Greg’s Reviews > Colonel Roosevelt > Status Update

Sir Cecil Spring Rice sent Arthur Balfour a cogent explanation as to why Wilson would have to resort to a draft to get a million men into uniform. ‘It is not immediately evident to the American citizen of German descent resident in Omaha, Nebraska, that he should shed his German blood because an American negro from New Orleans has been drowned on a British ship, carrying munition to France.’

For all the Colonel’s charm, she found him unsentimental about her personal experience of growing up among the working poor…She saw that Roosevelt could not understand the difference between the kind of boredom he complained of on the campaign trail, and the spiritual despair of miners and factory workers who saw nothing ahead of them but brute labor and an unpaid old age.

‘There can be no higher international duty,’ he declared, ‘than to safeguard the existence and independence of industrious, orderly states, with a high personal and national standard of conduct, but without the military forces of the great powers.’ ...Belgium...had just been trampled underfoot—was still being trampled—while the United States, the world’s most righteous republic, raised no objection.

Books were classified as essential cargo. Roosevelt packed the last two volumes of his Gibbon, as well as works by Sophocles and Epictetus, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Thomas More’s Utopia. Kermit chose Camões and some other Portuguese works; Rondon, Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ; Lyra, miniature editions of Goethe and Schiller in German.

Readers of The Wilderness Hunter and The Rough Riders were aware that the Colonel had a weakness for men who packed pistols, impregnated their wives regularly, and showed scant reverence for the law.

Word had gotten out that the Colonel favored the idea of a Negro delegate to second his nomination when the new party established itself. Veteran politicians recalled him attending his first GOP convention in 1884, and pushing for the election of a black chairman. One could not imagine Wilson, born in Virginia and bred in the South, carrying democracy quite that far.

The New York Commercial described New Nationalism as 'more and worse than rank socialism—it is communism at the limit.' The Tribune noted that Roosevelt had traveled to Osawatomie by way of the state lunatic asylum.