A Great Black Tornado: August to November 1914

Abstract

The Colonel spent the first days of August 1914 at Sagamore Hill, monitoring the war clouds in Europe as best he could while preparing to unleash a broadside against the Colombia treaty and William Jennings Bryan’s peace program generally. His friend John “Cal” O’Laughlin, the Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, advised him to hold his fire as there was little chance at present of the papers publishing anything other than the news from Europe. When the war ceased to be a “nine days wonder,” the newspaperman told TR, then he hoped the Colonel would “hit and hit hard.” As far as Bryan’s many arbitration treaties were concerned, O’Laughlin thought the “European war would teach him that such documents were not worth the paper they were printed on.” Further, he would like to put Bryan and Andrew Carnegie, “wearing their usual hypocritical smiles, between the French and German armies.”1