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World War I-dated ALS, three pages on two adjoining sheets, 4.5 x 6.75, Sagamore Hill letterhead, March 18, 1917. Handwritten letter to Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose, in full: “Lodge and Loeb have told me your position on the Colombia treaty, and naturally I am much pleased. Knox in his report implies that our action in 1903 was correct and necessary; but the people at large will never accept this view if they also accept the view that we ought to pay blackmail now. The two positions can not both be right.
I am quite unable to understand the hysterical attacks made on Maine, La Follette & Co., the ‘wilful’ senators, by the same men who with equal hysterics yell ‘support the President!’ Stone, O'Gorman and La Follette were simply carrying out the President's policies, those which he has continually and repeatedly upheld, and has continuously practiced, for two years and a half. I don't approve of them; but I disapprove much more strongly of this.” In fine condition, with tiny staple holes to the upper left corner. Accompanied by the original mailing envelope addressed in Roosevelt's hand.
Written just weeks before the United States entered the First World War, this letter finds Theodore Roosevelt commenting on two major political controversies then before the nation. Writing to Pennsylvania Senator Boies Penrose, Roosevelt first discusses the pending Colombia treaty, negotiated to compensate Colombia for the loss of Panama following the 1903 revolution that led to Panamanian independence and the subsequent acquisition of canal rights by the United States. Because the treaty carried an implicit acknowledgment that the United States had acted improperly in 1903, Roosevelt viewed it as a repudiation of the Panama policy pursued during his administration, insisting that Americans could not simultaneously regard the events of 1903 as "correct and necessary" while agreeing to what he denounced as "blackmail."
Roosevelt also addresses the recent controversy surrounding President Woodrow Wilson's armed-ship legislation, proposed in response to Germany's unrestricted submarine campaign against American shipping. Although a prominent critic of Wilson's foreign policy and an outspoken advocate of military preparedness, Roosevelt condemns attacks on the so-called "wilful" senators, arguing that figures including William J. Stone, former senator James A. O'Gorman, and Robert M. La Follette were merely carrying out policies that Wilson himself had long endorsed. Mentioning both Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Roosevelt's former secretary William Loeb, the letter reflects the continued involvement of Roosevelt and his political allies in the foreign-policy debates that immediately preceded American entry into World War I.
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