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APPENDIX A 
why we are at war; the german horror
Chapters II, VII, X, and XI are based on articles that have appeared in the metropolitan ; chapter VIII on an article that has appeared in the outlook; chapter III on a speech delivered on the Fourth of July last.

Let those who wish to understand the hideous evil wrought by the foes who at the moment are the most dangerous of those outside our own household, and the even greater menace to our future well-being presented by those who at the moment are the most dangerous of the foes within our own household, read such books as Owen Wister's "Pentecost of Calamity," Gustavus Ohlinger's "Their True Faith and Allegiance," James Beck's "Evidence in the Case," and "The War and Humanity," Arthur Gleason's "Golden Lads," and "Our Part in the Great War," Frederick Palmer's "With Our Faces Towards the Light," Vernon Kellogg's "Headquarters' Nights," and the various documents, including poems, sketches, brief essays issued by that capital organization the Vigilantes—among the writers being Hermann Hage-dorn, Porter Emerson Browne, Julian Street, Edwin Carty Ranck, arid Wm. H. Fischer. If any man still honestly wishes to know "why we are at war," these writings will enlighten him. He can well ask why we did not go to war immediately after the Lusitania horror —and to this there never can be any satisfactory answer; but no brave and patriotic man or woman has the right to ask why we are at war now.

    Germany and her subject-allies are now our foes from without. We must oppose her imperious will and high efficiency by developing as rapidly as possible an equal efficiency and by using it with an even firmer will until we have brought down her whole fabric of Prussianized militarism. But she does not rely merely on military efficiency. She relies just as much on a policy of organized terrorism and brutality, firmly trusting thereby to daunt and cow all men with a streak of cowardice in their make-up, and trusting no less to the assistance she always receives in her brutality from the base folly of the pacifists in our land, and from the intrigues of the paid and unpaid German tools and sympathizers. We should meet her terrorism and brutality by a stern and relentless retaliation; and this would mean not brutality, but the putting a stop to brutality. Until the German people separate themselves from the German Government we are against tho German people; and Germany has shown that she respects nothing whatever but force; that she treats good conduct as weakness, and that she can be withheld from the foulest cruelty only by punishment and by fear.

We are fighting this war for. humanity. But primarily we are fighting it for America. Germany has murdered our innocent men, women and children wholesale. She has plotted to dismember us. She has brutally wronged us. We fight her armies abroad in order that we ourselves or our children may not have to fight them here, on this continent, beside our own ruined homes.

During the last few months, since we have been at war with Germany, the Germans have added to the list of infamies they have committed in Belgium, Servia and Rou-mania, and to those which their tools and allies the Turks have committed in Armenia and Syria, the fresh infamy of the devastation of the parts of France from which they have retreated.
This devastation, now being perpetrated, is in accordance with the fixed military policy of Germany. It is done merely with malignant purpose and without hope of military advantage. In March, 1917, the military correspondent of the Berlin Lokalanzeiger gleefully described the process:

"In the course of these last months great stretches of French territory have been turned by us into a dead country. It varies in width from six and a quarter to seven and a half or eight miles, and extends along the whole of our new position, presenting a terrible barrier of desolation to any enemy hardy enough to advance against our new lines. No village or farm was left standing on this glacis, no road was left passable, no railway track or embankment was left in being. Where once were woods there are gaunt rows of stumps; the wells have been blown up, wires, cables and pipe lines destroyed. In front of our new position runs, like a gigantic ribbon, an empire of death."

The Berlin Tageblatt gloats over this destruction of the dwellings and property of helpless peasants as follows:

"And the desert, a pitiful desert leagues wide, bare of trees and undergrowth and houses! They sawed and hacked; trees fell and bushes sank; it was days and days before they had cleared the ground. In this war zone there was to be no shelter, no cover. The enemy's mouth must stay dry, his eyes turn in vain to the wells—they are buried in rubble. No four walls for him to settle down into; all levelled and burnt out, the villages turned into dumps of rubbish, churches and church towers laid out in ruins athwart the roads."

This brutal devastation did not in the slightest degree check the advance of the French armies. Across the waste they built highways and rebuilt roads. The wells were poisoned; but the armies laid water pipes for their supply. Every farmhouse and peasant's cot was reduced to dust, but the armies carried their own shelter.

The "frightfulness" had no more military purpose or effect than the "frightfulness" which expressed itself in the baby-killing and woman-killing air-raids on England; and it was no more excusable than the butcheries and slave-drives in Belgium and Poland.

Germany has re-introduced from the dark ages poison gas and liquid fire, so as to kill her enemies with torture. With cynical cruelty she has attacked hospitals and hospital ships, nurses, doctors, surgeons and wounded patients alike. She has deliberately destroyed undefended villages, and churches and schools. She has murdered in cold blood, in broad day and in the darkness of night, on cold and stormy seas, the non-combatant officers and crews, and the passengers, including women and children, on merchantmen of all flags, repeatedly including our own. She has persecuted, tortured, raped and abused her victims, and has loaded the wretched survivors with crushing monetary fines.

The nation responsible for such horrors is the foe of humanity. Whoever in the peace discussions proposes to treat that nation as on an equal footing of right with its antagonists is serving the powers of the pit. Peace without victory over such a nation would be a far-reaching wrong to mankind. We should fight this foe to a complete victory, if it takes five years, and ten million men, and even if all our allies made peace.

APPENDIX B
fair play for all americans
June 26, 1917. My dear Sir:
In the New York Times of the 22nd and 23rd instant it is stated that the United States Government has announced that in Red Cross units sent to the base hospitals of the allies abroad, American citizens born in Germany or in Austro-Hungary, or whose parents were born in Germany or Austro-Hungary will not be allowed to serve.

I very earnestly hope that the Government will at once recede from this position. If our Red Cross units are not desired abroad, whether with the base hospitals of the allies, or anywhere else, then we can use them purely for our people or with our own armies; but wherever we do send them it should be on the assumption that we no more permit distinction to be made among the American personnel on the ground of birthplace or parentage than on the ground of creed. Service in the Red Cross should be like service in the ranks of the army; no man worthy to serve in one should be barred from service in the other. If any spy or disloyal person is found in either, in the theater of war, he should be hung out of hand or shot by drumhead court-martial, without mercy, whether he is of native or foreign parentage. But it is an intolerable wrong and insult to discriminate, or permit discrimination, between loyal and devoted Americans because of their parentage or birthplace.
I have the right to speak in this matter because I have insisted that we should take the most drastic measures against any man who acts disloyally; and I hold that all men who attack our allies or uphold our enemies while we are in this war are disloyal to America. No man can now be loyal both to this country and to Germany; no man can be both a German and an American; he must be either all German or all American. If he is the former, he should be turned out of the country or put in a detention camp. If he is the latter, it is an intolerable outrage not to treat him as on an exact equality with all other good Americans.

When I was President, one of the men who sat in my cabinet was born in Germany; another was a descendant of one of Blucher's colonels. The man who has been closest to me politically for the last fifteen years is of German parentage. In this great crisis no organization has done better work in rousing the slumbering patriotism of the nation than the Vigilantes; and no one of the Vigilantes has done better work than Hermann Hagedorn, of German parentage. If I had been allowed to raise the four divisions of volunteer troops which Congress authorized me to raise, I would have asked that one of the divisions should be commanded by General Kuhn, the head of the War College, and another division, or else a brigade, by my old head of the Philippine Constabulary, Colonel Band-holtz. Both are of German parentage; both are Americans and nothing else; and I would eagerly and proudly have served under either. Four of the regular officers whom I would have recommended for Colonels are of German parentage or descent. One of the few non-regulars whom I would have recommended for a Colonelcy, at present the Colonel of a National Guard regiment in Illinois, is of German parentage; and he told me that 85% of the men who would have come in with him were of foreign parentage. My headquarters chaplain (not of my religious creed) would have been a retired regular army officer, born in Germany; my brigade quartermaster, a man of German parentage.

These men, and many, many others like them, are fit to lead our armies in war, and to hold our highest civil offices; and they stand in the forefront of our citizenship in time of peace. They are Americans in every fiber of soul and body. I would gladly confide the honor of the flag to their keeping, exactly as I would gladly confide my own honor and good name to their keeping. I resent any slur on their loyal Americanism as keenly as I would resent any slur on my own; and if they, and those in heart like them, from the highest to the lowest, are not fit to represent this country—in the army, in the Red Cross, in any and every capacity—-at home or abroad, then no Americans are fit to represent us.

I earnestly hope that the Government will punish with alert, instant and unsparing severity any man of whatever origin who is disloyal to us or false to our allies, in any position, during this war; but I no less earnestly hope that the Government will refuse to permit any discrimination among true and loyal Americans because of their parentage, birthplace or creed. Yours truly,
theodore roosevelt. mr. C. A. A. McGEE,
San Diego, Cal.

APPENDIX C
murder Is not debatable
On July sixth, at the reception in New York to the envoys of the Russian Republic, I made a speech of welcome. In the course of it I spoke in severe condemnation of the recent riots in East St. Louis, where a white mob had murdered and maimed, or otherwise maltreated, hundreds of negroes and had burned or otherwise destroyed their property. Mr. Gompers, the head of the Federation of Labor, in his following speech, spoke in extenuation of what had been done, so far as the white workingmen were concerned. As soon as he was through I spoke briefly again, my remarks being in part as follows:

"I demand that the Government representatives put down violence with ruthless resolution, whether it be of white against black or black against white. Before we can help others in drawing the beam from their eyes let us draw out the beam that is in our own eyes. The most dangerous form of sentimental debauch is to give expression to good wishes in behalf of virtue somewhere else when you do not dare to enforce decency in your own province.

"Justice is not merely words. It is to be translated into living acts, and how can we praise the people of Russia if we by explanation, silence or evasion apologize for murdering the helpless. In the past I have listened to the same form of excuse from the Russian autocracy for the pograms inflicted on the Jews. Shall we by silence acquiesce in this amazing apology for the murder of men, women and children in our own country?

"Never will I sit motionless while directly or indirectly apology is made for murder of the helpless."

Mr. Gompers in his speech had alluded to a telegram from the Illinois State Federation of Labor. Subsequently, the secretary of this body sent me a letter which I answered, as follows:
July  17,  1917. My dear Sir:
I thank you for your courteous letter enclosing the report of the Committee on Labor of the Illinois State Council of Defense, concerning the race riots at East St. Louis. They had nothing to do with any commission or alleged commission of rape or any other crime. Aside from race antipathy, the report seems to show that the riots were due to economic conditions. I was not informed, in any way, as to these economic conditions which it is alleged led up to the riot, until after Mr. Gompers' speech on July 6th. When on that evening I made my first remarks on the riot I supposed the underlying cause to be racial, and in my remarks I made no allusion whatever to organized labor, or indeed to labor at all, in connection with the riots. It was Mr. Gompers' speech which first gave me clearly to understand that the fundamental cause was alleged to be economic, and that organized labor regarded itself as especially concerned with the riots. Then my attention was called to the newspapers of July 4th, which carried an alleged statement by Mr. Michael Whalen, President of the Central Trades and Labor Councils of East St. Louis. If this statement is correctly reported, Mr. Whalen said, "The chief objection to the negroes is that they would not unionize, and would not strike." I hold with the utmost intensity of conviction, that it is absolutely impossible for us to succeed along the lines of an orderly democracy, a democracy which shall be industrial as well as political, unless we treat the repression of crime, including crimes of violence, and the insistence on justice obtained through the enforcement of law, as prime necessities. I, of course, refuse, under any conditions, to accept the fact that certain persons decline "to unionize and strike" as warranting their murder, or as warranting any kind of violence against them. But I go much further than this. I will aid in every way in my power to secure by governmental as well as private action, the remedying of all the wrongs of labor, and in so acting I shall pay no heed to any capitalistic opposition. But I refuse to treat any industrial condition as warranting riot and murder; and I condemn all persons, whether representatives of organized labor or not, who attempt to palliate or excuse such crimes, or who fail to condemn them in clear-cut and unequivocal fashion. I heartily believe in organized labor, just as, and even more than, I believe in organized capital; I am very proud of being an honorary member of one labor organization; but I will no more condone crime or violence by a labor organization or by workingmen than I will condone crime or wrong-doing by a corporation or by capitalists. A square deal for every man! That is the only safe motto for the United States.

This is a democracy, a government by the people, and the people have supreme power if they choose to exercise it. The people can get justice peaceably, if they really desire it; and if they do not desire it enough to show the wisdom, patience and cool-headed determination necessary in order to get it peaceably, through the orderly process of law, then they haven't the slightest excuse for trying to get it by riot and murder. All the governmental authorities concerned in the East St. Louis situation should have taken notice of that situation in advance, and should take notice of it now. The National Government, and all local governmental authorities in places where such a situation is likely to arise, should take notice now, and act now. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise'in time. If there has been improper solicitation of negroes to come to East St. Louis, or improper housing and working conditions among them after they have come, or an improperly low wage-scale, or if anything else improper has been done by the capitalists and employers, so that injustice has been done the workingmen, then it was the bounden duty, and is now the bounden duty, of the Government authorities to remedy the wrong and see justice done the workingmen. But the first consideration is to stop, and to punish, lawless and murderous violence. Lawless violence inevitably breeds lawless violence in return, and the first duty of the Government is relentlessly to put a stop to the violence and then to deal firmly and wisely with all the conditions that led up to the violence. If black men are lawlessly and brutally murdered, in the end the effect is to produce lawlessness among brutal blacks. Recently the I. W. W. has been guilty of all kinds of misconduct, and has been acting as in effect a potent ally of Germany, with whom we are now at war; and finally their lawlessness produced an explosion of counter-lawlessness. Of course the Government should repress both kinds of lawlessness. It should prevent all lawless excesses against the I. W. W. and it should also act on the theory that these excesses are fundamentally due to the previous failure of the Government to deal in drastic fashion and with all necessary severity with the turbulent, lawless, murderous and treasonable practices which have been so common among the I. W. W. and kindred organizations. And then it should deal in thoroughgoing fashion with the social and industrial conditions which have produced such results. We Americans must hold the scales even.

A few years ago certain negro troops shot up a Texas town, and the other members of their companies shielded them from punishment. The Government proceeded to the limit of its power against them all, and dismissed them from the army; not because they were black men who had committed a crime against white men, but because they had acted criminally; and justice should be invoked against wrong-doers without regard to the color of their skins, just as it should be invoked against wrong-doers without regard as to whether they are rich or poor, whether they are employers or employees, whether they are capitalists and heads of corporations who commit crimes of cunning and arrogance and greed, or wage workers and members of labor organizations who commit crimes of violence and envy and greed.

I have just received an abusive letter from an organization styling itself "The Industrial Council of Kansas City," and claiming to be affiliated with the Federation of Labor, which states that I accused organized labor of being responsible for the outrages at East St. Louis. I made no such accusation until the fact that there was at least a measure of truth in the accusation had been in effect set forth in the speech by the special representative of organized labor at the meeting at which I spoke and by the telegram quoted in that speech. Whenever I have the power, I will protect the white man against the black wrong-doer, and the black man against the white wrong-doer; I will as far as I have power secure justice for the laboring man who is wronged by the man of property, and for every man, whether he has property or not, if he is menaced by lawless violence; and when I haven't the power, I will at least raise my voice in protest, if there is the least chance of that protest doing good.

We are at this moment at war with a most formidable and ruthless enemy. We are fighting for our own dearest rights; we are also fighting for the rights of all self-respecting and civilized nations to liberty and self-government. We have demanded that the negro submit to the draft and do his share of the fighting exactly as the white man does. Surely when such is the case we should give him the same protection by the law, that we give to the white man. All of us who are fit to fight are to serve as soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, whether we are farmers or townsfolk, whether we are workingmen or professional men, men who employ others or men who are employed by others. We fight for the same country, we are loyal to the same flag, we are all alike eager to pay with our bodies in order to serve the high ideals which those who founded and preserved this nation believed it our mission to uphold throughout the world. Surely in such case it is our duty to treat all our fellow countrymen, rich or poor, black or white, with justice and mercy, and, so far as may be, in a spirit of brotherly kindness.

The victims of the mob in East St. Louis were very humble people. They were slain, and their little belongings destroyed. In speaking of the draft riots in New York during the Civil War, Lincoln, addressing a Workingmens' Association, singled out as the saddest feature of the riots the killing "of some working people by other working people." We have recently entered into a war, primarily it is true to secure our own national honor and vital interest, but also with the hope of bringing a little nearer to all the world the day when everywhere the humble and the mighty shall respect one anothers' rights and dwell together in the peace of justice. Surely, when we thus go to war against tyranny and brutality and oppression, our own hands must be clean of innocent blood. We hope to advance throughout the world the peace of righteousness and brotherhood: surely we can best do so when we insist upon this peace of righteousness and brotherhood within our own borders.

In securing such a peace the first essential is to guarantee to every man the most elementary of rights, the right to his own life.    Murder is not debatable. Sincerely yours,
(Signed) theodore roosevelt.
mr. victor A. olander, Sec'y-Treas., Illinois State Federation of Labor, 184 W. Washington Street, Chicago, 111.

APPENDIX D the "conscientious objector"
We have heard much of the conscientious objectors to military service, the outcry having been loudest among those objectors who are not conscientious at all but who are the paid or unpaid agents of the German Government.

It is certain that only a small fraction of the men who call themselves conscientious objectors in this matter are actuated in any way by conscience. The bulk are slackers, pure and simple, or else traitorous pro-Germans. Some are actuated by lazy desire to avoid any duty that interferes with their ease and enjoyment, some by the evil desire to damage the United States and help Germany, some by sheer, simple, physical timidity. In the aggregate, the men of this type constitute the great majority of the men who claim to be conscientious objectors, and this fact must be remembered in endeavoring to deal with the class.

In some of our big cities, since the war began, men have formed vegetarian societies, claiming to be exempt from service on the ground that they object to killing not merely men, but chickens. Others among the leading apostles of applied pacificism are not timid men; on the contrary they are brutal, violent men, who are perfectly willing to fight, but only for themselves and not for the nation. These rough-neck pacifists have always been the potent allies of the parlor or milk-and-water pacifists; although they stand at the opposite end of the developmental scale. The parlor pacifist, the white-handed or sissy type of pacifist, represents decadence, represents the rotting out of the virile virtues among people who typify the unlovely senile side of civilization. The rough-neck pacifist, on the contrary, is a mere belated savage, who has not been educated to the virtues of national patriotism and of willingness to fight for the national flag and the national ideal. The savage is a turbulent person anxious to brawl and to fight for his personal advantage, but too short-sighted and selfish to be willing to fight for the common good. So in the New York draft riots during the Civil War, the disturbance was at the outset fostered by the parlor pacifists who were shrieking for peace at any price and for the immediate stopping of the war; but it speedily passed under the management of the rough-neck pacifist mob who killed hundreds of innocent people; they were perfectly willing to risk life and to take it to gratify their private passions; all that they objected to was risking their lives for the well-being and preservation of the nation.

There remains the pacifist, the conscientious objector, who really does conscientiously object to war and who is sincere about it. As regards these men we must discriminate sharply between the men deeply opposed to war so long as it is possible honorably to avoid it, who are ardent lovers of peace, but who put righteousness above peace; and the other men who, however sincerely, put peace above righteousness, and thereby serve the Devil against the Lord.

The first attitude is that of great numbers of the Society of Friends who in this war behave as so very many of the Friends did in the Civil War; as that great English Quaker statesman, John Bright, lover of freedom and righteousness, behaved in the Civil War. I wish all good American peace lovers would read the recent address delivered by Professor Albert C. Thatcher of Swarth-more, and signed by some scores of the Society of Friends. He shows that in the Civil War it is probable that their branch of the Society of Friends furnished more soldiers in proportion to their numbers than any other denomination. Liberty was part of their religion. They not only fought, but they insisted that the war should go on, at whatever cost, until it was crowned by complete victory. John Bright said, in speaking of the pacifists, who in the time of the Civil War wanted peace without victory: "I want no end of the war, and no compromise, and no re-union, 'till the negro is made free beyond all chance of failure." He was for peace, but he was not for peace at the price of slavery. In the same way now, the best and most high-minded Friends, and lovers of peace in this country, are for peace, but only as the result of the complete overthrow of the barbarous Prussian militarism which now is Germany, and the existence of which is a perpetual menace to our own country and to all mankind. The Friends and peace lovers of this type are among the very best citizens of this country. They abhor war; but there are things they abhor even more. Every good citizen will support them in their opposition to wanton or unjust war, to any war entered into save from the sternest sense of duty.

The peace people of the directly opposite type include the men who conscientiously object to all participation in any war however brutal the opponents, and however vital triumph may be to us and to mankind. These persons are entitled to precisely the respect we give any other persons whose conscience makes them do what is bad. We have had in this country some conscientious polygamists. We now have some conscientious objectors to taking part in this war. Where both are equally conscientious, the former are, on the whole, not as bad citizens as the latter. Of course, if these conscientious objectors are sincere they decline in private life to oppose violence or brutality or to take advantage of the courage and strength of those who do oppose violence and brutality. If these men are sincere they will refuse to interfere (for moral suasion is not interference) with a white-slaver who runs off with one of their daughters or a blackhander who kidnaps and tortures a little child or a ruffian who slaps the wife or mother of one of them in the face. They are utterly insincere unless they decline to take advantage of police protection from burglary or highway robbery. Of course if such a man is really conscientious he cannot profit or allow his family to profit in any way by the safety secured to him and them by others, by soldiers in time of war, by judges and policemen in time of peace; for the receiver is as bad as the thief. I hold that such an attitude is infamous; and it is just as infamous to refuse to serve the country in arms during this war. If a man's conscience bids him so to act, then his conscience is a fit subject for the student of morbid pathology.

If a man does not wish to take life, but does wish to serve his country, let him serve on board a mine-sweeper or in some other position where the danger is to his own life and not to the life of any one else. But if he will take no useful and efficient part in helping in this war, in running his share of the common risk, and doing his part of the common duty, then treat him as having forfeited his right to vote. He has no right to help render at the polls any decision which in the long run can only be made good in the face of brutal and hostile men by the ability and willingness of good citizens to back right with might.

The case has been admirably put by the Methodist Bishop, R. J. Cooke, of Helena, Montana. He points out that the vast majority of these conscientious objectors do not object to receiving the benefits from the suffering, hardships and deaths of other men; they only object to doing anything in return. Such a conscientious objector gives no service in return for the value he receives. He claims citizenship, but will not perform the duty of a citizen. Now, he has no moral right to take such a twofold position. "If any man will not work neither shall he eat." If his conscience forbids him to work, do not violate his conscience, but refuse to feed him at the expense of somebody with a healthy conscience which does not forbid work. Service to the nation in war stands precisely on a footing with any other service. If a man will not perform it, let him lose all the benefits of war; and therefore let him lose the political rights which a free country can keep only if its free citizens are willing to fight for them. Respect the conscientious objector's opinions, but let him abide by the full consequences of his opinions. Universal suffrage can be justified only if it rests on universal service. We stand against all privilege not based on the full performance of duty; and there is no more contemptible form of privilege than the privilege of existing in smug, self-righteous, peaceful safety because other, braver, more self-sacrificing men give up safety and go to war to preserve the nation. If a man is too conscientious to fight then the rest of us ought to be too conscientious to let him vote in a democratic land which can permanently exist only if the average man is willing in the last resort to fight for it, and die for it. A man has no right to the things that do not belong to him; and this country does not belong to the men who will not defend her. The man who will not defend the country has no business to vote in the country. Extreme Quakers take this position. They refuse to vote or pay taxes, in addition to refusing to fight. Such men are unwise, but consistent. But nothing can be said for the pacifist who wishes to vote, but refuses to fight.

Monsignor Cassidy of St. Mary's Cathedral, Fall River, Massachusetts, in an address to a body of Massachusetts troops who were about to leave for the war, said: "The future would be filled with shame and ignominy if we had been led by those who would have peace at any price; we should have been a soulless nation, and shame and reproach and everlasting infamy would have been the profit of our peace. But the nation did not sell its soul for peace! In the spirit of '76 we fight for peace, that justice may prevail, that frightfulness and inhumanity may not possess the earth."

There spoke a true American, fit interpreter of the soul of America!

APPENDIX E the hun within our gates
The Hun within our gates is the worst of the foes of our own household, whether he is the paid or the unpaid agent of Germany. Whether he is pro-German or poses as a pacifist, or a peace-at-any-price man, matters little. He is the enemy of the United States. Senators and Congressmen like Messrs. Stone, La Follette and Maclemore belong in Germany and it is a pity they cannot be sent there, as Vallandigham was sent to the hostile lines by Lincoln during the Civil War. Such men are among the worst of the foes of our own household ; and so are the sham philanthropists and sinister agitators and the wealthy creatures without patriotism who support and abet them. Our Government has seemed afraid to grapple with these people. It is permitting thousands of allies of Berlin to sow the seeds of treason and sedition in this country. The I. W. W. boasts its defiance of all law, and many of its members exultingly proclaim that in their war against industry in the United States they are endeavoring to give the Government so much to do that it will have no troops to spare for Europe. Every district where the I. W. W. starts rioting should be placed under martial law, and cleaned up by military methods. The German-language papers carry on a consistent campaign in favor of Germany against England. They should be put out of existence for the period of this war. The Hearst papers, more ably edited than the German sheets, play the Kaiser's game in a similar way. When they keep within the law they should at least be made to feel the scorn felt for them by every honest American. Wherever any editor can be shown to be purveying treason in violation of law he should be jailed until the conflict is over. Every disloyal German-born citizen should have his naturalization papers recalled and should be interned during the term of the war. Action of this kind is especially necessary in order to pick out the disloyal but vociferous minority of citizens of German descent from the vast but silent majority of entirely loyal citizens of German descent who otherwise will suffer from a public anger that will condemn all alike. Every disloyal native-born American should be disfranchised and interned. It is time to strike our enemies at home heavily and quickly. Every copperhead in this country is an enemy to the Government, to the people, to the army and to the flag, and should be treated as such.

This pro-German, anti-American propaganda has been carried on for years prior to the war, and its treasonable activities are performed systematically to-day. The great majority of the men and women of German blood, are absolutely good Americans, and we owe it just as much to them as to the rest of our fellow countrymen with the utmost severity to suppress the tens of thousands of Germans and German-Americans who, having taken the oath of allegiance, yet 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. These men support and direct the pro-German societies. They incite disloyal activities among the Russian Jews. They finance the small groups of Irish-Americans whose hatred for England makes them traitors to the United States. They foment seditious operations among the German-American socialists and the I. W. W.'s. They support the German-language periodicals. Their campaigns range from peace movements and anti-draft schemings to open efforts in favor of sedition and civil war.

These traitors are following out the vicious teachings of Prussian philosophers; there is no cause for surprise at their treasonable course. Unfortunately there is cause for surprise at the license which the Administration extends to their detestable activities. In this attitude the Administration is repeating its course of indifference to world-threatening aggression, and of submission to studied acts of murderous violence, which resulted, after two and a half years of injury and humiliation, in our being dragged unprepared into war.

If during those two and a half years a policy of courage, and of consistent and far-sighted Americanism, had been followed, either the brutal invasion of our national rights would have been checked without war or else if we had been forced into war we would have brought it instantly to a victorious end. Our failure to prepare is responsible for our failure now efficiently to act in the war. In exactly the same fashion it may be set down as certain that continuance of the present craven policy of ignoring sedition and paltering with treason will encourage and aid German autocracy, and will be translated either into terrible lists of Americans slain and crippled on the battlefield or else into an ignoble peace which will leave Germany free at some future time to resume its campaign against America and against liberty-loving mankind.

APPENDIX F
nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time (Part of Speech at Lincoln, Nebraska, June 14, 1917)
In the past there have been two great crises in our national life: that in which the infant nation was saved by the soldierly valor and single-minded statesmanship of Washington, and that in which, in its raw maturity, the nation was again saved by the men who followed Lincoln and Grant. In each case the victory was followed by over half a century of national unity, secured by the peace of victory; and during this peace, brought by the victory of righteousness, men forgot that all its benefits would be lost if it were turned into the peace of cowardice and slackness. The Revolution was a war for liberty; and that liberty became of permanent value only when, again under Washington's lead, it was made secure by the orderly strength of the Union. The liberty secured in the Civil War to the black man was thus secured only because the white man was willing to fight to the death for the Union, and for the flag to which we owe undivided allegiance.

The old thirteen states were born of the Revolution. Nebraska, like Kansas, was born of the Civil War. It was the struggle over the admission to statehood of Kansas and Nebraska which marked the real opening of the contest that culminated at Appomatox.

The contest settled three great principles:
I. That we were no longer to make words substitutes for facts, or accept fine phrases in lieu of great deeds; and that therefore we were to make our devotion to liberty a fact instead of a phrase by abolishing slavery.
2.	That we were all hereafter to be Americans with an undivided allegiance to the flag of the Union; an alle giance even more incompatible with a loyalty divided be tween our flag  and some foreign flag than with a loyalty divided between the whole country and some section of the country.
3.	That we were definitely to realize that while peace was normally a good thing, yet that righteousness stood above peace, and that the only good citizens were those who were sternly ready to face war rather than submit to an unrighteous or cowardly peace.

All these principles are at stake at the present moment. All three have been threatened, and therefore the honor and the welfare and the usefulness and, indeed, the very life of the Republic have been threatened by the pacifist and pro-German agitation of the last three years.

Our national record during these three years is not one to which we can look back with pride; for during these three years we violated the three principles established by the Civil War.
1. For two years and a half we used fine phrases to cover ugly facts, when we unctuously protested our devotion to the liberties of small, well-behaved nations in the abstract, and yet, in the concrete did not say one word of indignant protest when with ruthless brutality, and without one shadow of moral justification, Germany conquered and enslaved Belgium. We did not even dare to act when our own innocent women and children and unarmed men lost their lives on the high seas, and when their murder was insolently justified by the tyrannous Prussianized autocracy which now menaces the entire peace-loving and liberty-loving world.  We permitted our national policy to be swayed by the national devotions and national antipathies of men who exercised the rights of American citizens but who showed themselves traitors to America by the way in which they prostituted our citizenship to the interests of Germany,  or to their hatred of  England; men whose allegiance to this country   was   merely one of the lips, while in their hearts their loyalty was wholly given to Germany, or else to any and every enemy of England, even although that enemy was also   an   enemy of the United States and of mankind.     Such   disloyalty was quite as mischievous as, and far less excusable than, sectional disloyalty.
2.	It would be impossible to overstate the damage done to the moral fiber of our country by the professional pacifist propaganda, the peace-at-any-price propaganda, which had been growing in strength for the previous decade and which for the first two and a half years of the war was potent in influencing us as a people to play a part which was wholly unworthy of the teachings of the great men of our past.    The professional pacifist movement was heavily financed   by   certain   big capitalists. This was not merely admitted but blazoned abroad by some among them;  whereas   the   accusations  that the munition makers or any other interested persons, played any important part in the movement  for preparedness were malicious  falsehoods, well known to be such by those who uttered them.    The professional pacifists during these two and a half years have occupied precisely the  position  of the   copperheads   during   the  time  of Abraham Lincoln.

We now pay the same tribute of respect to the men who fought for their convictions in the Civil War, whether they wore the blue or the gray—kinsmen of mine were in the Union army, and other kinsmen oi mine in the Confederate army, and I am equally proud of both. But nobody is proud of the copperheads, who exalted peace above righteousness; and the professional pacifists of to-day are their spiritual heirs.

At last, thank Heaven, we came to our senses, realized our shortcomings, and tardily did our duty. At last we spurned the mean counsels of timidity and folly. At last we showed that we were not too proud to fight; and we have reversed and repudiated the mean and base proposal to secure peace without victory. At last we took up the challenge which Germany had, with equal brutality and contempt, so often hurled in our faces. At last we determined to make our loyalty to this nation's past and to the welfare of humanity, a matter of deeds and not merely of empty words. We have entered the great war for the future of civilization; and now that we are at war it behooves us to bear ourselves like men.

We are utterly unprepared. The things we are now doing, even when well done, are things which we ought to have begun doing three years ago. We can now only partially offset our folly in failing to prepare during these last three years, in failing to heed the lesson writ large across the skies in letters of flame and blood. Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time! Now we must fight without proper preparation. But we must prepare as well as we can at this late date; and the most important of all forms of preparedness is spiritual preparedness.

First of all we must sternly insist that all our people practice the patriotism of service, and that we all give a fervid and undivided loyalty to our common country. Patriotism is an affair of deeds, and patriotic words are good only in so far as they result in deeds. If phrase-making and oratory, whether by public servants or by outsiders, are treated as substitutes for deeds, the result is unmixed mischief. We read Lincoln's Gettysburg speech and Second Inaugural, only because his words were made good by his deeds, only because he threw aside all considerations other than the welfare of the nation, and with steadfast efficiency fought to the end for freedom and for the preservation of the Union.

As it was with that very great man in the past, so it must be with us lesser men in the present. Unless we now, at this moment, in this war, strive each of us to serve the country according to our several abilities, we are false to the memories of il.a nation-builders to whose sagacity and prowess we owe the creation of this state fifty years ago. Nebraska was founded as a State of the Union only because there were in the nation at that time enough men who were willing to do and dare and die at need for the Union. To-day likewise, the instant and overwhelming need of the nation is for men who will serve in arms, and if necessary die, for the nation; and next to this is the need for the men and women who will put our entire industrial and agricultural strength back of the fighting men in the field. Only the men and women who do this are true patriots; for patriotism means service to the nation; and only those who render such service are fit to enjoy the privilege of citizenship.

We cannot render such service if our loyalty is in even the smallest degree divided between this and any other nation. There must be no division within our own ranks along the lines of creed or national origin; and any citizen of this country who uses his citizenship in the interest of some other country is a traitor to the United States. It is not merely our right, but our high duty, to insist on this fact. Twice over a century ago we fought Great Britain. In each contest the great majority of the citizens of British descent took the lead and proved that they were Americans and nothing else. Those who did not so act were traitors. Now we are at war with Germany; and every citizen of German blood is bound in this contest to show the same whole-hearted Americanism in support of the United States against Germany that was shown in 1776 and 1812 by the Americans of British descent in the contests with Great Britain. To act otherwise is to be guilty of treason.

In the Revolutionary War the British armies who strove against our liberties were aided by powerful bodies of German auxiliaries. One of Washington's most famous victories, that at Trenton, was gained purely over Germans; and his first military experience was against the French. But it would be unworthy folly now to inveigh against Germany because a hundred and forty years ago she furnished mercenary troops for our subjugation; or to inveigh against the French because they were the bitter foes of our people in colonial days. It is precisely as unworthy, precisely as silly and wicked, now to nourish hatred against England. Washington's troops included men of English and Irish, of German and French, blood. But they were Americans and nothing else! They did not ask whether they were to fight English, French, or Germans. They fought the foes of the American flag, whoever these foes might be.

This must be our spirit to-day. We are a different people from any people of Europe. It is our boast that we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality with the native born. In return we demand that he shall share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which floats over all of us. The events of the last few years have conclusively shown that the man, whether of German, or of any other origin, who attempts to combine allegiance to this country with allegiance to another, is necessarily false to this country.

In this country we must have but one flag, the American flag; but one language, the English language; and above all, but one loyalty, an exclusive and undivided loyalty to the United States, with no Lot's wife attitude, no looking back to the various Old World countries from which our ancestors have severally come.

Now for the lesson of preparedness—military and economic, spiritual and material. As yet, nearly five months after Germany declared war on us, we have not so much as a division of troops ready for action. As yet we are utterly helpless to act in our own defense. The fault lies primarily in our complete failure to prepare during the last three years since the great war opened. Nine-tenths of wisdom, is being wise in time! We have not been wise in time; and now we rely on our allies to protect us from the effect of our folly. Just think of what Germany would have done to us within the first month—not to speak of the first four months—after we broke off diplomatic relations with her if we had not been able to shield our feeble and short-sighted unreadiness behind the navy of Great Britain and the armies of the allies. We owe our ignoble safety to the British fleet, and the French and English armies. We escape paying an utterly ruinous payment for our folly only because the soldiers and sailors of our allies pay for it with their lives. Uncle Sam is in the undignified position of the man who gets on a street car and then fumbles in his pocket while somebody else pays his fare.

If we had been willing to prepare, and if we had showed that we meant what we said, we would probably have prevented the war, and would certainly have brought it to a close as soon as we entered it. Now, friends, there is no use crying over spilt milk. But it is even worse to make believe that the milk was not spilt. The important thing is to face the fact of the spilling and resolve that it shall not be spilt again. Let us act in the spirit of the words of Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Civil War: "Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged." Let us manfully acknowledge how great have been our shortcomings for the last few years, and then let us, without a particle of revengeful or recriminatory or uncharitable feeling, learn from them wisdom to be applied in our future conduct. From this time on let us insist on an absolute and undivided Americanism in this land, un-tempered by any half allegiance to the countries from which our ancestors may severally have sprung, and untainted by any unworthy national animosity towards any other country. Let us prepare ourselves spiritually, economically, and in all military and naval matters—including as a permanent policy the policy of universal military training and service—so that never again shall we be utterly unready, as we now are, to meet a great crisis. Finally, in the present war, a war for liberty and democracy against the ruthless militaristic tyranny of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns, let us as speedily as possible train our giant, but our soft and unready, strength, so that we may use our hardened might to bring the slaughter to an end in the only way honorably possible, by securing for ourselves and our allies the peace of justice based on overwhelming victory.
APPENDIX G
correspondence with the president and the secretary of war
metropolitan
432 Fourth Avenue, New York
February 2,  1917. Sir:
I have already on file in your Department, my application to be permitted to raise a Division of Infantry, with a divisional brigade of cavalry in the event of war (possibly with the permission to make one or two of the brigades of infantry, mounted infantry). In view of the recent German note, and of the fact that my wife and I are booked to sail next week for a month in Jamaica, I respectfully write you as follows:

If you believe that there will be war, and a call for volunteers to go to war immediately, I respectfully and earnestly request that you notify me at once, so that I may not sail. Otherwise, I shall sail, and in such case, I respectfully request that if or when it becomes certain that we will have war, and that there will be a call for volunteers to go to war, you will direct that a telegram be sent to me, at the metropolitan magazine office, New York, from whence a cable will be sent me to Jamaica, and I shall immediately return. I have prepared the skeleton outline of what I have desired the Division to be, and what men I should recommend to the Department, for brigade and regimental commanders, -Chief of Staff, Chief Surgeon, Quartermaster General, etc., etc. The men whom I would desire for officers and enlisted men are, for the most part, men earning their living in the active business of life, who would be glad to go to war at their country's call, but who could not be expected, and who would probably refuse, to drop their business and see their families embarrassed, unless there is war, and the intention to send them to war. So it is not possible for me to do much more in the way of preliminary action than I have already done, until I have official directions. Very respectfully,
theodore roosevelt.
hon. newton D. baker, Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.
Washington, February 3, 1917. Dear Sir:
I have received your letter of February 2. No situation has arisen which would justify my suggesting a postponement of the trip you propose. Your letter and its suggestion will be filed for consideration should occasion arise.
Very respectfully yours,
newtoh  D. baker, Secretary of War.
hon. theodore roosevelt, 432 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
metropolitan 432 Fourth Avenue, New York
February 7, 1917. 

Sir:
I beg to acknowledge receipt of your letter, informing' me that I could go on my trip to Jamaica. It had crossed my letter to you informing you, that in view of the President having broken off diplomatic relations with Germany, I should of course abandon my trip.

   In the event of being allowed to raise a division, I should of course strain every nerve to have it ready for efficient action at the earliest moment, so that it could be sent across with the first expeditionary force, if the Department were willing. With this end in view, I am desirous of making all preparations that are possible in advance. I have intended, in the event of being allowed to raise a division, to request the Department to appoint Captain Frank McCoy, of the regular army, as my divisional Chief of Staff, with the rank of Colonel. Would it be proper for me to ask that he be permitted now to come on and see me here, so that I may immediately go over with him all the questions that it is possible to go over at this time, in connection with raising the division ? Very respectfully yours,
theodore roosevelt. hon. newton D. baker, Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.
war department
Washington, February 9, 1917. Sir:
I beg to acknowledge receipt, yesterday, of your letter of the 7th instant.
In reply to your patriotic suggestion that in due time you be authorized to raise a division of troops for service abroad and that it is your desire, in anticipation of that authority, to take certain preliminary steps, I have to state the limitations under which the War Department is in respect to this matter.

No action in the direction suggested by you can be taken without the express sanction of Congress. Should the contingency occur which you have in mind, it is to be expected that Congress will complete its legislation relating to volunteer forces and provide, under its own conditions, for the appointment of officers for the higher commands.
Very respectfully,
newton D. baker,
Secretary of War. hon. theodore roosevelt, 432 Fourth Avenue, New York City.
telegram
March 19, 1917. To the Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.:

In view of the fact that Germany is now actually engaged in war with us, I again earnestly ask permission to be allowed to raise a division for immediate service at the front. My purpose would be after some six weeks preliminary training here to take it direct to France for intensive (.raining so that it could be sent to the front in the shortest possible time to whatever point was desired. I should of course ask no favors of any kind except that the division be put in the fighting line at the earliest possible moment. If the Department will allow me to assemble the division at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and will give me what aid it can, and will furnish arms and supplies as it did for the early Plattsburg camps, I will raise the money to prepare the division until Congress can act, and we shall thereby gain a start of over a month in making ready. I would like to be authorized to raise three three-regiment brigades of infantry, one brigade of cavalry, one brigade of artillery, one regiment of engineers, one motorcycle machine-gun regiment, one aero squadron, and of course the supply branches, and so forth. As Captain McCoy whom I asked to have detailed to me as Chief of Staff has been sent to Mexico, I would ask that Captain Moseley be immediately assigned me as Chief of Staff and Lieutenant Colonel Allen, Major Howze and Major Harbord as brigade commanders. I would further ask for one regular officer of less rank, whose names I will suggest to you, for about every eight hundred or one thousand men in the division.
theodore roosevelt.
telegram
Washington, D. C, March 20, 1917. Hon. Theodore Roosevelt:
Your telegram March nineteenth arrived. No additional armies can be raised without the specific authority of Congress which by its act of February 27, 1906, has also prohibited any executive department or other government establishment of the United States to involve the Government in any contract or other obligation for the future payment of moneys in excess of appropriations unless such contract or obligation is authorized by law. A plan for a very much larger army than the force suggested in your telegram has been prepared for the action of Congress whenever required. Militia officers of high rank will naturally be incorporated with their commands, but the general officers for all volunteer forces are to be drawn from the regular army.
newton D. baker, Secretary of War.
Sagamore Hill, March 23, 1917. 
To the Secretary of War, Sir:

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your telegram in answer to my telegram of the nineteenth, and will govern myself accordingly.

I understand, Sir, that there would be a far larger force than a division called out; I merely wished to be permitted to get ready a division for immediate use in the first expeditionary force sent over.

In reference to your concluding sentence, I wish respectfully to point out that I am a retired Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army, and eligible to any position of command over American troops to which I may be appointed. As for my fitness for command of troops, I respectfully refer you to my three immediate superiors in the field, Lieutenant-General S. B. M. Young (retired), Major-General Samuel Sumner (retired), and Major-General Leonard Wood. In the Santiago campaign I served in the first fight as commander, first of the right wing, and then of the left wing ot the regiment; in the next, the big fight, as colonel of the regiment; and I ended the campaign in command of the brigade.

The regiment, First United States Volunteer Cavalry, in which I first served as lieutenant-colonel, and which I then commanded as colonel, was raised, armed, equipped, drilled, mounted, dismounted, kept for two weeks on a transport, and then put through two victorious aggressive fights, in which we lost a third of the officers, and a fifth of the enlisted men, all within a little over fifty days.

I have the honor to be,

Very respectfully yours,
theodore roosevelt. the secretary of war
Washington, March 26, 1917. 

My dear Mr. President: *

I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the twenty-third. The military record to which you call my attention is, of course, a part of the permanent records of this Department and is available, in detail, for consideration.

The patriotic spirit of your suggestion is cordially appreciated.
Respectfully yours,
newton D. baker. hon. theodore roosevelt, Sagamore Hill.
Oyster Bay, April 12, 1917. 

My dear Mr. Secretary:

First, let me say how greatly I enjoyed our conversation the other day, and how much I appreciate your courtesy in calling upon me.

I enclose, in accordance with our conversation, copy of the letter I have just sent to Congressman Dent and to Senator Chamberlain. If there is any way in which you can suggest that I can be of further help to the Administration as regards your obligatory service bill, or as regards the loan, pray command me.

   There is one point I did not have a chance to discuss with you, but I suppose it is hardly necessary. If I were Sic; of course, an error; for "Mr. Roosevelt." a younger man I would be entirely content to go in any position, as a second lieutenant, or as a private in the force. With my age I cannot do good service, however, unless as a general officer. I remember when I went to the Spanish War there was talk about rejecting me on account of my eyes; but, of course, even in the position I then went in, it was nonsense to reject me for any such reason. To the position which I now seek, of course, the physical examination does not apply, so long as I am fit to do the work, which I certainly can do—that is enlisting the best type of fighting men, and putting into them the spirit which will enable me to get the best possible results out of them in the actual fight. Hindenberg, was of course, a retired officer, who had been for years on the retired list, and who could not physically have passed an examination. I am not a Hindenberg; but I can raise and handle this division in a way that will do credit to the American people, and to you, and to the President.
Very sincerely yours,
theodore roosevelt.
hon. newton D. baker, Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.
war department
Washington, April 13, 1917. My dear Mr. Roosevelt:
I have thought earnestly about the subject of our conversation the night before last, and have reached some conclusions which I think, in frankness, I ought to indicate to you.

   The War College Division of the General Staff has repeatedly reaffirmed a recommendation to me in the following language:

"The War College Division earnestly recommends that no American troops be employed in active service in any European theater until after an adequate period of training, and that during this period all available trained officers and men in the Regular Army or National Guard be employed in training the new levies called into service. It should, therefore, be our policy at first to devote all our energies to raising troops in sufficient numbers to exert a substantial influence in a later stage of the war. Partially trained troops will be entirely unfit for such duty, and even if our regular forces and National Guard could be spared from training duty, their number is too small to exert any influence."

This policy I have a number of times approved. It is, of course, a purely military policy, and does not undertake to estimate what, if any, sentimental value would attach to a representation, of the United States in France by a former President of the United States, but there are doubtless other ways in which that value could be contributed apart from a military expedition.

Cooperation between the United States and the Entente Allies has not yet been so far planned as that any decision has been reached upon the subject of sending an expeditionary force; but should any such force be sent, I should feel obliged to urge that it be placed under the command of the ablest and most experienced professional military man in our country, and that it be officered by and composed of men selected because of their previous military training and, as far as possible, actual military experience. My judgment reaches this conclusion for the reason that any such expedition will be made up of young Americans who will be sent to expose their lives in the bloodiest war yet fought in the world, and under conditions of warfare involving applications of science to the art, of such a character that the very highest degree of skill and training and the largest experience are needed for their guidance and protection. I could not reconcile my mind to a recommendation which deprived our soldiers of the most experienced leadership available, in deference to any mere sentimental consideration, nor could I consent to any expedition being sent until its members had been seasoned by most thorough training for the hardships which they would have to endure. I believe, too, that should any expeditionary force be sent by the United States, it should appear from every aspect of it that military considerations alone had determined its composition, and I think this appearance would be given rather by the selection of the officers from the men of the Army who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters and have made a professional study of the recent changes in the art of war. I should, therefore, be obliged to withhold my approval from an expedition of the sort you propose.

I say these things, my dear Mr. Roosevelt, as the result of very earnest reflection, and because I think you will value a frank expression of my best judgment rather than an apparent acquiescence in a plan which I do not approve, drawn from my failure to comment.
With assurance of appreciation of your patriotic intentions, I beg leave, with great respect, to remain, 

Sincerely yours,
newton D. baker,
Secretary of War. hon. theodore roosevelt,
Oyster Bay, N. Y.

THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD
metropolitan
432 Fourth Avenue, New York
April 22, 1917. My dear Mr. Secretary:
I thank you for your very frank and courteous letter of April I3th. Of course, my dear sir, you wish me to write with equal frankness in return, and I gladly do so. Since the German message of January 3ist, which was practically a declaration of war, I have scrupulously refrained from public criticism of the Administration, keeping silent when I could not support it; but your letter makes it incumbent on me to speak plainly.

My whole purpose is to help make good the President's message. If we make it good by efficient and speedy action it will rank with the great state papers of our history. Otherwise, it will amount to nothing. I have ungrudgingly and whole-heartedly backed up the Administration's plans. There was much about these plans of which I entirely disapproved, but I did not wish to mar the support I was giving the President by anything public in the way of criticism. I felt that the employment of the national guard was a mistake; but I said nothing. I did, however, feel it imperative (without uttering one word of criticism of your plans) to make a strong appeal for the additional use of volunteers who would otherwise be exempt from service, for immediate service at the front. Not to make such use of them is in my opinion a capital mistake.

You say that only "military considerations" should govern your action. In that event I am unable to understand the effort to continue to utilize the national guard, when the actual experience on the border has shown that the attempt to do what was done in Mexico (and what it is now proposed to do in Europe), with the national guard inevitably produces waste, extravagance, military inefficiency and cruel injustice. Last summer you tried to mobilize the guard. You were not able to mobilize much more than half of it; and of this half three-fifths had practically no training, and only one-fifth could shoot. Nothing more completely divorced from sound military policy can be imagined than this attempt to utilize the national guard. Did the General Staff protest against it? If so, their protest must have been over-ridden for non-military reasons. If they did not protest, and if they do not now protest, their advice on other military matters must be regarded as discredited in advance. In this letter of yours you say that only officers of the regular army (Army officers "who have devoted their lives exclusively to military matters") are to be sent on an expeditionary force. Yet the officers of the national guard are certainly called out on the theory that they are to be sent to the front. Some of them doubtless will be glad not to go. But many admirable men among them are eager to go; and it is a wrong to force them to abandon their business and go into camp when there is no serious intention to use them for the serious work that alone would justify requesting them to make the sacrifices they have made.

I wish to point out another thing. You decline my application on the ground of lack of military training and experience; and yet you are summoning, and have summoned, to the field, numbers of military officers, as division and brigade commanders, who have not had one-tenth my experience. My dear sir, you forget that I have commanded troops in action in the most important battle fought by the United States Army during the last half century, and that I have commanded a brigade in the campaign of which this battle was an incident.

I most heartily favor universal obligatory military training and service, not only as regards this war, but as a permanent policy of the Government. Selective obligatory military service, as a "temporary" expedient, is better than having resort only to volunteering; but it is a mischievous error to use it in order to prevent all volunteering. Universal obligatory service, as a permanent policy, is absolutely just, fair, democratic and efficient. But it needs a period of perhaps two years in order to produce first-class results; and so does the "selective" substitute for it. It is folly not to provide by volunteering for the action that ought to be taken during these two years. (Volunteering to serve in the ranks of the regular army and national guard, of course, in no way meets the need.)

The vice of the volunteer system lies chiefly, not in the men who do volunteer, but in the men who don't. A chief, although not the only, merit in the obligatory system lies in its securing preparedness in advance. By our folly in not adopting the obligatory system as soon as this war broke out, we have forfeited this prime benefit of preparedness. You now propose to use its belated adoption as an excuse for depriving us of the benefits of the volunteer system. This is a very grave blunder. The only right course under existing conditions is to combine the two systems. My proposal is to use the volunteer system so that we can at once avail ourselves of the services of men who would otherwise be exempt, and to use the obligatory as the permanent system as to make all serve who ought to serve. You propose to use the belated adoption of the obligatory system as a reason for refusing the services of half the men of the nation who are most fit to serve, who are most eager to serve, and whose services can be utilized at once.

You quote with approval the recommendation of certain of your military advisers to the effect that no expeditionary force should soon be sent across to fight. They wish instead that "all the available trained officers and men in the regular army and national guard be employed in training the new levies" so as to exert a substantial influence in a "later stage of the war." You add that, as this is the proper "military policy," you do not think it should be departed from for any "sentimental value" or "sentimental consideration." I have not asked you to consider any "sentimental value" in this matter. I am speaking of moral effect, not of sentimental value. Sentimentality is as different from morality as Rousseau's life from Abraham Lincoln's. I have just received a letter from James Bryce urging "the dispatch of an American force to the theater of war" and saying, "The moral effect of the appearance in the war line of an American force would be immense." From representatives of the French and British Governments, and of the French, British and Canadian military authorities, I have received statements to the same effect, in even more emphatic form, and earnest hopes that I myself should be in the force. Apparently your military advisers in this matter seek to persuade you that a "military policy" has nothing to do with "moral effect." If so, their militarism is like that of the Aulic Council of Vienna in the Napoleonic Wars, and not like that of Napoleon, who stated that in war the moral was to the material as two to one. These advisers will do well to follow the teachings of Napoleon and not those of the pedantic militarists of the Aulic Council, who were the helpless victims of Napoleon.

If we had been wise enough to begin thoroughgoing preparations two and a half years ago, after this great war broke out, and if, as the main feature thereof, we had introduced the principle of obligatory universal military training and service (and had also done such elementary things as running the Springfield factory at full speed, in which case we would now be a million rifles to the good), there would be scant need of a volunteer force now, for we would have been able to put a couple of million men, well armed and equipped, into the field, and would have finished this war at once. Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. But we were not wise in time. We did not prepare in advance the instruments which would alone be thoroughly satisfactory, and which cannot possibly be improvised to meet immediate needs. Therefore, let us use every instrument that is available to meet the immediate needs. Let us not advance our unwisdom in the past as a justification for fresh unwisdom in the present. If the people of a town do not prepare a fire company until a fire breaks out, they are foolish. But they are more foolish still if when the fire breaks out, they then decline to try to put it out with any means at hand, on the ground that they prefer to wait and drill a fire company. Your military advisers are now giving you precisely such advice. Put out the fire with the means available, and at the same time start the drill of the fire company!

Our nation has not prepared in any adequate way 'during the last two and a half years to meet the crisis which now faces us. You, therefore, propose that we shall pay billions of dollars to the allies to do our fighting for us, while we stay here in comfort and slowly proceed to train an army to fight in the end, unless the war is over, one way or the other, before our army is ready. This is exactly as if after Sumter was fired on, Lincoln had demanded a draft and declined to use volunteers in the interval. In such a case he would have doubtless had a good army in a year. But it would then have been useless because the Union would meanwhile have been destroyed. Or take the,, history of the past three years. In 1914 the British were unprepared. They were not nearly as unprepared as we now are, but inasmuch as their danger was far greater (for we have been safe behind the British fleet and the allied armies) their short-sightedness was probably as blameworthy as ours. For some years Lord Roberts had been preaching universal obligatory military training and service. They declined to profit by his preaching, and war came upon them. In consequence they were wholly unfit to do in the military way what they are now doing and what Germany and France could then do. They immediately sent abroad, however, a small military force which fought valiantly. They followed it by volunteer armies as rapidly as possible. They accepted masses of volunteers from Australia and Canada. All the time they were training the great armies they have now put in the field. If they had acted upon the principles which you desire us now to apply, they would have refused to send any troops at all to France; they would have declined to receive the Canadian and Australian volunteers; they would have kept all their regulars at home to train the new levies; and to any suggestion as to the "moral effect" of such conduct, they would have responded as you do when you say that a military policy should not deal with "sentimental values" and "sentimental considerations." If England had adopted such a course, it is conceivable that after eighteen months her army would have been better than, as a matter of fact, it actually was; but *iiis would not have been of much consequence, because if she had so acted the war would have been already lost.

Our task has been and is incomparably easier and safer than the tasks of the European powers in this war. Any one of them which behaved as we have behaved would long before this time have been ruined. And we can still secure a measure of material well-being while shirking our duty. If we follow the advice of the military men you quote we shall shirk our duty. I earnestly hope we refuse this advice, and play the part of men. I earnestly hope that we shall not advance our failure to provide universal obligatory military training in the past as an excuse for refusing to make use of the volunteer organizations that we can raise with reasonable rapidity in the present, while we are, with belated wisdom, introducing the principle of obligatory service.

My dear Mr. Secretary, the proposal as you outline and adopt it, must come from doubtless well-meaning military men, of the red-tape and pipe-clay school, who are hide bound in the pedantry of that kind of wooden militarism which is only one degree worse than its extreme opposite, the folly which believes that an army can be improvised between sunrise and sunset. The two kinds of folly are nominally opposed, but really complementary to one another. It is unnecessary for me to say that military men differ among themselves in wisdom and far-sightedness, precisely as civilians dot The civilian heads of a government, when faced by a great military crisis, have to show their own wisdom primarily in sifting out the very wise military advice from the very unwise military advice which they will receive. This is especially true in a service where promotion is chiefly by seniority and where a large number of the men who rise high owe more to the possession of a sound stomach than to the possession of the highest qualities of head and heart. The military advice which you have received in this matter is strikingly unwise. I dp not know whether those giving it openly advocated the principle of universal obligatory military training two and a half years ago—not within the last few months when people everywhere have been waking up to the matter—but two and a half years ago. If they did not, then they themselves are partly responsible for the condition of unpreparedness which renders it expedient from every standpoint that we should utilize every military asset in the country.

The proposed bill of the Administration, in the last form shown me, was not to take any man over twenty-five. My proposal is to utilize the men who will not be brought in under your proposed conscription. If we had had a wise law for universal military training and service two and a half years ago, it certainly would have included some method for utilizing the men who would be of great value in war, but who are past the age limit when the first training would naturally be given. In the Spanish War I knew well the conditions of the training camps. I know that men put into service for a long period of training with no certainty that they are ever to be employed at the front, will feel far more disheartened than if they could be sent to the front within a reasonable time. I am certain that as rapidly as possible the various units should be transferred to France for intensive training; that as soon as possible an American force, under the American flag, should be established on the fighting line, should be steadily fed with new men to keep its members to the required point, and steadily reinforced by other units, so that it would be playing a continually more important part in the fighting. It is an ignoble thing for us not to put our men into the fighting line at the earliest possible moment. Such failure will excite derision and may have a very evil effect upon our national future.

So much for the general consideration raised in your letter. Now, my dear sir, for what you specifically say about my offer. You say that the officers in command of any expedition must be chosen from the officers of the regular army, "who have devoted their lives exclusively to the study and pursuit of military matters," and have had "actual military experience," and that it would be improper to trust the "guidance and protection" of the young men sent abroad in such a force, to men like myself. Doubtless the rule you thus indicate is generally wise. But to follow it without exercising any judgment as to exceptions would have barred the Confederate Army from using Forrest, and the Union Army from using Logan, and would have kept Wood and Funston out of the Spanish War. Most certainly I do not claim to be a Forrest, or a Logan. But I ask you to consider my actual experience. In the Spanish War I took part in raising a regiment, which I afterward commanded. Exactly the same objections were made to the use of that regiment then that you now make to the use of the division (to be composed of just such regiments) which I ask leave to raise. One of the pacifist papers of that day, about a week prior to our going into action, gave expression to this feeling as follows—"competent observers have remarked that nothing more extraordinary has been done than the Bending to Cuba of the first United States volunteer cavalry, known as the Rough Riders. Organized but four weeks, barely given their full complement of officers, and only a week of regular drill, these men have been sent to the front before they have learned the first elements of soldiery and discipline. There have been few cases of such military cruelty in our military annals." This was the prophecy. The fulfilment you will find in the reports of the expedition. In health, in achievement, and in the loss necessarily paid to purchase the achievement, the regiment stood with the best and most forward of the regular regiments with which it served. This efficiency was, of course, largely due to the way we set about raising it, and to the character of its first Colonel—Leonard Wood. He was at the time a surgeon in the U. S. Army. When President McKinley offered me the Colonelcy, I said I would take the Lieutenant-Colonelcy if he would make Wood Colonel. Since then Wood's record of achievement (for which he was conspicuously recognized by President McKinley—his promotion of a later date having been in the regular order) has been on a par with that of Lord Kitchener prior to the outbreak of the present war; Lord Cromer once said to me that Wood's administration of Cuba was the greatest feat of the kind that had been done in our time.

At the close of the campaign, I was in command of the brigade, which consisted of my regiment, and of two regular regiments. Since then I have been com-mander-in-chief of the Army of the United States, and devoted much time and thought to the study of military and naval problems throughout the seven and a half years when I was President. I now ask permission to raise a division to consist of regiments like the regiment which I commanded in the Santiago campaign (and I can raise you an army corps on this basis). If I were young enough I should be willing to raise that division, and myself merely go as a second lieutenant in it. As it is, I believe I am best fitted to be the division commander in an expeditionary corps, under the chief of that corps; but if you desire to put me in a less position, and make me a brigade commander, I will at once raise the division, and can raise it without difficulty, if it is to be put under any man of the type of General Wood, General Pershing, or General Kuhn. These men served with loyalty and efficiency under me when I was President, and I believe that they will tell you, and that my former commanders, Lieutenant-General Young, retired, and Major-General Sumner, retired, will tell you that I will serve with loyalty and efficiency and entire subordination under my superiors. Of course, my dear sir, I could not raise the division speedily and satisfactorily without the active and generous support of yourself and of the Department.

As for the young Americans who you feel should have better guidance and protection than I can give them, my dear Mr. Secretary, why not let them judge for themselves? The great majority of the men who were in my old regiment will eagerly come forward under me, in so far as they are yet fit. I believe I can appeal to the natural fighting men of this country. The plan you outline in your letter makes most of these men useless as a military asset to the United States at the very time when they could be most useful. Let me give you two examples. If you grant me permission, I would put at the head of most of my regiments, captains or young majors in the regular army. One of my three civilian Colonels would probably be Roger Williams of Kentucky, who is now a Major-General in the National Guard. The other two would be John Greenway of Arizona, and John Groome, the head of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary. I believe that only the very best men in the regular army would be better colonels than Greenway and Groome. They can be used to render to the United States, the splendid service they will render, if I am given the division for which I ask; otherwise, if the plan you outline is put in effect, they will be left unused at the very time when their services would be most valuable. As for the time necessary to train the division, I refer you to the time in which my regiment was utilized in the Spanish War. I have just received from one of the highest Canadian military authorities, a letter running in part as follows: "I can personally say that with the Canadian system of intensive military training your announced plan to have Americans at the front in four months would be entirely practical." Under your orders, and by the aid of your Department, I am confident this could be done. If when I made my offer to you nearly three months ago, you had aided me in going ahead (the money I offered was as a gift, not a loan; the justification for the Government's permitting its use would have been precisely the same as the justification for permitting the men—all volunteers by the way—recently summoned to the officers' training camp at Plattsburg to pay portions of their own expenses, or have their friends pay them, which your Department has directed), and if the Department had acted toward my division as General Wood acted toward the original Plattsburg camp (which started our whole Officers' Reserve movement)  that division would now be ready to sail for France for the intensive training.

I desire that you judge me on my record. All I am asking is the chance to help make good the President's message of April 2d. If you don't know whether the governments of the allies would like me to raise such a division, and take it abroad at the earliest possible moment, I wish you would ask those governments yourself their feeling in the matter. I know that they earnestly desire us to send our men to the fighting line ; and I have been informed from the highest sources that they would like to have me in the fighting line. Of course, they will not desire to have me go, or the division go, unless the Administration expresses its willingness.

Let me repeat that if you permit me to raise a division, it will be composed of men who would not be reached in the bill you proposed to Congress, and who would otherwise not be utilized at all. I should, of course, like your authority to have about two regular officers for every thousand men, and perhaps four of the Reserve Officers for every thousand men, and perhaps certain additional ones if you saw fit to grant them. But the subtraction of these men from the number of men available to train the force called out under your proposed bill would be inconsiderable, compared to the immense gain which would come from having such a division put into the fighting line at the earliest moment. You already know the names of some of the regular officers for whom I would ask you. At the head of the medical corps I would ask for Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Page, U. S. A. You, of course, know the record of Colonel Page as surgeon and medical director. He has his arrangements made, if he is allowed to go with me; and I believe that no division of any regular army would go with a better medical and surgical preparation than we should have under Colonel Page. In four months the men of the division would have been seasoned, under the thorough training which you rightly demand. Most of the men who would come forward would be seasoned already, exactly as was the case in my regiment nineteen years ago. Very many would have had military training and experience. I very earnestly hope you will be able to grant my request, sir. I make it not only because I most earnestly desire to serve the country under the President and under you, but because I am certain that in this way I can render the best service. Very respectfully,
theodore roosevelt. hon. newton D. baker, Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.
war  department
Washington, May 5, 1917. My dear Mr. Roosevelt:
I have read several times your long letter of April B2d, and find myself much embarrassed in attempting more than mere acknowledgment of its receipt. For obvious reasons I cannot allow myself to be drawn into a discussion of your military experience and qualifications. That is a subject upon which my personal opinion would be of little importance and upon which I am without the technical qualifications to form a judgment. Nor can I undertake a general defense of regular army officers and particularly of my associates in the General Staff against your suggestion that they may be possibly "of the red-tape and pipe-clay school." They are, after all, that part of our professional army of longest experience and by our law are my constituted military advisers. Incidentally, however, I cannot refrain from saying that I have found them men of intense and discerning enthusiasm for their profession, filled with loyalty to their country, and very zealous so to train, equip and use our military forces as to make them most effective and to minimize to the utmost the inevitable losses of life which all uses of such forces necessarily entail. I am, of course, not unaware that there are soldiers not now connected with the General Staff who have an absentee sense of superiority about the conduct of business in which they are not personally participating; but all such differences of opinion must of necessity be resolved in favor of those who are charged with the responsibility for action, as, no doubt, your own experience as an executive has shown.

The questions raised by your letter, however, seem to  me  to  become  simple   when   stripped   of  personal considerations.     The   war   in   Europe   is   confessedly stern, steady and relentless.    It is a contest between the morale of two great contending forces.    Any force sent by the United States into this contest should be so chosen as, first, to depress as  far as may be the morale of the enemy; second, to stimulate as far as may •   be the morale of our associates in arms; third, in itself to be as efficient from a military point of view as is possible, and fourth, so organized and led as to reduce its own losses and sacrifices to the minimum.

   As between a hastily summoned and unprofessional force on the one hand and a part of the regular professional army of the United States on the other, I am convinced that our adversary would esteem the former lightly; that our associates would be depressed by the dispatch of such a force, deeming it an evidence of our lack of seriousness about the nature of the enterprise. Unless the whole theory of having a professional army is vicious, a portion of our professional army would be more efficient from a military point of view than such a hastily summoned force, and, quite obviously, the long and systematic training to which the members of our regular army are subjected will have taught them better how to fight without needless exposure and how to protect their health and diminish their losses both in camp and on the field.

Thus, upon every consideration, my mind justifies the conclusion expressed to you in my letter of April I3th. This reasoning quite frankly eliminates the consideration of personality; but upon that subject there is so much uncertainty of judgment that I do not feel that I could with confidence elect a course at plain variance with every other consideration in order to satisfy a personal conclusion based wholly upon a personal consideration.
Cordially yours,
newton D. baker,
Secretary of War. hon. theodore roosevelt
432 Fourth Avenue, New York City, N. Y.
metropolitan
432 Fourth Avenue, New York
May 8, 1917. My dear Mr. Secretary:

Many thanks for your letter of May 5th.
You say that the questions raised by my letter are "simple when stripped of personal considerations." You then describe the war in Europe, and the objects to be achieved by the United States sending over a force to take part in the contest. I, of course, entirely agree with what you thus say as to the nature of the war, the need of our sending over an efficient force to depress the morale of our enemy, and to raise that of our friends.

Your next paragraph indicates that your present intention is to send over a portion of the "regular professional army of the United States" (rather than use a force, such as I suggest) ; and you state in the following paragraph that in consequence your mind "justifies the conclusion" expressed in your letter of April I3th. But, my dear Mr. Secretary, this is the direct reverse of the conclusion of your letter of April I3th. In that letter you approved the recommendation of the general staff, that the regular army of the United States should not be sent over as an expeditionary force, but, on the contrary, should in its entirety be kept here to train the selective draft army; and you dismissed, as of "sentimental" and "no military" value, the idea of sending over this force at once. In your present letter you take the ground that such a force should be sent over, and give as two of the reasons that it would depress the morale of the enemy, and stimulate the morale of our associates in arms. I entirely agree with the position taken by you in this letter as to immediately sending an expeditionary force abroad, and as to the fact that it would, among other objects, achieve the two above mentioned. But permit me, my dear Mr. Secretary, to say that this shows that you have reversed the action of the general staff, which you approved in your letter of April I3th, and surely the need of such reversal, as regards the most vital military matter which must immediately be decided, shows that my criticism of the men who gave you the advice was exactly justified. The matter of most immediate importance, which the staff had to decide at the time you wrote me on April I3th, was whether we should at once begin sending forces to the other side, or whether the entire regular army and everybody else fitted to do any soldiering should be kept on this side to train our army for a year or two, in order, as you phrased it in your letter, to use the army for decisive effect in the later stages of the war. The general staff adopted the latter view as you stated in your letter of April I3th. I protested, with all possible emphasis, against this view. The French and the military authorities, with the utmost emphasis, have since protested against it also, and have taken, in this matter, exactly the position which I took in my letter to you, and in my letters to Senator Chamberlain and Mr. Dent, and in my public utterances. From your letter, and from the statements in the press, I gather that the Administration has now reversed the position which was thus taken by the general staff, and, as regards sending abroad an expeditionary force, has come to the position I have so earnestly advocated, and which I set forth in detail in the letter that you have now answered.
There remains the question of the composition of the force, and inasmuch, my dear Mr. Secretary, as in one of the vital matters the general staff misled you, and inasmuch as my advice has proved to be right, I beg you to at least consider the reasons I now advance for the advice I propose to give as regards another phase of the matter.

There is every reason why a portion of the regular army should go abroad. There is also every reason why, in view of the smallness of the regular army and the need of its giving instruction, this proportion should not be too large. There is, therefore, every reason why the force should consist of a proportion of the regular army as a nucleus, with an efficient volunteer force under and with it. Under the act of March 2, 1899, volunteer regiments were raised which, in actual service in the Philippines, did almost as well as the regular regiments, especially when mixed with them. My own regiment in Cuba was raised under substantially similar legislation, and so I know, at first hand, of what I am speaking. Our own regular troops not having been trained in modern warfare, would themselves need some preliminary training in the theater of war before we could expect them to be as good as their French or English allies, or German foes. Volunteer regiments, chosen as above indicated, and used as hereinafter outlined in close association with the regulars, could be made almost as good as the regulars during this period of training—and here again, my dear Mr. Secretary, remember that I am not making a mere guess, for I am stating what actually occurred in connection with my regiment at Santiago, and with the other United States volunteer regiments in the Philippines.

    I, therefore, respectfully, but earnestly suggest, that I be allowed, under the direction of the War Department, to raise, or help raise, an army corps of two divisions. Inasmuch as we have no artillery fit to go into the battle front abroad, and inasmuch as it is at least doubtful whether artillery ought to be included permanently in the organization of an infantry division, I assume you would not. wish this first expeditionary force to have artillery. Furthermore, I believe you will find that the wisest military men do not sympathize with the plan of having one divisional regiment of cavalry with each division. Cavalry should be able to act as a mass. I therefore very earnestly recommend that in connection with each division we raise a three-regiment brigade of cavalry. As long as the fighting is in the trenches, this cavalry will be used dismounted, and will represent an addition to the infantry strength of equal value. (As soon as we began to fight outside the trenches, the two brigades could be joined together, and could be used as a small cavalry division, under the direction of the corps commander.)

Each of the divisions sent over would thus consist, in addition to the supply, transportation, and other services, of three three-regiment infantry brigades, one three-regiment cavalry brigade, a regiment of engineers, and a regiment of machine guns. (I will give you the details of the organization, if you so desire, and send you also a carefully wrought out blue print of the entire organization of the division.) For a corps of two divisions, therefore, there would be six infantry brigades, two cavalry brigades, two machine gun regiments, and two engineers' regiments, or twenty-eight regiments in all. There should be one regular regiment in every cavalry or infantry brigade; eight regular regiments in all. This would leave twenty volunteer regiments. As regards four of these, I would suggest civilian colonels, two of them being of the National Guard; namely, Brigadier General Roger Williams of Kentucky, and Colonel Forman of Illinois, together with Colonel John Groome of the Pennsylvania State Constabulary, and John C. Greenway of Arizona. For the other sixteen colonels, together with the corps and divisional chiefs of staff and the like, I would suggest to you captains and junior majors from the regular army, including such men as those I have mentioned—Frank McCoy, Fitz Hugh Lee, Edgar Collins, Phil Sheridan, Moseley, Gordon Johnston, Jim Shelley, Hugh D. Wise, the two Parker brothers (one cavalry, one infantry), Smedberg, Goethals, Quekenmeyer, Quackenbush, Baer, Fitch, Lincoln Andrews, and others. For brigade commanders I would suggest to you to appoint men like Lieutenant-Colonel Allen, Colonel Howze, and Major Harbord. Rear Admiral Winslow, retired, would make an admirable brigade commander. The corps and division commanders would be, I presume, men already with the rank of general, whom you chose; any men of the stamp of those mentioned in my previous letter would do admirably. I would be glad to accept the junior brigade generalship, ranking behind the other seven brigade commanders, as well, of course, as the division and corps commanders. This would be merely giving me the position which I held at the close of the Santiago campaign when, because of my conduct in the field, I was recommended by my superior officers, not only for promotion, but for the medal of honor and for brevets.

In addition, I should trust that you would allow certain junior cfficers, men like Lieutenant Stonewall Jackson Christian, Lieutenant Wainwright, Lieutenant Chaffee, and others of like position, to come in as majors or adjutants, or with similar rank. If possible, I should like to use, in each volunteer regiment, two or three regulars, and six or eight, or ten reserve officers from the Plattsburg and similar camps, together with half a dozen of the best regular non-commissioned officers, giving these the rank of second lieutenant. This would not represent an appreciable drawing off of strength from the body of men you wish to use in training the draft army, for you have about 35,000 men in the training camps, and this proposal of mine would only be to take out, all told, from the officers and noncommissioned officers of the regular army, and from the reserve officers, between 200 and 300 men, who would be employed in training some 40,000 volunteers. These volunteers would be men of exceptional quality, enlisted for the war, with the special purpose of being immediately sent to the fighting line in Europe.

Under this plan you would immensely increase the size of the army you sent abroad, and, owing to the nature of the volunteer regiments, four-fifths of whom would be under regular officers, and all of them brigaded with regulars, the force would be almost or practically as good as if composed solely of regulars; and yet you would not be sending abroad a wholly dis-proportioned amount of our small regular army, and would be enabled to use the others for the purposes of instruction at home. The two divisions at the front would be kept filled, all the losses being made good by recruits, and as rapidly as possible other divisions would be put beside them. In each case, as soon, or almost as soon, as raised, the brigades and divisions would be sent across to, or just behind, the theater of war in France, or if this was impossible, at least to England, and there trained in bayonet work, bombing, gassing, and all the other incidents of modern trench warfare.

I have the highest respect for the individual officers and men of the National Guard, the greatest admiration for the patriotism of those who served on the border last year, and a thorough belief in the efficiency of the National Guard for its proper duty, which is purely state duty. But, of course, divided control between state and nation is thoroughly vicious. Moreover, many of the men in the National Guard are family men, supporting their families by their wages, and it is a cruel injustice to these men to take them to the front when there are literally millions of other men who ought to go first. Again, there are plenty of men in the National Guard who can do state work well, but who are not fit for a gruelling campaign. Therefore, the National Guard regiment should not be sent out as such, if there is a desire either to do equal justice to the men or to secure efficient results. Each regiment should furnish a nucleus—which might be a quarter, or which might be a half of its strength, and which would be composed both of officers and enlisted men, and should, in most cases, be put under the command of a regular officer; then, around this nucleus as a framework, could be built up a purely National United States regiment, either by volunteering or by the draft. Such a regiment would be fit for duty very quickly, and would render admirable service; while at the same time these guardsmen who ought not to be asked to undertake a foreign campaign would be left within the state, to do the necessary and important state duty which the National Guard is peculiarly fitted to perform.

The selective draft has been authorized by Congress. The Harding amendment, or similar measures, will en able the Government to admirably use men who desire to serve, whose ardor it is certainly unwise to damp, who could render invaluable service, and who otherwise would be unused. If this amendment is adopted, and the Department authorizes me to raise a force as above outlined, I can at once assign the regular officers whom the Department desires as colonels to different localities, where they can raise regiments or battalions, already provisionally provided. We can get private help precisely as in connection with the training camps. While, of course, we cannot act as instantaneously as if we had begun these steps a couple of months ago, yet we can act with great speed, and in a way to establish the best possible precedent, while at the same time we are putting a substantial force of good fighting men on the firing line at the earliest possible moment.
I am, sir, with great respect,
Very sincerely,
theodore roosevelt. hon. newton D. baker,
Secretary of War, Washington, D. C.
war department
May ii, 1917. 
My dear Mr. Roosevelt:

I beg leave to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of May 8th.

It does not seem to me that the considerations urged affect in any degree the soundness of the conclusions stated in my letter of May 5th, and I suppose that, since the responsibility for action and decision in this matter rests upon me, you shall have to regard the determination I have already indicated as final, unless changing circumstances require a re-study of the whole question. I appreciate your willingness so thoroughly to discuss this important subject, and have read with interest your suggestions for organization and action. It is, of course, unpleasant to find myself at variance with you in a matter of opinion of this sort, but the earnestness with which you have pressed your views is a comforting assurance of the zeal with which you will cooperate in carrying forward unitedly, whole-heartedly and effectively the operations determined upon, now that this particular phase of the question is finally disposed of.
newton D. baker,
Secretary of War. hon. theodore roosevelt,
432 Fourth Avenue, New York.
telegram

To the President: May 18, 1917.
White House, Washington, D. C.

I respectfully ask permission immediately to raise two divisions for immediate service at the front under the bill which has just become law, and hold myself ready to raise four divisions, if you so direct. I respectfully refer for details to my last letters to the Secretary of War. If granted permission, I earnestly ask that Captain Frank McCoy be directed to report to me at once. Minister Fletcher has written me that he is willing. Also if permission to raise the divisions is granted, I would like to come to Washington as soon as the War Department is willing, so that I may find what supplies are available, and at once direct the regular officers who are chosen for brigade and regimental commands how and where to get to work.
telegram
the white house, Washington, D. C., May 19, 1917. I very much regret that I cannot comply with the request in your telegram of yesterday.    The reasons I have stated in a public statement made this morning, and I need not assure you that my conclusions were based entirely upon imperative considerations of public policy and not upon personal or private choice.
woodrow wilson.
Letter sent to each of various men who had done work in personally raising units for the proposed divisions which Were finally authorized by Congress:
May 25, 1917. 

My dear Sir:

You have doubtless seen the President's announcement wherein he refused to make use of the Volunteer Forces which Congress had authorized him to permit me to raise.

Prior to this announcement by the President, I had sent him a telegram as follows:

[Here I included the two telegrams quoted immediately above.]

Accordingly, I communicated with as many of the men who had agreed to raise units for service in this division as possible, and after consultation with about twenty of them I issued the statement which is herewith appended.

I now release you and all your men. I wish to express my deep sense of obligation to you and to all those who had volunteered under and in connection with this division.

As you doubtless know, I am very proud of the Rough Riders, the First Volunteer Cavalry, with whom I served in the Spanish-American War. I believe it is a just and truthful statement of the facts when I say that this regiment did as well as any of the admirable regular regiments with which it served in the Santiago campaign. It was raised, armed, equipped, drilled, mounted, dismounted, kept two weeks aboard transports and put through two victorious aggressive fights in which it lost one-third of the officers and one-fifth of the men; all within sixty days from the time I received my commission.

If the President had permitted me to raise the four divisions, I am certain that they would have equalled the record, only on a hundredfold larger scale. They would have all been on the firing line before or shortly after the draft army had begun to assemble, and moreover they could have been indefinitely reinforced, so that they would have grown continually stronger and more efficient.

I regret from the standpoint of the country that your services were not utilized. But the country has every reason to be proud of the zeal, patriotism and businesslike efficiency with which you came forward.

With all good wishes,
Faithfully yours,
theodore roosevelt.
May 21, 1917. 
To the men who have volunteered for immediate service on the firing line in the divisions which Congress authorized:

The President has announced that he will decline to permit those divisions to be organized or to permit me to have a command in connection with such a force. After consultation yesterday, personally or by wire, with some of the men who have volunteered to raise units—regiments and battalions—for the divisions, ineluding John C. Groome, of Pennsylvania; Seth Bullock, of South Dakota; John C. Greenway, of Arizona; John M. Parker, of Louisiana; Robert Carey, of Wyoming; J. P. Donnelly, of Nevada; Sloan Simpson, of Texas; D. C. Collier and F. R. Burnham, of California; I. L. Reeves, Frazer Metzger, and H. Nelson Jackson, of Vermont; Harry Stimson, W. J. Schieffelin, and William H. Donovan, of New York, and Messrs. James R. Gar-field, Raymond Robbins, R. H. Channing, David M. Goodrich, W. E. Dame, George Roosevelt, Richard Derby and various others who were immediately accessible, it was decided unanimously that in view of the decision of the President the only course open to us is forthwith to disband and to abandon all further effort in connection with the divisions, thereby leaving each man free to get into the military service in some other way, if that is possible, and, if not, then to serve his country in civil life as he best can.

As good American citizens we loyally obey the decision of the Commander-in-Chief of the American Army and Navy. The men who have volunteered will now consider themselves absolved from all further connection with this movement. The funds that have been promised will be treated as withdrawn and applied to other purposes. I therefore direct that this statement be sent to the leaders in the various states who have been raising troops and that it be published.

Our sole aim is to help in every way in the successful prosecution of the war and we most heartily feel that no individual's personal interest should for one moment be considered save as it serves the general public interest. We rejoice that a division composed of our fine regular soldiers and marines under so gallant and efficient a leader as General Pershing is to be sent abroad. We have a right to a certain satisfaction in connection therewith.

The Brooklyn Eagle last evening stated authoritatively that "the sending of this expedition was a compromise between the original plans of the General Staff, which favored no early expedition, and the request of Colonel Roosevelt for authority for an immediate expedition. The Roosevelt agitation, backed by the express desire of such distinguished military leaders as General Joffre and General Petain, unquestionably had its effect in bringing about the Pershing expedition. The compromise is that France gets American soldiers in the trenches, but Roosevelt will not lead or accompany them. It is believed in Washington that any criticism for turning down Roosevelt will be fully answered by the fact that American soldiers are going over."

If this gives the explanation of the matter, I gladly say that we are all unselfishly pleased to have served this use, although naturally we regret not to have been allowed ourselves to render active service.

It is due to the men who have come forward in this matter during the three and a half months since February 2d, when I began the work of raising one or more divisions, that the following facts should be known:

If yesterday my offer immediately to raise four divisions for immediate use at the front had been accepted the various units of the first division would to-morrow have begun to assemble at whatever points the War Department had indicated, and they would have assembled in full force and without an hour's delay as rapidly as the War Department directed them where to go and as soon as it provided them camping places, tents, blankets, etc.

    We were prepared by the use of private funds partly to make good any immediate lack in such supplies as regards many of the units. Fifteen days afterward the second division would have mobilized in a similar fashion, and then, at intervals of thirty days, the two other divisions.

In accordance with what I had found to be the wish of the military authorities among our allies, each of the divisions would have been ready to sail for France for intensive training at the theater of war within thirty days of the time it began to mobilize, if the War Department were able to furnish supplies; and we would have asked permission to use the rifles and ammunition now in use in the French and British armies.

All four divisions would have sailed and two would have been on the firing line by September ist, the time at which the Secretary of War has announced that the assembling of the selective draft army is to begin. Abouf one-half of our men, at least of those in the first division, were men who had already seen military service.

I wish respectfully to point out certain errors into which the President has been led in his announcement. He states that the purpose was to give me an "independent" command. In my last letter to the Secretary of War I respectfully stated that if I were given permission to raise an army corps of two divisions, to be put under the command of some General like Wood or Bell or Pershing or Barry or Kuhn, I desired for myself only the position of junior among the eight brigade commanders. My position would have been exactly the same as theirs, except that I would have ranked after and have been subordinate to the rest of them.

The President alludes to our proffered action as one that would have an effect "politically," but as not contributing to the "success of the war," and as representing a "policy of personal gratification or advantage." I wish respectfully but emphatically to deny that any political consideration whatever or any desire for personal gratification or advantage entered into our calculations. Our undivided purpose was to contribute effectively to the success of the war.

I know nothing whatever of the politics of the immense majority of the men who came forward, and those whose politics I do know numbered as many Democrats as Republicans. My purpose was to enable the Government to use as an invaluable military asset the men who would not be reached under the selective draft, who were fit for immediate service, and the great majority of whom would not otherwise be used at all.

As above pointed out, all four divisions, if the War Department could equip them, would have been sent to the aid of our hard-pressed allies before the training of the selective draft army was even begun, and they would not have been put into the firing line until the French and British military authorities deemed them fit.

The President says in effect that to comply with our offer would have been mischievous from the military standpoint and he adds that the regular officers whom I have asked to have associated with me are "some of the most effective officers of the regular army," who "cannot possibly be spared from the duty of training regular troops." One of the chief qualifications for military command is to choose for one's associates and subordinates "the most effective officers," and this qualification the President thus states that I possess.

As for my withdrawing them from the "more pressing and necessary duty of training" the troops, I wish to point out that I had asked for about fifty regular officers from lieutenant-colonels to second lieutenants for the first division. This would be only about one-tenth of the number who will go with General Pershing's division which, the President announces, is to be composed exclusively of regulars. Therefore, the present plan will take from "most pressing and necessary duty" about ten times as many regular officers as would have been taken under our proposal.

It has been stated that the regular officers are opposed to our plan. As a matter of fact "the most effective" fighting officers have been eager to be connected with or to have under them the troops we proposed to raise.

The President condemns our proposal on the ground that "undramatic" action is needed, action that is "prao tical and of scientific defmiteness and precision." There was nothing dramatic in our proposal save as all proposals indicting eagerness or willingness to sacrifice life for an ideal are dramatic. It is true that our division would have contained the sons or grandsons of men who in the Civil War wore the blue or the gray; for instance, the sons or grandsons of Phil Sheridan, Fitz Hugh Lee, Stonewall Jackson, James A. Garfield, Simon Bolivar Buckner, Adna R. Chaffee, Nathan Bedford Forest; but these men would have served either with commissions or in the ranks, precisely like the rest of us; and all alik'-"-would have been judged solely by the efficiency—including the "scientific definiteness"—with which they did their work and served the flag of their loyal devotion.
theodore roosevelt.
In view of the President's reference to the "political" effect and "personal gratification or advantage" involved in the offer to raise the divisions in question it is but just to point out the following facts:

    My offer was first made long before the German note of January 3ist last. I repeated it immediately after that date, on the morning of February 2d. If the offer had been accepted at that time a division would have been ready to sail for France in April, the moment that Congress declared that war existed. We received, all told, applications from over 300,000 men for the divisions. From our rough preliminary examinations we were able to guarantee that we could from these have raised over 200,000—double the number that the four divisions would have contained.

On February 9th the President's Secretary of War stated, as a reason for refusing my offer, that Congress must provide "under its own conditions" for raising troops. When Congress did thus provide, the President refused to act under the conditions provided.

The President's suggestion that I had asked for an "independent" command was in flat contradiction of the facts; which were all before him when he made the statement. I had repeatedly and explicitly asked to be put under the command of whatever commander was chosen for the expedition.

On April I3th Mr. Baker wrote that there was to be no expedition sent to the front until the armies were trained [which would be some time in 1918]. Before May 8th, the pressure initiated by my offer caused him, or his chief, to reverse this decision, and therefore to save this nation the humiliation of taking no military part in the war throughout 1917 and part of 1918.

The refusal of the President to accept my offer was supported and applauded by the leaders among the zealous and intelligent partisans of Germany and opponents of war with Germany in this country, including senators such as Messrs. LaFollette and Stone, and papers like Mr. Hearst's, and the German-American press generally.

Mr. Wilson's Secretary of War in April advanced as a reason for refusing my application, that commanding officers ought to be "selected because of their previous military training, and, as far as possible, actual military experience." In August, four months later, Mr. Wilson nominated for the position of Brigadier-General, a gentleman from New York, whose "military training and experience" apparently consisted in having been a Captain in the militia, a major in a volunteer regiment which did not leave the country, and Adjutant-General under Governor Sulzer. The Senate requested from the Administration information as to the nominee's military record. The nomination was then withdrawn, on the ground of temporary physical incapacity. A number of the nominations which were not withdrawn were seemingly of substantially similar character.

President Wilson's reasons for refusing my offer had nothing to do either with military considerations or with the public needs. 

The End

A concluding word from Robert J. Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoyed our books. Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people. He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations. If we reed what he has said. We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government.

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”. A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor. Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive. It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions. This was the type of government Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won. He was a visionary. He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us. It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages. His message is an example, clearly defined. It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country. Join the good fight today. You only need to read and interest others to do the same. 

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we reed.” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt. It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”, is one of his famous quotes. Your own part is as simple as helping to introduce others to an example of a life well lived by recommending our web site.