About a month ago, I posted about a line I ran across in Sarah Watts' Rough Rider in the White House. It was a striking sentence by Owen Wister about how the holocaust of WWI laid waste to the blood-and-thunder fantasies of he and his fellow red-blooded American authors.

I had trouble believing it, to be honest. Wister's The Virginian is one of the Western novels that sorta laid the ground rules for all those that followed. But following is the full passage, from his Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, which is long out of print:

The great darkness and the great enlightenment proceeded. Four years of it drew a line between all we had known and what we had come to know. Our new selves could never return to our old selves; not because we had lost a brother, a husband, a son, an irreparable friend; some of us had lost no one very near or dear. It was not grief that taught us anything unknown, it was having myths about blood and fire and mutilation and blindness come true. We had read the words in histories, poems, plays; we did not doubt that Joan of Arc had been burned, and that Attila had been known as the Scourge of God. Books, nothing but book, romance, far away and long ago, that is all it meant to us. It can never mean that any more, unless to those whose lack of imagination insulates them from emotional currents.

Turn back to the newspapers. Look at their front pages. The spy is no longer Cooper's hero, no longer Mr. Gilette thrilling us agreeably on the stage in his Secret Service. Secret Service, enemy secret service, is in our streets and homes, opening our trunks and letters, listening to our table talk. Secret service is blowing up du Pont powder mills; attempting to wreck communication between Canada and the United States. I am watching the Missouri from the rear platform as my Burlington train crosses the river at Plattsmouth. A train main tells me to come inside; no one allowed out there; secret agents drop bombs on bridges. Boys you last saw in tennis flannels or dinner jackets are in the Foreign Legion, or with the English, enlisted by way of Canada. You hear of their deaths. You hear of a new word, shell-shock. You hear of London houses wrecked by zeppelin raids. You hear of gas at Ypress. You hear of submarines.

Of course, I don't think Theodore Roosevelt himself was affected in any such way. As WWI approached, he was trying to trump up another volunteer cavalry regiment to relive his Rough Rider glory days. But then, I'm not sure there's been enough industrial warfare made that could satiate Roosevelt's bloodlust. Even the death of his oldest son, Quentin, who was shot down behind German lines, didn't seem to give him much pause.

I find Roosevelt endlessly fascinating. As I've said before, and will say again, part of that is because he seems to me the figure through which American Indian policy becomes American Imperial policy, if you know what I mean. Which suggests an interesting dynamic in itself. After all, the horror of indiscriminate butchery which WWI represented to Wister was hardly new.

The Wounded Knee massacre which marked the final stage of military extermination of American Indians wasn't that long ago. And Roosevelt was directly involved in the total warfare that the US  visited upon the Philippines, which included calls for the complete extermination of the Moros by Roosevelt's hero and military mentor, Colonel Leonard Wood — and which Wood enacted at the Moro Crater Massacre.

What was new, at least to some degree, was that in WWI, as in WWII, Europeans were engaging in massive and total warfare against their own. That's what Wister is objecting to here. Wholesale slaughter can be romantic when it's Indians or Moros on the receiving end; not so when it's Europeans.

You've got to almost respect the lunatic purity of Roosevelt's vision. In a way, he's the most egalitarian of madmen. He doesn't really give a shit who's on the receiving end: war is always pure.