Theodore Roosevelt Predicts American Involvement in WWI (and Presages Its Entry into World War II): “It may take a disaster… to bring us to our senses.”

The former President comforts his English friend "during these dark days", and compares the English situation in 1916 with the Union cause before the Battle of Gettysburg: "You are passing through dark days; as dark as, but no darker than, those this nation saw in the latter part of '62 and the first half of '63.  But I firmly believe that you are at last aroused as the French are aroused, and that you will fight to a finish and will therefore win."

America's involvement in World War I was not a forgone conclusion.  Separated from Europe by a great ocean and imbued with the legacy of generations who sought to avoid foreign entanglements, Americans were not quick to think that their interests were advanced by association with the English and French against the Germans. Theodore Roosevelt, a soldier who had famously commanded the Rough Riders, and the President who ushered America into the 20 century and defined its new international role was, however, a proponent of U.S. intervention into the war. He saw the German invasion of Belgium as justifying such action and sneered at President Woodrow Wilson's attempts to maintain neutrality.  His was a constant voice against Wilson and what TR felt were his timid and weak-kneed policies, instead advocating action against Germany.  

In 1915, with Europe locked in a deadly struggle stretching over an entire Continent, the Germans sunk the HMS Lusitania, a British vessel that carried many Americans onboard.  The high death toll and the U-Boat sinking of what appeared to be a passenger vessel incensed Americans. But U.S. action would not occur until 1917, and In the meantime, in 1916, Wilson was reelected under the slogan, "He kept us out of war."

Arthut Weigall was a noted English Egyptologist who in time took over for Howard Carter as the protector of discoveries in Luxor.  He was a writer, a journalist and scholar, a man likely to catch the attention of TR.  TR spent three days with the Weigall and even reviewed his book on Egypt.  With the war seemingly never ending and British lives and treasure being lost, Roosevelt wrote Weigall to encourage him.  

This fascinating and unpublished letter presages American involvement in the war and predicts a great event that would precipitate it: the discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram, which seemed an attempt by the Germans to draw Mexico into the war by promising return of land seized by the United States in 1848, a warlike position and clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Interestingly, a parallel situation took place just a quarter of a century later, when the disaster at Pearl Harbor had the effect of drawing the United States into World War II against Germany. Moreover, TR draws a comparison between the dire straights of England in 1916 and the Union forces in the American Civil War in early 1863, before the Battle of Gettysburg and the turning of the tide. He also refers to the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in the early 1870s.

Autograph letter signed, Sagamore Hill, January 8, 1916.  "Mr dear Mr. Weigall, I thank you for sending me your very interesting article. Under ordinary circumstances I should like to speak of many matters to you.  But as it is, I am almost as much concerned about the war as you are.  I have done everything I could to make my country stand as it ought to stand; but we are cursed with a President who is a timid and shifty phrasemaker; and naturally our people, when they are not roused by their official leader, fail to realize their duty, or the real nearness to them of events in the rest of the world. Throughout most of the Victorian epoch, and for ten years immediately preceding that war, the English people occupied the same attitude, altho fortunately they had certain traditions about navy and imperial duty which impressed themselves even on the least far-sighted of the men in office.  I do not know whether sordid materialism or merely sentimentality is the poorer asset in a national makeup; and we are cursed with both. At least I think this people is sound; but it may take a disaster as great as France suffered in '70 to bring us to our senses.

"You are passing through dark days; as dark as, but no darker than, those this nation saw in the latter part of '62 and the first half of '63.  But I firmly believe that you are at last aroused as the French are aroused, and that you will fight to a finish and will therefore win. With the heartiest good wishes for yourself and your nation."  This fascinating letter and poignant letter was once the property of the legendary autograph dealer ASW Rosenbach, who was active from the 1920s to 1951, and comes in his folder. It has remained in the family of the collector to whom Rosenbach originally sold it since then, and only now appears again on the market.

After the U.S. became involved in the First World War in 1917, an action Roosevelt had called for (as here) and applauded, his sons enlisted and fought. His beloved son Quentin, the youngest and the apple of his eye, was killed in action, a blow from which TR never recovered.