called it a gift “to France at her most critical hour, that magnificent testimony of love; he sent to her his four sons.”Footnote ⁴³ The physical presence of Quentin's grave evolved into a site of memory for Allied soldiers amid the destruction of eastern France. Americans and Europeans decorated the grave with flowers, and it soon became a shrine to which Allied soldiers made a pilgrimage. A soldier's journey to the grave ended with respects paid to Quentin and his father.

TR's strong preference for intervention and the service of his sons can also illustrate just how much the war shaped European perceptions of Americans. The Roosevelt family's commitment to the war symbolized the nation's resolve. U.S. Major Warwick Greene told how Quentin's death “seals forever, with his dearest blood, the stand [TR] has taken in this war since the very beginning. He is now one with all the great British and French statesmen who have had the same loss and who ‘carry on’ just the same.” Thus when Roosevelt died, Europeans recalled his sacrifice in terms of blood as well as political leadership. “The speeches, loans, enthusiasm, ships, munitions, etc., are all very well, but the ties which really bind Allies are the splendid dead, humble and great alike,” Major Greene wrote his father. “The attitude of the poilus and Tommies, of the peasant women and little shopkeepers, has entirely changed since our men have actually begun to die.… Blood counts; blood is not only thicker than the water of the Atlantic, but also thicker than the wind of speeches and fine writing.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The Roosevelts’ sacrifice made the death of its patriarch an even greater loss in European minds. The Allies felt they knew Roosevelt better than any other American politician and, conversely, that he knew them better for his sons’ service.

Wilson could not inspire the same affection. The president had three daughters, keeping him from committing his family in the same fashion. But regardless of this, Wilson did not empathize with Europeans like Roosevelt. For example, Wilson's reluctance to view the battlefields and inspect the Allied military forces alienated many Europeans and conveyed a sense of detachment from the conflict. The French delegate to the peace conference, Jules Cambon, condemned the president for this: “Why has he not visited the devastated regions of France so as to see our gaping wounds and know what we have suffered?”Footnote ⁴⁵ The president did not have time to visit the battlefields, he heard, to which Cambon thundered: “Not had time! He had time to go to London and to Rome. There had been time for banquets and entertainments.… He should take sufficient time to know what France has suffered.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Eventually Wilson did visit the battlefields, but he traveled in a limousine and took little time to speak with soldiers or victims of the war.Footnote ⁴⁷ This is not to say the war did not deeply affect his sensitivities, but his failure to communicate or express his feelings to the Allies made him appear cold and removed.

ROOSEVELT'S LONG SHADOW

In death, Roosevelt still cast a shadow over the peace conference. Just as the Allies imagined TR and Wilson as contrasting personalities, they anticipated the two men's views of the postwar order would likewise diverge. Their presumptions typically favored Rooseveltian statecraft over Wilsonianism.

David Lloyd George greeted President Wilson's arrival in Europe with caution and a degree of uncertainty. He felt generally supported by Wilson as a war partner, but in person and as a diplomat, he did not know what to expect. Conversely, Roosevelt captivated him. Lloyd George recalled TR as able to “impress those who for the first time came into close personal contact with him” and called his political convictions a “stern and dauntless Radicalism [that] always appealed to me.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Roosevelt's leadership of the Progressive Party and his success in shaping America's political discourse—even in electoral failure—spoke deeply to the political ambitions of Lloyd George. The British prime minister could not say the same of Wilson and the Democrats, who seemed aloof and distant, often reactionary in comparison. In Paris he concealed his true sentiments and trod carefully with the Wilson delegation particularly when it came to Roosevelt. “It was a great a breach of good manners to mention [Roosevelt] in certain circles,” namely, in Wilson's presence, Lloyd George wrote in his memoirs. “I did not think [Wilson] comparable to his great rival,” and the surprise news of Roosevelt's death upset him greatly.Footnote ⁴⁹ Wilson heard of Roosevelt's passing on his way to Italy, and according to Arthur Krock, experienced a range of emotions, first surprise, then pity, then “came a look of transcendent triumph.”Footnote ⁵⁰ When Lloyd George had the opportunity to pass on his condolences, after Wilson's return to London, his good wishes and sympathies collided with the president's abhorrence for his rival. “I was aghast,” the prime minister recalled of Wilson's response. Perhaps unaware the prime minister had fond memories of Roosevelt and a deep affinity for his progressive politics, the president made an “outburst of acrid detestation,” which the prime minister found crass and insulting.Footnote ⁵¹ The episode was one he would always remember and one that cemented his sense of Wilson as “a man of burning animosities.”Footnote ⁵²

Clemenceau, too, had a deep admiration for Roosevelt's diplomacy. Like Lloyd George, he believed TR's death came at an unfortunate time, lamented his absence at Versailles, and distrusted Wilson. “Clemenceau followed his movements like an old watchdog,” Lloyd George said of their first engagements with Wilson, who was “keeping an eye on a strange and unwelcome dog who has visited the farmyard.”Footnote ⁵³ In 1865 Clemenceau moved to New York and worked for nearly five years as an anonymous journalist for French newspapers. He wrote scathing social commentaries on the postbellum South and supported the Reconstruction plans of radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner. Even though he never traveled beyond Richmond, Southern Democrats did not appeal to him and surely played some role, however minor, in his perception of Wilson, a Southern Democrat. Roosevelt, however, came from a Northern Republican pedigree and seemed more familiar even though the two met only once. Clemenceau maintained a long correspondence with Roosevelt that continued after TR left the White House. In their wartime correspondence, Roosevelt portrayed Wilson in a negative manner, further tainting Clemenceau's impression of the president, long before he came to Versailles. For instance, Roosevelt thanked Clemenceau for his public protest when Wilson resolved to exclude him from the fighting and explained that he “wished to give France immediate help, and to use the volunteers.” TR blamed the president for a slow response, insisting that “the fundamental trouble with Mr. Wilson is that he is merely a rhetorician, vindictive and yet not physically brave.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Clemenceau gravitated to the brusque and masculine personality of TR and his intellectual convictions, but more, the French prime minister revered Roosevelt as the presidential architect of stronger Franco-American relations. The “French infatuation” with TR, as diplomacy scholar David Haglund calls it, “had to do with certain of the president's character traits; but it also had to do with policies he would adopt in pursuit of America's national interests that fortuitously happened to coincide with French interests.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Specifically, Roosevelt's instigation of the Algeciras Conference that adjudicated the Franco-German dispute in Morocco and his peace mission to Germany in 1910 ingratiated him to nationalists such as Clemenceau and contributed to the sense that Roosevelt had tested himself in the fiery melee of European power politics. Wilson recognized Clemenceau's fondness for TR, and when his press secretary asked him if he liked Clemenceau after meeting him, Wilson replied, “Yes, I like him, but do not agree with him in any particular whatsoever,” defining him as a man who's “principles are like Roosevelt's. They vibrate in a vacuum, and do not seem to guide him when he had to meet actual problems.”Footnote ⁵⁶

The pall Roosevelt cast over the Versailles conference came, at first, through his own attempts to discredit Wilson as he set sail across the Atlantic. The very week Wilson disembarked on French shores to begin his European tour and the peace negotiations, Roosevelt wrote to the Allies from his hospital bed to criticize the president's statecraft as dictatorial, rather than genuinely collaborative. Wilson had not consulted with the Allies on the Fourteen Points, which Roosevelt used as proof that the president intended to force through his proposals and neglect European demands. TR drafted a contemptuous report on Wilson to British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and Prime Ministers Lloyd George and Clemenceau that advanced his own belief that American statecraft should serve “not as an umpire between our allies and our enemies, but as one of the allies bound to come to an agreement with them, and then to impose this common agreement upon our vanquished enemies.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Roosevelt presented himself as the leader of the Republican Party, the party that trounced Wilson's Democrats in the 1918 midterm election largely on the issue of foreign policy. His message functioned as a reminder to the Allies that any peace would require Republican support, as they controlled Congress.

The Allies knew well that Roosevelt opposed Wilson and hardly needed a reminder, though they welcomed his support because it suited their interests. Each of the Allies held reservations about at least some of the Fourteen Points. Wilson's peace plan matured from 1914 to 1917, while European rivalries subsumed the continent in war, and the United States watched from the safety of the other side of the Atlantic. Wilson's initial plea for “peace without victory” failed to capture the imagination of Europeans who could not disentangle their victory from their adversary's total defeat. Wilson's subsequent demand for “a peace between equals” as the only reconciliation capable of lasting came just as the United States entered the war, but likewise met with widespread derision.Footnote ⁵⁸ After the war, as Wilson continued to push for collective security through the League of Nations, European Allies attempted to reshape the Fourteen Points into a peace that met their concerns.

Perhaps more than all the other Allies, France and Clemenceau feared Wilson's plans. Much of the war's fighting took place on French soil. With over one million military deaths, the French counted more dead soldiers than any other Allied army. Clemenceau distrusted collective security. For him, only the French would defend France, and he refused to accept Wilson's confident promise that a League of Nations could act as sufficient protection, especially with neighboring Germany reconstituted as an equal. When Wilson proclaimed his notion of peace without victory, the French prime minister bristled, “Never before has any political assembly heard so fine a sermon on what human beings might be capable of accomplishing if only they weren't human.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As for the Fourteen Points, Clemenceau infamously parodied Wilson by saying, “God himself was content with ten commandments.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The French leader made clear his view of human nature at the Versailles negotiations by adopting the stance of ultimate realist, determined to castrate Germany and maintain the wartime alliance as a means of ensuring the “bosch” never regained military dominance. This immediately put him at odds with Wilson who pushed collective security and the league as the primary vehicle for the world's protection, rather than relying on an open-ended commitment or alliance with France. The final peace settlement met somewhere between Wilson's and Clemenceau's wishes. Germany did not join the League of Nations, but neither did the wartime alliance continue in a formal capacity.

In contrast, Roosevelt's postwar vision appealed to Clemenceau. First, TR called for European “reconstruction on the basis of nationalities” and on terms set by the victors.Footnote ⁶¹ In his last publication before his death, TR promoted nationalist agendas by recognizing the different desires of the Allies who coveted an assortment of postwar spoils; the treaty should “explicitly reserve certain rights” for the victors, TR editorialized, much to Clemenceau's pleasure. “Let us absolutely refuse to abolish nationalism,” a scheme the Allies liked the sound of. “Let us base a wise and practical internationalism on a sound and intense nationalism.”Footnote ⁶² In addition to supporting national agendas, Roosevelt opposed Wilson's idea of “peace among equals.” Perhaps partly because of his son's death, but surely because of the millions of Allied lives sacrificed, Roosevelt determined that Germany must be punished and its ability to make war permanently disabled. Without entirely opposing the League of Nations, he believed Wilson's conception of a body of equal nations capable of protecting the global community hopelessly ineffectual. “Let us begin by including in the league only the present allies,” TR asserted, welcoming the continuation of the wartime alliance as the only realistic approach to defense.Footnote ⁶³ Extending the wartime alliance would provide a sustainable means of protection for the Allies, Roosevelt believed, and strong deterrent for aggressive foreign policies; Wilson's initial plans guaranteed neither.

In his last editorial, dictated to his wife and published one week after his death, Roosevelt gave his support to the French plans for security: “Would it not be well to begin with the League which we actually have in existence, the League of Allies who have fought through this great war? Let us at the peace table see that real justice is done as among these Allies.… Let each nation reserve to itself and for its own decision, and let it clearly set forth questions which are non-justiciable.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Pontificating, literally from the grave, TR's recommendation that national questions trumped all others and that a preferred means of collective security existed in a League of Allies greatly contented Clemenceau.Footnote ⁶⁵ While Wilson eventually agreed to leave Germany out of the league, making it a League of Allies, Clemenceau had every expectation that if Roosevelt occupied the White House, such a settlement would have come earlier.

TR's position reflected British apprehensions as well. Lloyd George and the British delegation's anxiety at the conference centered almost entirely on finance and trade. They conceptualized the map of Europe in economic terms, rather than Clemenceau's strategic view, although the British delegation believed rigidly in perpetuating naval dominance to safeguard their empire.Footnote ⁶⁶ The German naval threat after the war had almost entirely abated, and the fleet of U-boats impressed in British ports allowed the Royal Navy to sail largely unopposed. The British Empire even acquired former German coaling stations in the Pacific, while the threat to Indian security subsided with the revolution in Russia. Because of these circumstances, the British felt a greater sense of security than the French, and Lloyd George's position on security therefore rested somewhere between Clemenceau's and Wilson's. He believed that a guarantee of defense must go beyond the collective security of a League of Nations, but that a league would offer a good place for diplomacy and negotiation. Even so, the British refused to support Wilson's demand for the “absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas.” British Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Robert Cecil called Wilson “obsessed” with an “indefinite formula respecting the Freedom of the Seas which no one seems to understand” and believed it “will cause serious disunion among Allies at the Peace Conference.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Without the ability to blockade its enemies the British would lose their most valued means of defense. By contrast, Roosevelt endorsed Britain's desire to continue as the naval hegemon. To his longtime friend, English poet Rudyard Kipling, he conceded that “the British fleet has preserved not only England, but the United States” and supported the country's desire to “have the largest fleet in the world.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At the peace conference the issue of the freedom of the seas never really threatened to derail the talks. It came off the negotiating table due mainly to the rare cooperation of Lloyd George and Clemenceau, who forced Wilson to abandon the second of his Fourteen Points, much to the president's chagrin.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Italian negotiators, like the French, prioritized security. They sought to establish a permanent military alliance capable of defending their borders, while simultaneously expanding into Austro-Hungarian, Turkish, and Slavic lands to establish a territorial buffer and to repatriate minority Italian populations. The Treaty of London (1915) secretly arranged for Italy to gain much of the Adriatic coast, Albania, Tyrol, the Austrian Littoral, and a share of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such expansion looked like territorial aggrandizement to the Wilson administration, who criticized it as secretive imperialism, but to Italians it comprised a pivotal means of defense. Wilson directly addressed Italian designs in his Fourteen Points when proposing that the “frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality,” which denied the Treaty of London's scheme for basing some annexations on the presence of minority Italian populations.Footnote ⁷¹ The president found success on this front by using his closest diplomatic negotiator, Colonel Edward House, to outmaneuver the Italians, convincing them that by holding back on their demands in early negotiations, they would eventually win the concessions they sought. All the while, Wilson and House proceeded to promote a broader collective security that would not include the territorial buffers Italians expected.Footnote ⁷² In contrast, Roosevelt upheld the Italian view on border adjustments. In letters to the Serbian ambassador and former British ambassador he argued, “There can be no peace worth having unless … Italian Austria is united to the Italian Kingdom” and more broadly the entirety of “Italia irredenta,” which included the Slavic coast.Footnote ⁷³ The chief Italian negotiators at Versailles, Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, found Wilson so intractable over their territorial claims that they abandoned the conference in protest. The Italian public that cheered so intensely for Wilson when he visited Rome months before now condemned him as the architect of a treaty of broken promises.Footnote ⁷⁴

Roosevelt's responsiveness to Italian demands led other European nations that held similar expectations for border adjustments unfulfilled by Wilson's Fourteen Points to petition the former president for support. Scandinavians appealed, such as Danish businessman Vilhelm Carstens, who contacted Roosevelt to call for “the restitution of the old Danish territory of Sleswick, that was torn from the Motherland Denmark in 1864 by Prussia and Austria, only by the right of the strongest.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Carstens imagined Roosevelt would have the clout to pressure fellow Republicans when the treaty reached the Senate, as did a host of other European Allies.Footnote ⁷⁶

After Roosevelt's death, the Republican Party and its spokesmen on foreign affairs—namely, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, former President William Howard Taft, and former Secretary of State Elihu Root—helped cast the Rooseveltian shadow further. Although the Allies could no longer count on TR to directly advocate views they shared, these Republicans opposed Wilson's Fourteen Points on nearly identical grounds. They hoped to perpetuate the wartime alliance, they refused to consider the League of Nations without reservations for national sovereignty, and they supported further territorial gerrymandering on behalf of the Allies.Footnote ⁷⁷ Wilson's vision of a universal peace buttressed by a common moral suasion inspired as much discontent at home as it did among the Allies.

The European Allies perceived the debates in the U.S. Senate over the treaty's ratification as a contest between Wilsonianism and Rooseveltian statecraft. An American correspondent in Paris, Herbert Adam Gibbons, summarized the French interpretation:

French commentators considered Republican support for the wartime alliance and the reservations over Wilson's League of Nations as entirely Rooseveltian. In fact, some French encouraged the image of the Republican politicians as Roosevelt's living political heirs. Georges Schelle, professor of law at the University of Dijon and France's foremost scholar of international arbitration, called the wartime coalition and international League of Nations an “initiative … taken by the defeated Roosevelt,” who in life and death “directly inspired” the Republican Party's foreign policy. Schelle specifically names Elihu Root as the successor to Roosevelt's brand of international arbitration and statecraft, while other French publications named Taft or Lodge as the living champion.Footnote ⁷⁹ Such commentaries that depicted Roosevelt as the symbol of Republican reservations served French interests. Generally, the French wanted the United States to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Depicting Roosevelt as an ally of Taft, Root, and Lodge dulled the view of Republicans as outright opponents of Wilson. Reservationists, French commentators believed, shared their desires for peace, and the popularity of TR in the United States gave them hope that the treaty's ratification, even if it came with alterations, was imminent.

The British also referred to reservationists in the United States as friends or agents of Roosevelt. Edward Price Bell, the London correspondent for the Chicago Daily News and regular contributor to the London Times, told the British public in a postwar editorial that Republicans such as Lodge and Root long represented the views of Roosevelt. “Republicans of his type,” Bell wrote of TR, did not oppose “a League of Nations on principle,” but actually have “supported it for many years. What they object to is a ‘Wilsonian’ League.”Footnote ⁸⁰ One British correspondent in Washington called Root the “oracle” of the Republican Party, who proved himself an able diplomat under Roosevelt and whose “criticism of the League project as it stands, thus rounds out not only the official Republican attitude as represented by Senators Lodge, Knox, and others, but also the views of Republicans sympathetic to the President's [Wilson's] achievements at Paris—men like ex-President Taft.”Footnote ⁸¹ Like the French, the British supported the treaty and desperately wanted the Americans to do the same. Consequently many British placed their hopes of American ratification with the “friends” of Roosevelt, portraying the deceased president as a moderate supporter of the treaty and ultimately a Republican reservationist. As the treaty neared a vote in the U.S. Senate, the Allies recalled Roosevelt as a proponent of international law and collective security, not the polar opposite of Wilson.

After several votes, the U.S. Senate could not reach the two-thirds majority necessary to ratify any version of the treaty. In the end, senators “irreconcilable” to the treaty—opposed to it in any form—represented only a small minority of the total Senate. In the view of many pro-treaty Europeans, blame for the failure to ratify the peace rested largely with intractable Democrats, who with Wilson's encouragement insisted on ratification of an unedited treaty as submitted by the president. Republicans with reservations found it impossible to work with these Democrats as much as the group of irreconcilables. The impasse ended with a rejection of the treaty and the League of Nations. The outcome disappointed the Allies, but even then, the rejection did not inspire criticism of reservationist Republicans. Nor did the Allies complain that Roosevelt's tenacious opposition to Wilson before his death led to a confrontational partisan context. Instead, the Allies blamed Wilson. Italian and British commentators particularly faulted Wilson for political naivety. They argued sending a treaty so adverse to Roosevelt's viewpoint to a Senate packed with his Republican associates never gave it a chance.Footnote ⁸² After the treaty's defeat, European Allies held out hope that the 1920 election might allow for some reconsideration. The London Times's Washington correspondent lamented the outcome and told of British “disappointment at America's failure under Mr. Wilson's leadership (and it must be added the uncompromising play of politics in the Senate)” but remained hopeful that all may well change with a new president who could reinvigorate the nation to once again play a “great role” in international relations.Footnote ⁸³ The moment, however, had passed, and the United States forever abstained from the league.

EUROPEAN PILGRIMS TO OYSTER BAY

Not long after TR's death, a throng of European pilgrims paid their respects to Roosevelt by visiting his grave in Oyster Bay, Long Island. The ritual began with American admirers promoted by the Roosevelt Memorial Association. The small Long Island village hosted visitors mostly on Roosevelt's October birthday, but in 1919 pilgrims came all year long and from around the world.

Perhaps the most eminent foreign pilgrim was the Prince of Wales, Edward Albert (later King Edward VIII), who came to the grave in a semiprivate visit as part of his 1919 state tour of the United States. The prince, “with his whole bearing expressive of solemn sadness,” placed a wreath beside the tombstone and passed on his condolences to Roosevelt's family.Footnote ⁸⁴ His father, King George V, admired Roosevelt greatly and imparted his sentiments to Edward, telling the young prince, “He is a great and good man. In some respects I look upon him as a genius.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Sir Edward Grey accompanied the prince; he walked with his head hung low, eyes impossible to see, covered by dark sunglasses. Grey, the British foreign secretary during much of the war and ambassador to the United States, mourned TR deeply. He treasured Roosevelt's friendship and admired his politics and his passionate conservationism, often finding common ground while arguing about bird calls. Grey stood with the prince at TR's grave and solemnly prayed. He later wrote TR's sister Corinne, “I shall always place it among the happy and fortunate things of my life that I was brought to know him. The memory of a walk together,” recalling a 1910 stroll through England's New Forest recording bird songs, “is a constant source of pleasure.” More than just a memory, Grey told TR's sister, “I wish more than I can express that he were living now to take a hand in the troubles of the world and help them.”Footnote ⁸⁶

As European pilgrims visited Oyster Bay, they often entertained counterfactual speculation about the war, the treaty, and the postwar order. How soon would intervention have occurred if TR sat in the White House? Would the United States have entered the war earlier? How would the peace negotiations take shape? Would the treaty have passed the Senate? In 1933, only a few years after Clemenceau's death, his intimate friend and military chief of staff Général Jean Jules Mordacq published a few memories of the French “tiger,” including one visit to the United States in 1922. Roosevelt stuck out in Mordacq's recollection because Clemenceau, like the Prince of Wales, also made a pilgrimage. On his visit Clemenceau said:

Figure 4.

The Prince of Wales (center) and Sir Edward Grey (right) on pilgrimage to TR's grave, November 1919, accompanied by Theodore Roosevelt Jr (left). Courtesy of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (TRC-PH-1 560.99).

Although Clemenceau's conjecture supposes a different world with Roosevelt in it, a world that exists only as conjecture, his reflection deserves attention because it exemplified the Allied perceptions of Roosevelt's influence.

TR's long advocacy of cooperation with the Allies, along with his persistent attempts to personally serve in the war, his sons’ service, his personality, and his conviction that a League of Nations worked best when comprised of like-minded Allies rather than a world of equals, ingratiated him to many Europeans. His sympathy for European concerns over security in the aftermath of the war's devastation fueled Allied remembrances of him. “The world could ill afford to lose him at any time, doubly so in the present critical hour,” Luxembourgian author Frederic Heidekoper wrote to TR's sister Anna, “his spirit and his splendid example will live always, and remote generations will cherish him and what he did [for] the example of rugged patriotism … every land and every nation felt the impress of his master-mind and the principles for which he stood, transcended all national foundations.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The moment a president dies, a flood of eulogistic hagiography ensues with negative impressions suppressed, if only temporarily in the spontaneous commemoration by friends, allies, and sympathizers who wish to exalt the values of the deceased. The instantaneous reflection on any bereavement—U.S. presidents included—is a selective process and one that belongs to the precise moment of remembrance, in a specific and unique context. Memory, however, changes over time, and the homages paid to Roosevelt did just this. In 1919, the memories of TR clung to the context of war and peace. European Allies recalled his personal and political sacrifices in the struggle because these acts featured fresh in their minds. But perhaps most interestingly, TR's passionate advocacy for the Allied cause operated in dual measure. The war certainly helped to shape his legacy among the Allies, at home, and globally. But in addition, because Europeans valued Roosevelt's policies and opinions, his memory in their minds actually affected events after his death. Europeans or Americans who paid tribute to TR amid the backdrop of the peace conference and the Senate debates over the Treaty of Versailles, symbolized opposition to Wilsonianism. His image had a distinct political meaning, even if Roosevelt did not literally give voice to it.