The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Long did not understand that extreme crisis, whether of an intimate or public nature, had precisely the reverse effect on Theodore Roosevelt. The man’s personality was cyclonic, in that he tended to become unstable in times of low pressure. The slightest rise in the barometer outside, and his turbulence smoothed into a whirl of coordinated activity, while a core of stillness developed within. Under maximum pressure Roosevelt was sunny, calm, and unnaturally clear. History was to show that his behavior as Acting Secretary of the Navy on 25 February 1898, was neither nervous nor spontaneous. It was the logical result of ten months of strategic planning, at the Navy Department and at the Metropolitan Club, in his correspondence with Captain Mahan, and on his walks with Captain Wood. “Someday,” Roosevelt told the latter confidently, “they will understand.”51

  SIR WILLIAM OSLER examined Edith over the weekend and confirmed that she was “critically ill.” There was an abdominal swelling which should be operated on at once.52 For some unexplained reason Roosevelt ignored this warning and relied instead on more cautious advice. Edith lay wasting with fever for another week, too frail even to stand the sound of his voice reading to her. On 7 March, all opinions concurred that she must undergo surgery or die. He sat holding her hand until ether removed her from him.53

  The operation revealed an abscess near the hip, and was completely successful.

  ROOSEVELT’S CONTEMPT FOR “peace at any price men” rose to new heights as he watched William McKinley trying to avoid war in the weeks following the Maine disaster. Certainly the President showed a touching faith in the benign effects of gold currency. His first proposal was that the United States end the Cuban problem once and for all by buying the island outright for $300 million. But Congress showed reluctance to put such funds at his disposal, and the plan was dropped.54 Then, on 25 February, the same day Roosevelt alerted Dewey to the imminence of war, McKinley reportedly suggested that if the Court of Inquiry found Spain responsible for the loss of the Maine, a large cash indemnity would assuage America’s grief. Congress did not like this idea either.55

  “An honest man, but weak,” the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon, remarked of McKinley.56 By early March, when preliminary divers’ reports indicated that a mine might have caused the explosion, the President was desperate enough to use scare tactics. He flabbergasted Joseph Cannon of the House Appropriations Committee with a request for $50 million, saying, “I must have money to get ready for war. I am doing everything possible to prevent war, but it must come, and we are not prepared for war.”57

  McKinley intended this to be his political masterstroke, silencing warmongers in both Washington and Madrid with a sudden display of Presidential decisiveness. At first the move seemed bound to succeed. Congress reacted with such shocked surprise—probably assuming the President was in possession of secret evidence of Spain’s hostile intentions—that on 8 March the “Fifty Million Bill” became law without a single dissenting vote.58 McKinley was authorized to spend the money as he saw fit. Spaniards and Cubans boggled at the wealth of a treasury which could produce such a huge appropriation in extra defense funds with no effect upon its credit. It was announced that the bulk of the appropriation would be given to the Navy Department for a crash program of naval expansion. Construction of three 12,500-ton battleships was to begin immediately, supplemented by sixteen destroyers, fourteen torpedo-boats, and four monitors. In addition, the department could assemble a large auxiliary fleet of ships purchased abroad.59

  Roosevelt was not as overjoyed as he might have been by the President’s apparent conversion to the doctrine of preparedness. Nine months before, at the Naval War College, he had warned against the futility of any such last-minute attempt at naval expansion. The Maine Court of Inquiry was due to publish its formal report any day now; if it corroborated his own suspicion of sabotage, “I believe it will be very hard to hold the country.”60 What use would McKinley’s construction program be then? His only hope of improving the present strength of the Navy lay in the auxiliary-fleet program.

  The ink on the Fifty Million Bill was scarcely dry before Roosevelt and Long began to review all available war vessels on the international market. News that Spain was already bargaining for ships inspired even the Secretary to a sense of urgency, although he continued to hope illogically that the buildup would have some deterrent effect.61

  Roosevelt was given especial responsibility for purchasing merchant-men suitable for quick conversion into cruisers.62 Among the many dealers who flocked to his office was one Charles R. Flint, who assessed him as “a young man at the very peak of his truly tremendous physical and mental energy.” The Assistant Secretary was obviously in a tearing hurry. Flint started to tell him about the Brazilian ship Nictheroy, but Roosevelt knew all about her:

  ROOSEVELT What is the price?

  FLINT Half a million dollars.

  ROOSEVELT (snapping) I will take her.

  FLINT Good. I shall write you a letter—

  ROOSEVELT Don’t bother me with a letter. I haven’t time to read it.

  “We eventually did have a formal contract,” Flint noted, “… dictated by Mr. Roosevelt. It was one of the most concise and at the same time one of the cleverest contracts I have ever seen. He made it a condition that the vessel should be delivered under her own steam at a specific point and within a specific period. In one sentence he thus covered all that might have been set forth in pages and pages of specifications. For the vessel had to be in first-class condition to make the time scheduled in the contract! Mr. Roosevelt always had that faculty of looking through details to the result to be obtained.”63

  EVERY NOW AND AGAIN President McKinley would indulge in a little banter with his Assistant Attending Surgeon, Leonard Wood. “Have you and Theodore declared war yet?”

  “No, Mr. President, but we think you should.”64

  McKinley always shook his head when the handsome officer asked to be returned to active duty in the Army. Wood worked off his growing restlessness with more and more violent exercise with Roosevelt. The pair were now inseparable, and Roosevelt began to include Wood in his regular appeals to General Tillinghast. “I have a man here who rendered most gallant service with the regular Army against the Apaches, whom I should very much like to bring in with me if I could raise a regiment.”65

  MID-MARCH CAME and went. Forsythia, magnolia, hyacinths, and tulips sweetened Washington’s warming air.66 Still the Court of Inquiry delayed its Maine report. In an atmosphere of mounting political tension, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont prepared to deliver a speech on Cuba, which he had just visited.

  Proctor, despite his friendly assistance in behalf of Dewey the previous fall, was by no means as “ardent for the war” as Roosevelt supposed. He was a careful, rather colorless politician, respected on all sides as a former Cabinet officer, a friend of big business, and an intimate of President McKinley. When he rose in the Senate on 17 March, the nation listened.67

  Speaking coldly and dispassionately, Proctor confessed that he had gone to Cuba an isolationist, and returned with views inclining toward armed intervention. For the next several hours he cataloged the horrors he had seen, most notably the barbaric indignities of reconcentrado camps, where four hundred thousand peasants were living like pigs and dying like flies. After discussing Spain’s promises of “autonomy” with certain eminent Cubans, he was convinced that the authorities would never yield power, and that the insurrectos would never cease to fight for it. “To me,” he concluded, “the strongest appeal is not the barbarity practiced by Weyler, nor the loss of the Maine … but the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”68

  The effect of this toneless speech, after months of fiery oratory for and against war, was so great as to convert large numbers of conservative Senators to the cause of Cuba Libre. Even more significantly, Wall Street’s hitherto solid resistance to war now bega
n to crumble, while business groups across the country expressed profound concern. Political observers predicted that if McKinley did not intervene upon receipt of the Maine report—whatever it said—Cuba Libre would become the campaign cry of the Democrats in the fall. “And who can doubt,” asked the Chicago Times-Herald, “that by that sign … they will sweep the country?”69

  Three days later, on 20 March, the President was confidentially informed that the Court of Inquiry would soon make a “unanimous report that the Maine was blown up by a submarine mine.”70 Some inkling of this message must have reached Roosevelt, who vented his wrath in a positively Elizabethan outburst to Brooks Adams. “The blood of the Cubans, the blood of women and children who have perished by the hundred thousand in hideous misery, lies at our door; and the blood of the murdered men of the Maine calls not for indemnity but for the full measure of atonement which can only come by driving the Spaniard from the New World.”71

  Events moved rapidly to a climax. On 24 March the Navy ordered squadron commanders to paint their white warships battlegray.72 On 25 March the American Minister in Madrid was warned that Spain’s presence in Cuba was now considered “unbearable” by the Administration, and that unless an immediate diplomatic settlement was reached “the President … will lay the whole question before Congress.”73 And on 26 March, Roosevelt publicly confronted Senator Hanna, one of the last holdouts for peace, at a Gridiron Club after-dinner speech which had the whole capital agog. “We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba,” he insisted, and smacked his fist into his palm. Then, wheeling and staring directly at Hanna, he said that “the interests of the business world and of financiers might be paramount in the Senate,” but they were not so with the American people. Anyone who wanted to stand in the way of popular opinion “was welcome to try the experiment.” Hanna’s porcine neck turned purple, and his knuckles tightened on the arms of his chair, as applause filled the room. “Now, Senator,” said his neighbor dryly, “may we please have war?”74

  On 28 March the Maine report was finally made public. Although the court made no accusation of Spanish or Cuban guilt (there being absolutely no incriminating evidence), it confirmed that the explosion of the ship’s forward magazines had been touched off by an external device, and absolved the U.S. Navy of any “fault or negligence” in the disaster.75 Within hours a new ominous chant was drowning out calls of Cuba Libre:

  Remember the MAINE!

  To hell with Spain!

  ALMOST UNNOTICED, in the general uproar, was a historic memo from Theodore Roosevelt to John D. Long. He wished to draw the Secretary’s attention to the “flying machine” of his friend Professor S. P. Langley, having watched it briefly flutter over the Potomac River.76 “The machine has worked,” Roosevelt wrote. “It seems to me worth while for this Government to try whether it will not work on a large enough scale to be of use in the event of war.” He recommended that a board of four scientifically trained officers be appointed to examine the strategic and economic aspects of producing flying machines “on a large scale.” After some prodding, Secretary Long agreed, and named Charles H. Davis chairman of the board. By the time Davis reported on the “revolutionary” potential of air warfare, the Assistant Secretary had moved on to other things. It would be a long time before Roosevelt was recognized as the earliest official proponent of U.S. Naval Aviation.77

  HAGGARD, SMUDGE-EYED, drugged, and occasionally tearful as the inevitability of war forced itself upon him, President McKinley managed to maintain statesmanlike decorum at least through the end of March.78 While Congress debated the Maine report, he sent an ultimatum to Madrid courteously demanding a declaration of armistice in Cuba, effective 1 April. His terms stipulated that he be mediator of any subsequent negotiations for peace between the Spanish Government and the insurrectos. If no agreement was reached by 1 October (i.e., five weeks before the fall elections), McKinley would assume the role of final arbiter. He also insisted that all reconcentrado prisoners be set free, and that Spain cooperate with the United States in relief efforts.79

  On Thursday, the last day of the month, Queen María Christina’s ministers agreed to all points of McKinley’s ultimatum except that of armistice. If the insurrectos wished to declare a truce themselves, well and good; Spain would not end four centuries of New World dominion with an ignominious acceptance of defeat.80 McKinley saw no flexibility, only obstructionism, in this reply. After a weekend of sleepless deliberation, he decided, around midnight on 3 April, that he could not afford to gamble with Cuba, or with Congress, or with the Republican party any longer. The will of the American people, reiterated ad nauseam by Assistant Secretary Roosevelt (whom in self-defense, he had finally stopped seeing), must be heeded. McKinley went to bed and next morning began work on a war message to Congress.81

  THE IMMINENCE OF WAR, like the imminence of death, is enough to give the most ardent soul a momentary pause, to reaffirm basic truths and articulate thoughts long held in suppression. In such frame of mind did Theodore Roosevelt write one of his best letters, to William Sturgis Bigelow, while Madrid pondered McKinley’s ultimatum. For once he wrote calmly, reasonably, without any attempt at vulgar bravado:

  I say quite sincerely that I shall not go for my own pleasure. On the contrary if I should consult purely my own feelings I should earnestly hope that we would have peace. I like life very much. I have always led a joyous life. I like thought, and I like action, and it will be very bitter to me to leave my wife and children; and while I think I could face death with dignity, I have no desire before my time has come to go out into the everlasting darkness.… So I shall not go into a war with any undue exhilaration of spirits or in a frame in any way approaching recklessness or levity; but my best work here is done.

  … One of the commonest taunts directed at men like myself is that we are armchair and parlor jingoes who wish to see others do what we only advocate doing. I care very little for such a taunt, except as it affects my usefulness, but I cannot afford to disregard the fact that my power for good, whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.82

  Bigelow, unimpressed, told Secretary Long that Roosevelt might by the same token “wear no clothes in the street to prove that he is not a negro.”83

  THE PRESIDENT HAD DECIDED to send his war message up to the Hill on Monday, 4 April, but hints from Madrid that further concessions might be made mañana caused a postponement until Wednesday the sixth. Belligerents in Congress, who now comprised a majority, did not see why they should have to wait two more days, or for that matter two more hours, before settling with “the butchers of Spain.” When the message was postponed a second time, in order to allow for free evacuation of American citizens from Cuba, frustrated legislators crowded the White House so threateningly that McKinley was obliged to lock the precious document in a safe. “By God,” one Senator growled to Assistant Secretary of State Rufus Day, “don’t your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged?”84

  As always, Theodore Roosevelt produced the most quotable insult. “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”85

  7 April was Holy Thursday in Havana. Under lowering skies, bands throughout the city played soothing sacred music. On Good Friday, Roosevelt assured his classmate Bob Bacon that he did not want to annex Cuba, only to free it from “medieval” fiefdom: “Let us fight on the broad grounds of securing the independence of a people who, whether they amount to much or not, have been treated with hideous brutality by their oppressors.” On Saturday the American Minister in Madrid was told that at the behest of the Pope, Spain would declare an armistice in Cuba after all. On Easter Sunday, the Minister followed up with a personal appeal to McKinley: “I hope nothing will now be done to humiliate Spain.” But on Monday, 11 April, the President finally sent his message to Congress. Debate still rages as to whether by doing so McKinley confessed his inability to hold the dogs of war any longer, or whether a study of Cuban history persuaded him that
Spain’s promises were not to be believed. If he wanted peace, why did he not keep the message locked up, and announce that, thanks to the armistice, a diplomatic victory was at hand? If he wanted war, why did he not send in the message sooner? Perhaps the President realized that nothing he thought or said was of much consequence now. America, as Theodore Roosevelt kept saying, “needed” a war. “I have exhausted every effort to relieve the intolerable condition of affairs which is at our doors,” McKinley told Congress. “Prepared to execute every obligation imposed upon me by the Constitution and the law, I await your action.”86

  DURING THE WEEK THAT Congress took to debate McKinley’s message—pausing, once, to roar out an impromptu chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”87—Roosevelt redoubled his efforts to secure a commission in the Army. There was no question of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy applying for service at sea—“I shall be useless on a ship”—and he was equally determined not to become “part of the garrison in a fort.”88 Preliminary mobilization was ordered on 15 April, well in advance of any declaration of war, and he at once began to pester the Secretary of War, Russell A. Alger, and General-in-Chief Nelson A. Miles. Neither man impressed him. “Alger has no force whatsoever … Miles is a brave peacock,” he wrote in a new pocket diary. “They both told me they could put 100,000 men in Tampa in 24 hours! The folly, the lack of preparation, are almost inconceivable.”89

  Frustration at the slowness of Congress to act, at his own inability to get a place in any New York regiment, vented itself in further jabs of angry ink. “The President still feebly is trying for peace. His weakness and vacillation are even more ludicrous than painful.… Reed … is malignantly bent on preventing all preparation for war.” Fortunately there was one department in the Administration ready and willing to fight. “Long is at last awake … I have the Navy in good shape.”90