From this beginning Roosevelt went on vigorously preaching preparedness against war; and the Great War had been raging for a scant seven months when he was irresistibly impelled to utter open criticism of President Wilson. In April, 1915, in The Metropolitan Magazine, to which he had transferred his writings, he declared that "the United States, thanks to Messrs. Wilson and Bryan, has signally failed in its duty toward Belgium." He maintained that the United States, under the obligations assumed by the signature of The Hague Conventions, should have protested to Germany against the invasion of Belgium.
For two years thereafter, while Germany slapped America first on one cheek and then on the other, and treacherously stabbed her with slinking spies and dishonored diplomats, Roosevelt preached, with growing indignation and vehemence, the cause of preparedness and national honor. He found it impossible to support the President further. In February, 1916, he wrote:
"Eighteen months have gone by since the Great War broke out. It needed no prescience, no remarkable statesmanship or gift of forecasting the future, to see that, when such mighty forces were unloosed, and when it had been shown that all treaties and other methods hitherto relied upon for national protection and for mitigating the horror and circumscribing the area of war were literally 'scraps of paper,' it had become a vital necessity that we should instantly and on a great and adequate scale prepare for our own defense. Our men, women, and children—not in isolated cases, but in scores and hundreds of cases—have been murdered by Germany and Mexico; and we have tamely submitted to wrongs from Germany and Mexico of a kind to which no nation can submit without impairing its own self-respect and incurring the contempt of the rest of mankind. Yet, during these eighteen months not one thing has been done.... Never in the country's history has there been a more stupendous instance of folly than this crowning folly of waiting eighteen months after the elemental crash of nations took place before even making a start in an effort—and an utterly inefficient and insufficient effort-for some kind of preparation to ward off disaster in the future.
"If President Wilson had shown the disinterested patriotism, courage, and foresight demanded by this stupendous crisis, I would have supported him with hearty enthusiasm. But his action, or rather inaction, has been such that it has become a matter of high patriotic duty to oppose him.... No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency as regards the United States Navy, of short-sighted inadequacy as regards the army, of abandonment of the duty owed by the United States to weak and well-behaved nations, and of failure to insist on our just rights when we are ourselves maltreated by powerful and unscrupulous nations."
Theodore Roosevelt could not, without violating the integrity of his own soul, go on supporting either positively by word or negatively by silence the man who had said, on the day after the Lusitania was sunk, "There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight," and who later called for a "peace without victory." He could have nothing but scorn for an Administration whose Secretary of War could say, two months after the United States had actually entered the war, that there was "difficulty. .. disorder and confusion... in getting things started," and could then add, "but it is a happy confusion. I delight in the fact that when we entered this war we were not like our adversary, ready for it, anxious for it, prepared for it, and inviting it."
Until America entered the war Roosevelt used his voice and his pen with all his native energy and fire to convince the American people of three things that righteousness demanded that the United States forsake its supine neutrality and act; that the United States should prepare itself thoroughly for any emergency that might arise; and that the hyphenated Americanism of those who, while enjoying the benefits of American citizenship, "intrigue and conspire against the United States, and do their utmost to promote the success of Germany and to weaken the defense of this nation" should be rigorously curbed. The sermons that he preached on this triple theme were sorely needed. No leadership in this phase of national life was forthcoming from the quarter where the American people had every right to look for leadership. The White House had its face set in the opposite direction.
In August, 1915, an incident occurred which set the contrast between the Rooseveltian and Wilsonian lines of thought in bold relief. Largely through the initiative of General Leonard Wood there had been organized at Plattsburg, New York, an officers' training camp where American business men were given an all too brief course of training in the art and duty of leading soldiers in camp and in the field. General Wood was in command of the Plattsburg camp. He invited Roosevelt to address the men in training. Roosevelt accepted gladly, and in the course of his speech made these significant statements:
"For thirteen months America has played an ignoble part among the nations. We have tamely submitted to seeing the weak, whom we have covenanted to protect, wronged. We have seen our men, women, and children murdered on the high seas without protest. We have used elocution as a substitute for action.
"During this time our government has not taken the smallest step in the way of preparedness to defend our own rights. Yet these thirteen months have made evident the lamentable fact that force is more dominant now in the affairs of the world than ever before, that the most powerful of modern military nations is utterly brutal and ruthless in its disregard of international morality, and that righteousness divorced from force is utterly futile. Reliance upon high sounding words, unbacked by deeds, is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of sham.
"It is not a lofty thing, on the contrary, it is an evil thing, to practise a timid and selfish neutrality between right and wrong. It is wrong for an individual. It is still more wrong for a nation.