America and the World War

by Theodore Roosevelt

Moreover, these plans must be treated as part of the coherent policy of the nation in international affairs. With a gentleman like Mr. Bryan in the State Department it may be accepted as absolutely certain that we never will have the highest grade of efficiency in the Departments of War and of the Navy. With a gentleman like Mr. Daniels at the head of the navy, it may be accepted as certain that the navy will not be brought to the level of its possible powers. This means that the people as a whole must demand of their leaders that they treat seriously the navy and army and our foreign policy.

The waste in our navy and army is very great. This is inevitable as long as we do not discriminate against the inefficient and as long as we fail to put a premium upon efficiency. When I was President I found out that a very large proportion of the old officers of the army and even of the navy were physically incompetent to perform many of their duties. The public was wholly indifferent on the subject. Congress would not act. As a preliminary, and merely as a preliminary, I established a regulation that before promotion officers should be required to walk fifty miles or ride one hundred miles in three days. This was in no way a sufficient test of an officer’s fitness. It merely served to rid the service of men whose unfitness was absolutely ludicrous. Yet in Congress and in the newspapers an extraordinary din was raised against this test on the ground that it was unjust to faithful elderly officers! The pacificists promptly assailed it on the ground that to make the army efficient was a “warlike” act. All kinds of philanthropists, including clergymen and college presidents, wrote me that my action showed not only callousness of heart but also a regrettable spirit of militarism. Any officer who because of failure to come up to the test or for other reasons was put out of the service was certain to receive ardent congressional championship; and every kind of pressure was brought to bear on behalf of the unfit, while hardly the slightest effective championship was given the move from any outside source. This was because public opinion was absolutely uneducated on the subject. In our country the men who in time of peace speak loudest about war are usually the ultrapacificists whose activities have been shown to be absolutely futile for peace, but who do a little mischief by persuading a number of well-meaning persons that preparedness for war is unnecessary.

It is not desirable that civilians, acting independently of and without the help of military and naval advisers, shall prepare minute or detailed plans as to what ought to be done for our national defense. But civilians are competent to advocate plans in outline exactly as I have here advocated them. Moreover, and most important, they are competent to try to make public opinion effective in these matters. A democracy must have proper leaders. But these leaders must be able to appeal to a proper sentiment in the democracy. It is the prime duty of every right-thinking citizen at this time to aid his fellow countrymen to understand the need of working wisely for peace, the folly of acting unwisely for peace, and, above all, the need of real and thorough national preparedness against war.

Former Secretary of the Navy Bonaparte, in one of his admirable articles, in which he discusses armaments and treaties, has spoken as follows:

Indeed, it is so obviously impolitic, on the part of the administration and its party friends, to avow a purpose to keep the people in the dark as to our preparedness (or rather as to our virtually admitted unpreparedness) to protect the national interests, safety, and honor, that a practical avowal of such purpose on their part would seem altogether incredible, but for certain rather notorious facts developed by our experience during the last year and three quarters.

It has gradually become evident, or, at least, probable that the mind (wherever that mind may be located) which determines, or has, as yet, determined, our foreign policy under President Wilson, really relies upon a timid neutrality and innumerable treaties of general arbitration as sufficient to protect us from foreign aggression; and advisedly wishes to keep us virtually unarmed and helpless to defend ourselves, so that a sense of our weakness may render us sufficiently pusillanimous to pocket all insults, to submit to any form of outrage, to resent no provocation, and to abdicate completely and forever the dignity and the duties of a great nation.

In the absence of actual experience, a strong effort of the imagination would be required, at least on the part of the writer, to conceive of anybody’s not finding such an outlook for his country utterly intolerable; but incredulity must yield to decisive proof. Even the votaries of this novel cult of cowardice, however, are evidently compelled to recognize that, as yet, they constitute a very small minority among Americans, and, for this reason, they would keep their fellow countrymen, as far as may be practicable, in the dark as to our national weakness and our national dangers; they delight in gagging soldiers and sailors and, to the extent of their power, everybody else who may speak with any authority, and, if they could, would shut out every ray of light which might aid public opinion to see things as they are.

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There is no room for difference as to the utter absurdity of reliance on treaties, no matter how solemn or with whomsoever made, as substitutes for proper armaments to assure the national safety; Belgium’s fate stares in the face any one who should even dream of this. Her neutrality was established and guaranteed, not by one treaty but by several treaties, not by one power but by all the powers; yet she has been completely ruined because she relied upon these treaties, refused to violate them herself and tried, in good faith, to fulfil the obligations they imposed on her.

For any public man, with this really terrible object-lesson before his eyes, to seriously ask us to believe that arbitration treaties or Hague tribunals or anything else within that order of ideas can be trusted to take the place of preparation impeaches either his sincerity or his sanity, and impeaches no less obviously the common sense of his readers or hearers.

A nation unable to protect itself may have to pay a frightful price nowadays as a penalty for the misfortune of weakness; the Belgians may be, in a measure, consoled for their misfortune by the world’s respect and sympathy; in the like case, we should be further and justly punished by the world’s unbounded and merited contempt, for our weakness would be the fruit of our own ignominious cowardice and incredible folly.

Secretary Garrison in his capital report says that if our outlying possessions are even insufficiently manned our mobile home army will consist of less than twenty-five thousand men, only about twice the size of the police force of New York City. Yet, in the face of this, certain newspaper editors, college presidents, pacificist bankers and, I regret to say, certain clergymen and philanthropists enthusiastically champion the attitude of President Wilson and Mr. Bryan in refusing to prepare for war. As one of them put it the other day: “The way to prevent war is not to fight.” Luxembourg did not fight! Does this gentleman regard the position of Luxembourg at this moment as enviable? China has not recently fought. Does the gentleman think that China’s position is in consequence a happy one? If advisers of this type, if these college presidents and clergymen and editors of organs of culture and the philanthropists who give this advice spoke only for themselves, if the humiliation and disgrace were to come only on them, no one would have a right to object. They have servile souls; and if they chose serfdom of the body for themselves only, it would be of small consequence to others. But, unfortunately, their words have a certain effect upon this country; and that effect is intolerably evil. Doubtless it is the influence of these men which is largely responsible for the attitude of the President. The President attacks preparedness in the name of antimilitarism. The preparedness we advocate is that of Switzerland, the least militaristic of countries. Autocracy may use preparedness for the creation of an aggressive and provocative militarism that invites and produces war; but in a democracy preparedness means security against aggression and the best guarantee of peace. The President in his message has in effect declared that his theory of neutrality, which is carried to the point of a complete abandonment of the rights of innocent small nations, and his theory of non-preparedness, which is carried to the point of gross national inefficiency, are both means for securing to the United States a leading position in bringing about peace. The position he would thus secure would be merely that of drum-major at the peace conference; and he would do well to remember that if the peace that is brought about should result in leaving Belgium’s wrongs unredressed and turning Belgium over to Germany, in enthroning militarism as the chief factor in the modern world, and in consecrating the violation of treaties, then the United States, by taking part in such a conference, would have rendered an evil service to mankind.

At present our navy is in wretched shape. Our army is infinitesimal. This large, rich republic is far less efficient from a military standpoint than Switzerland, Holland, or Denmark. In spite of the fact that the officers and enlisted men of our navy and army offer material on the whole better than the officers and men of any other navy or army, these two services have for so many years been neglected by Congress, and during the last two years have been so mishandled by the administration, that at the present time an energetic and powerful adversary could probably with ease drive us not only from the Philippines but from Hawaii, and take possession of the Canal and Alaska. If invaded by a serious army belonging to some formidable Old World empire, we would be for many months about as helpless as China; and, as nowadays large armies can cross the ocean, we might be crushed beyond hope of recuperation inside of a decade. Yet those now at the head of public affairs refuse themselves to face facts and seek to mislead the people as to the facts.

President Wilson is, of course, fully and completely responsible for Mr. Bryan. Mr. Bryan appreciates this and loyally endeavors to serve the President and to come to his defense at all times. As soon as President Wilson had announced that there was no need of preparations to defend ourselves, because we loved everybody and everybody loved us and because our mission was to spread the gospel of peace, Mr. Bryan came to his support with hearty enthusiasm and said: “The President knows that if this country needed a million men, and needed them in a day, the call would go out at sunrise and the sun would go down on a million men in arms.” One of the President’s stanchest newspaper adherents lost its patience over this utterance and remarked: “More foolish words than these of the Secretary of State were never spoken by mortal man in reply to a serious argument.” However, Mr. Bryan had a good precedent, although he probably did not know it. Pompey, when threatened by Cæsar, and told that his side was unprepared, responded that he had only to “stamp his foot” and legions would spring from the ground. In the actual event, the “stamping” proved as effectual against Cæsar as Mr. Bryan’s “call” would under like circumstances. I once heard a Bryanite senator put Mr. Bryan’s position a little more strongly than it occurred to Mr. Bryan himself to put it. The senator in question announced that we needed no regular army, because in the event of war “ten million freemen would spring to arms, the equals of any regular soldiers in the world.” I do not question the emotional or oratorical sincerity either of Mr. Bryan or of the senator. Mr. Bryan is accustomed to performing in vacuo; and both he and President Wilson, as regards foreign affairs, apparently believe they are living in a world of two dimensions, and not in the actual workaday world, which has three dimensions. This was equally true of the senator in question. If the senator’s ten million men sprang to arms at this moment, they would have at the outside some four hundred thousand modern rifles to which to spring. Perhaps six hundred thousand more could spring to squirrel pieces and fairly good shotguns. The remaining nine million men would have to “spring” to axes, scythes, hand-saws, gimlets, and similar arms. As for Mr. Bryan’s million men who would at sunset respond under arms to a call made at sunrise, the suggestion is such a mere rhetorical flourish that it is not worthy even of humorous treatment; a high-school boy making such a statement in a theme would be marked zero by any competent master. But it is an exceedingly serious thing, it is not in the least a humorous thing, that the man making such a statement should be the chief adviser of the President in international matters, and should hold the highest office in the President’s gift.

Nor is Mr. Bryan in any way out of sympathy with President Wilson in this matter. The President, unlike Mr. Bryan, uses good English and does not say things that are on their face ridiculous. Unfortunately, his cleverness of style and his entire refusal to face facts apparently make him believe that he really has dismissed and done away with ugly realities whenever he has uttered some pretty phrase about them. This year we are in the presence of a crisis in the history of the world. In the terrible whirlwind of war all the great nations of the world, save the United States and Italy, are facing the supreme test of their history. All of the pleasant and alluring but futile theories of the pacificists, all the theories enunciated in the peace congresses of the past twenty years, have vanished at the first sound of the drumming guns. The work of all the Hague conventions, and all the arbitration treaties, neutrality treaties, and peace treaties of the last twenty years has been swept before the gusts of war like withered leaves before a November storm. In this great crisis the stern and actual facts have shown that the fate of each nation depends not in the least upon any elevated international aspirations to which it has given expression in speech or treaty, but on practical preparation, on intensity of patriotism, on grim endurance, and on the possession of the fighting edge. Yet, in the face of all this, the President of the United States sends in a message dealing with national defense, which is filled with prettily phrased platitudes of the kind applauded at the less important type of peace congress, and with sentences cleverly turned to conceal from the average man the fact that the President has no real advice to give, no real policy to propose. There is just one point as to which he does show real purpose for a tangible end. He dwells eagerly upon the hope that we may obtain “the opportunity to counsel and obtain peace in the world” among the warring nations and adjures us not to jeopardize this chance (for the President to take part in the peace negotiations) by at this time making any preparations for self-defense. In effect, we are asked not to put our own shores in defensible condition lest the President may lose the chance to be at the head of the congress which may compose the differences of Europe. In effect, he asks us not to build up the navy, not to provide for an efficient citizen army, not to get ammunition for our guns and torpedoes for our torpedo-tubes, lest somehow or other this may make the President of the United States an unacceptable mediator between Germany and Great Britain! It is an honorable ambition for the President to desire to be of use in bringing about peace in Europe; but only on condition that the peace thus brought is the peace of righteousness, and only on condition that he does not sacrifice this country’s vital interests for a clatter of that kind of hollow applause through which runs an undertone of sinister jeering. He must not sacrifice to this ambition the supreme interest of the American people. Nor must he believe that the possibility of his being umpire will have any serious effect on the terrible war game that is now being played; the outcome of the game will depend upon the prowess of the players. No gain will come to our nation, or to any other nation, if President Wilson permits himself to be deluded concerning the part the United States may take in the promotion of European peace.

Peace in Europe will be made by the warring nations. They and they alone will in fact determine the terms of settlement. The United States may be used as a convenient means of getting together; but that is all. If the nations of Europe desire peace and our assistance in securing it, it will be because they have fought as long as they will or can. It will not be because they regard us as having set a spiritual example to them by sitting idle, uttering cheap platitudes, and picking up their trade, while they have poured out their blood like water in support of the ideals in which, with all their hearts and souls, they believe. For us to assume superior virtue in the face of the war-worn nations of the Old World will not make us more acceptable as mediators among them. Such self-consciousness on our part will not impress the nations who have sacrificed and are sacrificing all that is dearest to them in the world, for the things that they believe to be the noblest in the world. The storm that is raging in Europe at this moment is terrible and evil; but it is also grand and noble. Untried men who live at ease will do well to remember that there is a certain sublimity even in Milton’s defeated archangel, but none whatever in the spirits who kept neutral, who remained at peace, and dared side neither with hell nor with heaven. They will also do well to remember that when heroes have battled together, and have wrought good and evil, and when the time has come out of the contest to get all the good possible and to prevent as far as possible the evil from being made permanent, they will not be influenced much by the theory that soft and short-sighted outsiders have put themselves in better condition to stop war abroad by making themselves defenseless at home.