Abilene, Texas, October 3, 1917. Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Fort Worth, Tex. The Roosevelt article appearing in your paper of this date is nothing short of the expression of the thoughts of a seditious conspirator who should be shot dead, and, the Editor-in-Chief of your paper should be tarred and feathered for publishing it, and your paper should be excluded from the mails of the United States. You may publish this if you wish, and stop my paper.
E. N. Kirby
Mayor of Abilene
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram promptly published Mayor Kirby’s letter, under the caption “The Retort Courteous,” adding the following:
The Editor-in-Chief presents his compliments to the Mayor of Abilene and begs to say that should he conclude personally to conduct a tar and feather expedition in our direction, he will experience no great difficulty in locating the said Editor-in-Chief. Meanwhile we can assure him that his reception will not be lacking in hospitality or warmth.
The mayor of Abilene and the editor did not meet. Later, in an editorial devoted to apologists for the delay in making war who were saying, “Why cry over spilt milk?” Colonel Roosevelt referred to the incident, saying:
Recently the mayor of Abilene, Texas, expressed his disapproval of my pointing out that we, as a Nation, had wholly failed to prepare, by saying that I was “a seditious conspirator who ought to be shot dead,” and that the editor of the newspaper publishing the article “should be tarred and feathered.” Although differing in method of expression, this slight homicidal bleat of the gentle-souled (and doubtless entirely harmless) mayor of Abilene, Texas, is exactly similar in thought to the utterances of all these sheeplike creatures who raise quavering or incoherent protests against every honest and patriotic man who points out the damage done by our failure to prepare.
V
When the “cub reporter” came to take on his “new job,” he learned for the first time of the conditions at Camp Funston, in Kansas, the big national army training camp of the Middle West, to which his old friend, Major-General Leonard Wood, had been assigned. The drafted men were assembled there from the farms and towns of the Middle West before adequate provision had been made for their care or their training. They were trained with wooden cannon, and broomsticks served in place of rifles. Colonel Roosevelt wrote an editorial entitled “Broomstick Preparedness,” which touched mildly on the conditions at Funston. The expression “Broomstick Preparedness” caught popular fancy as typifying the Administration’s delay in many aspects of war preparation. It stuck in the public mind. It was widely used by newspapers and by speakers who thought the Government was not showing sufficient speed. An editorial, “Broomstick Apologists,” followed, directed at people who answered criticism of delay by making excuses for delay.
From the beginning Colonel Roosevelt had in the main devoted his articles to speeding up the preparations for making war. The boosting of Liberty bonds and the various war drives, the pacifists and hyphenated enemies on our own soil, were not overlooked by any means, but the thing that seared his soul was the lack of speed in making ready for actual warfare. When his connection with The Star began, we had been officially at war nearly six months, and how little the Government had accomplished toward equipping for actual warfare was continuously held up in his articles.
Colonel Roosevelt used the method, followed by newspaper writers who earnestly seek to achieve results, of pounding continually on a few things, dressing each article in different language, but keeping to the front all the time the central idea, presenting the same thoughts in article after article, but striving in each so to change the presentation that the ideas would finally enter the reader’s mind and stir him to action. Mr. Nelson used this method in the conduct of The Star. For many years, beginning with its first publication, The Star advocated parks and boulevards for Kansas City. It hammered away on the subject in nearly every issue. It took almost twenty years to do it, but at the end a splendid system of parks and boulevards stands as a monument to The Star’s persistence.