Teddy Roosevelt's Hidden Legacy

How an "imperialist" president's record makes the case for military restraint.

Michael McMenamin from the June 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Wilson had more human flaws, however, than "natural irritability and stubbornness." Marital infidelity was one of them, and he was not nearly as discreet or as compartmentalized as his philandering successors Warren Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton. He was prone to write long, gushy love letters to women not his wife, and once in love he found it difficult to focus on his work.

Such infidelity can change the course of history. Zimmermann does not make much of it, but John Hay had an affair that may well have influenced history in more ways than one, including the eventual American rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. This is because the cuckolded husband in Hay's affair was none other than Roosevelt's best friend, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge. Zimmermann writes: "A wellborn Bostonian, daughter of a rear admiral, Nannie [Lodge] must have seemed to Hay everything [Hay's wife] Clara was not. She was pretty and witty, small and slim with dark hair and eyes extolled by [the painter John Singer] Sargent as 'unforgettable blue.' So sharp was she of intellect that her vain husband depended on her to edit his speeches. John and Nannie fell in love and went to great lengths to arrange trysts that would not provoke gossip."

Was the affair a secret? Not really. Gossip wasn't invented in the 20th century. Lizzie Cameron, wife of Sen. J. Donald Cameron (R-Penn.), wrote to Henry Adams that "everyone" in Cleveland except Hay's wife knew about it. Given the prominent roles Ohioans played in Washington in the last 20 years of the 19th century, it is fairly certain they didn't keep it to themselves when they returned to Washington. In 1896 Lodge recommended Hay as secretary of state. In 1900 he recommended that Root replace the incumbent Hay. Zimmermann timidly suggests that "perhaps Lodge had found out about Hay's affair with his wife."

But surely if Lodge ever learned of the affair, he would have done more than simply propose Root to replace Hay, who was widely known to be in poor health. Ask yourself: If you were the most powerful senator in foreign relations and you knew the secretary of state had been engaged in a long-term affair with your beautiful and brilliant young wife, what would you do? Well, for starters, wouldn't you flyspeck every treaty the man negotiated and, consistent with your principles of course, make the secretary jump though every hoop your fertile mind could manage to devise?

This is, in fact, what Lodge did to virtually every treaty Hay negotiated, to a far greater extent than he ever did with Hays' successor Root. A detailed comparative analysis of how Lodge handled the treaties negotiated by both men is a subject worthy of serious study by scholars interested in testing the hypothesis.

What does this have to do with Wilson's infidelities? In 1915 Wilson fell "passionately in love" with the woman who was to become his second wife barely seven months after his first wife died. Auchincloss suggests the romance contributed to Lodge's low opinion of Wilson because Lodge "had suffered the sad loss of his own lovely spouse, to whom he had been so happily wed for forty-four years, just two months before, and his private remarks about Wilson's quick recovery from a much demonstrated grief were not complimentary."

There was more. Wilson's enemies in the summer of 1915 all knew of his adulterous affair in 1910 with Mary Peck, to whom he had written a series of more than 200 embarrassingly soppy love letters. These she had carefully saved. Thereafter, Wilson kept in contact with her and paid her money, $7,500 in total, to buy her silence.

And while the story of Wilson's affair with Mary Peck is unquestionably true, there were even uglier rumors circulating in Washington that summer, worthy of a Bill Clinton. As Gene Smith writes in his 1964 book When the Cheering Stopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson, "stories about the Presidential romance began flying around. And what was being said in Washington in the fall of 1915 was that the President and this Galt woman had conspired long ago to get Ellen Wilson out of the way so that they could marry, and that the loyal Dr. Grayson had poisoned the First Lady. It was also said she died after a beating at the President's hands.... Rumor had it that so taken with Edith Galt was he that official business was utterly ignored and stacks of neglected matters were piled high on his desk."

The neglect, at least, was more than rumor. It was fact, confirmed by Wilson's closest confidante, Col. Edward House, who wrote in his diary, "It seems the President is wholly absorbed in this love affair and is neglecting practically everything else." So while war raged in Europe, hormones raged in the widowed president, his work was neglected, and wild rumors flew through D.C. that he had conspired to kill his wife. Small wonder that Wilson's diplomacy in 1915 failed miserably to bring an end to a year-old conflict where the worst was still to come.

Perhaps Henry Cabot Lodge didn't need more reasons to hate Woodrow Wilson, but if you posit Lodge's knowledge of his wife's infidelity and combine it with her recent death, plus the rumors, true and false, about Wilson's infidelities, you begin to understand that there might have been something more than principle behind the loathing and contempt Lodge had for the president. Auchincloss offers a glimpse into the intensity of Lodge's feelings about Wilson during the war: "One day at [Henry] Adams's table...Lodge launched out on a particularly violent denunciation of his adversary in the White House. As the story has it, Adams finally struck the board with his whitened and trembling fist. 'Cabot, I've never allowed treasonable conversation at this table, and I don't propose to allow it now.' The two men were, of course, soon reconciled, but it was clear that Adams felt that the time of irresponsible partisanship had passed."

Would Lodge still have opposed a Versailles Treaty that superseded the Constitution and committed the U.S. to use force against its will to preserve the territorial integrity of members of the League of Nations without a vote of Congress? Certainly. But could he have tried sooner and worked harder to reach common ground with his Democratic colleagues over the treaty -- especially the League of Nations, which he did not oppose in principle? He very well could have. And it wouldn't have taken that many defecting Democrats to ratify the modest GOP "reservations" that would have seen the U.S. join the League of Nations.

Drafted by Elihu Root, a key reservation would have made clear that the U.S. assumed no obligation in any given situation to "preserve the territorial integrity...of any country" unless the Congress were to specifically "by joint resolution so provide." With that reservation (which Britain and France would have accepted), Lodge and the Republicans would have voted to ratify the Treaty and the U.S. would have been in the League of Nations. Whether our presence in the League would ultimately have made a difference in keeping the peace in Europe and Asia is questionable, but in the event, Wilson refused to agree.

Individuals can change history. How they treat and interact with others is important. Unlike Wilson, Roosevelt was an excellent judge of human nature able to successfully negotiate with absolute rulers like the czar and the kaiser on the one hand and the ever-sensitive Japanese on the other. Considering all the accomplishments of his eight years as president, it is interesting to speculate whether there could have been a negotiated peace in the early years of World War I had Roosevelt been elected in 1912. He wouldn't have had a fool like William Jennings Bryan as secretary of state in 1914 or a vain, rigid, and stubborn president dispatching an honorary Texas "colonel" as his emissary to Europe while he wooed his new love. Instead, we would have had skilled, effective diplomacy from Elihu Root, orchestrated by a president who knew what he was doing. And with the assistance of Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. Senate could well have been behind him.

Could Roosevelt have successfully brought both sides to their senses? Auchincloss offers a tantalizing hint of what might have been: "There had always been a basic distrust behind T.R.'s occasional admiration of the Kaiser. He had been flattered in 1910 by the latter's taking him on military maneuvers in Germany, a privilege not usually accorded to aliens, but from the beginning of their relationship he had deplored the Kaiser's rashness and excitability, so different from the cool reflectiveness behind his own seeming bluster. Henry Adams saw this, and when Lodge told him the British thought that Roosevelt was under the Kaiser's spell, he exclaimed: 'For heaven's sake let them think so! The President's influence with the Kaiser is one of the strongest weapons we have in a really perilous condition. We know he understands the Kaiser, and that is enough.'" (In the event, Roosevelt's initial neutrality eventually gave way to sympathy with the Allies.)

Contrary to Zimmermann, Roosevelt was no Wilson when it came to foreign policy -- and contrary to Chapman, he did not believe it was America's "Manifest Destiny" to establish a "New Imperialism" throughout the world by force. Roosevelt is a much better foreign policy role model than, say, Wilson or Clinton, who used military force indiscriminately and left the world a more dangerous place than the one they inherited.

With that understanding, it is welcome news that Bush and Rove regard Roosevelt as a hero. We can only hope that they recognize the genuine foreign policy differences between Roosevelt and Wilson -- and that they remember what happened after the messianic Wilson mounted his white horse and charged off to make the world safe for democracy.

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