55 Only George F. Thompson, Party Leaders, 58–71; George F. Hoar to Carl Schurz, 3 June 1902 (CS). This incident occurred on 18 May 1902. See also Hoar to TR, 15 June 1902 (TRP), and TR’s moving reply in Letters, vol. 3, 276–77.
56 “Everybody that” George F. Hoar to Carl Schurz, 3 June 1902 (CS).
57 A few seconds before noon Washington Times, 20 May 1902; The New York Times, 21 May 1902; Leonard Wood diary, 20 May 1902 (LW).
58 On the roof Frank McCoy to his mother, May 1902 (FMcC); The New York Times, 21 May 1902; news clips and photographs in Leonard Wood scrapbook (LW).
59 “—and I hereby” The New York Times, 21 May 1902.
60 From far across Philadelphia Press, 21 May 1902; Frank McCoy to his mother, May 1902 (FMcC).
61 By any standards This sentence is paraphrased from one in Howard Gillette, Jr., “The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902: Workshop for American Progressivism,” American Quarterly, Oct. 1973. See Healy, United States in Cuba, 179–86.
62 A trained surgeon Leonard Wood, transcript of speech at Williams College, 25 June 1902 (LW). See also Leonard Wood, “The Military Government of Cuba,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 21.30 (1903); and Gillette, “Military Occupation of Cuba.”
63 The cannons continued New York Herald, 21 May 1902; Leonard Wood diary, 20 May 1902 (LW); James Hitchman, “The American Touch in Imperial Administration: Leonard Wood in Cuba, 1898–1902,” The Americas, Apr. 1968; Healy, United States in Cuba, 180–82 (“By the end of 1901, free public education was a reality in Cuba”). Gillette, “Military Occupation of Cuba,” suggests that Wood’s experiment did much to inspire the Progressive reform movement in the United States.
64 What protection Leonard Wood to Elihu Root, 9 Apr. 1902 (ER).
65 The forty-fifth Washington Times, 20 May 1902; Frank McCoy to his mother, May 1902 (FMcC).
66 There were groans Eyewitness account in Harry Frank Guggenheim, The United States and Cuba: A Study in International Relations (New York, 1934), 99; New York Herald, 21 May 1902; Leonard Wood diary, 20 May 1902 (LW). Wood also took with him an extremely detailed, up-to-date map of Cuba, to give to the War Department, and a complete survey of Havana harbor and its environs, “including all fortifications, fieldworks, etc.” Wood to Elihu Root, 18 Nov. 1902 (ER).
67 As soon as Leonard Wood diary, 20 May 1902 (LW); Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 77; New York World, 19 May 1902.
CHAPTER 7: GENIUS, FORCE, ORIGINALITY
1 What’s all this Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 91.
2 THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL New York World, 19 May 1902; Oswald Garrison Villard, Fighting Years: Memories of a Liberal Editor (New York, 1939), 152.
3 Whether exercising New York World, 19 May 1902.
4 On 28 May New York World, 29 May 1902; William Dudley Foulke, A Hoosier Autobiography (New York, 1922), 117; Leupp, The Man Roosevelt, 311–13; Wister, Roosevelt, 93–99; New York World, 3 May 1902. For TR’s introduction to this new and exotic sport, see Akiko Murakata, “Theodore Roosevelt and William Sturgis Bigelow: The Story of a Friendship,” Harvard Library Bulletin 23.1 (1975).
5 White House groundsmen John Burroughs, Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (Boston, 1907), 84; New York World, 30 Mar. 1902. Calvin Brice remarked that he intended in the future “to observe the President from the safe summit of some neighboring hill.” Qu. in Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 364.
6 Petitioners visiting TR’s current reading included a novel by the Filipino consciousness-raiser José Rizal. TR to J. C. Abrey, 31 May 1902 (TRP); Maria [Mrs. Bellamy] Storer, In Memoriam Bellamy Storer (privately printed, 1923), 38–39.
7 On another occasion New York World, 22 Sept. 1901. Apparently, Henry Cabot Lodge had bet him he could not do it. TR demanded, and got, the Senator’s hat in settlement.
8 He encouraged his Baltimore Sun, 15 May 1902; Washington Times, 8 June 1902.
9 Hay, who as John Hay qu. in Byron Price memorandum (EMH). For a discussion of the question of presidential succession at this time, see George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (New York, 1903), vol. 2, 168–71.
10 a permanent Census TR, Letters, vol. 3, 238–39.
Chronological Note: Until TR’s Presidency, each census was conducted by a temporary “office” that went out of existence as soon as it reported. These “offices” had become sinkholes of patronage by the end of the nineteenth century; the 1900 census comprised some sixty thousand jobs, all political favors. On 6 Mar. 1902, TR signed a bill that not only created a permanent directorate, but made its appointments subject to the approval of the Secretary of the Interior. Clerkships and other administrative positions were made subject to the civil-service law. In 1903, the Bureau initiated a countrywide system of death registration and statistical reporting; in 1904, it produced the nation’s first population forecasts; in 1905, the first annual reports on cotton supply and distribution, and in 1906, the first in a series of annual “inter-censual” surveys. Theodore G. Clemence, “The Early Years of the Bureau of the Census: The Politics of Appointment and the Struggle for Independence,” ts. in Bureau of the Census, Washington, D.C., 8–12.
11 Senators Aldrich and New York Herald, 18 May 1902; TR to W.H.H. Llewellyn, qu. in Douglas, Many-Sided Roosevelt, 83.
12 “You have wasted” Hoar’s speech is given in Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 5788–98.
13 At Arlington National The following account is based on TR, Presidential Addresses and State Papers (New York, 1910), vol. 1, 59–66; and Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
14 The year’s first New York Sun and Washington Evening Star, 30 May 1902. 110 He had been See ms. in TRP. No previous President had delivered a Memorial Day address at Arlington.
15 “Is it only” TR, Presidential Addresses and State Papers, vol. 1, 60.
16 Had he spat Literary Digest, 7 June 1902. See also Welch, Response to Imperialism, 144, and, for a concise analysis of TR’s antilynch policies from this moment on, William L. Ziglar, “The Decline of Lynching in America,” International Social Science Review 63.1 (1988).
17 Sure enough, when Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 250. TR finally signed it into law on 1 July 1902; Literary Digest, 7 June 1902. An editorial exception was the New York Sun, which hailed TR’s speech as “a great public service … [that] excels anything that the President has yet delivered.” Alfonso, Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines, 203–5, finds the nation’s press, as a whole, supportive of TR’s Philippines policy.
18 Bruised and rueful See TR, Letters, vol. 3, 268–69, for TR’s attempt to explain his Philippines policy to an outraged cleric.
19 On Wednesday, 4 See Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 6267–80.
20 “Be it enacted” Ibid., 6267.
21 old man’s tremor Scholars skeptical of this detail should try to read Morgan’s handwriting from 1902.
22 He had no new Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 6267–80.
23 Senator Hanna sat The Treaty of New Granada was basically a trade agreement intended to protect free transit (then by railway) across the Isthmus of Panama. In return for right of way, the United States guaranteed the “perfect neutrality” of the Isthmus, as well as “the rights of sovereignty and property which New Granada has and possesses over the said territory.” Lawrence Beilenson, The Treaty Trap: A History of the Performance of Political Treaties by the United States and European Nations (Washington, D.C., 1969), 33–34.
24 Storming on Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 6275.
25 As soon as Ibid., 6280.
26 WHEN SENATORS RECONVENED Washington Evening Star, 5 June 1902; DuVal, Cadiz to Cathay, 165; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 319–22. The volcanic map was provided courtesy of Philippe Bunau-Varilla.
27 Hanna entered to Thomas Beer, Hanna, Crane, and the Mauve Decade (New York, 1941), 600; Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1
, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 6317ff. All quotations from Hanna’s speech come from the latter source.
28 The chamber settled Beer, Hanna. For the “facts and conditions” behind Hanna’s conversion, see Miner, Fight for the Panama Route, 102–4.
29 For the next The Washington Post, 6 June 1902; Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 6, 6317–21.
30 “Oh, do make” Beer, Hanna, 600.
31 Polls in smoke-filled The conspiracy theory was dampened by another rumor that Hanna was the agent of James J. Hill and the transcontinental railroads. He was actually conducting a filibuster, in order to have no canal at all. New York Journal, 17 June 1902.
32 HANNA RESUMED HIS Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 7, 6380; Philippe Bunau-Varilla, Panama: The Creation, Destruction, and Resurrection (London, 1933), 242; Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 7, 6381. Managua is here a correction for Hanna’s misspoken Nicaragua.
33 For another hour Congressional Record, 57 Cong., sess. 1, 1902, vol. 35, pt. 7, 6377–87; Washington Evening Star, 6 June 1902; Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 248. The best account of the legislative and diplomatic struggle for the Panama Canal is in DuVal, Cadiz to Cathay.
34 AS LONG AS Beer, Hanna, 602. The senators were Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania and Thomas Platt of New York.
35 MEANWHILE, HIS CUBAN Guggenheim, United States and Cuba, 101–6; Healy, United States in Cuba, 196–200; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 288. For a detailed discussion of the reciprocity issue, see United States Tariff Commission, The Effects of the Cuban Reciprocity Treaty of 1902, miscellaneous series, no. 22 (Washington, D.C., 1929).
36 Common sense TR, Letters, vol. 3, 228, 265–66; U.S. Tariff Commission, Effects. For evidence of TR’s strong feelings on reciprocity, see his passionate reworkings of Spooner Amendment drafts in TRP.
37 On 13 June Tomas Palma to TR, 12 Sept. 1902 (TRP). The text of TR’s Special Message is in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C., 1911), vol. 15, 6682–84. See also Robert Freeman Smith, “Cuba: Laboratory for Dollar Diplomacy, 1898–1917,” The Historian 28.4 (Aug. 1966).
38 “Cuba is a young” Washington Evening Star, 13 June 1902.
39 Some senators detected The Atlanta Constitution, 14 June 1902; Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich, 187; Leonard Wood to Elihu Root, 9 Apr. 1902 (ER); World’s Work, June 1902. Embarrassingly for TR, the Message was preceded by a press revelation that Leonard Wood had used government funds for reciprocity propaganda.
40 “My dear Mr. Cannon” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 272–73.
41 Representative Joseph Blair Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois: Uncle Joe Cannon’s Experiment with Personal Power (New York, 1951), 118–19, 211, 40. TR had spoken out on the subject of reclamation as early as Nov. 1900, at the National Irrigation Congress. D. Jerome Tweton, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Arid Lands,” North Dakota Quarterly 36.2 (1968).
42 For a quarter Lacey, “Mysteries of Earth-Making,” 372; Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776–1936 (Princeton, N.J., 1942), 325–29.
43 Roosevelt expressed TR, Letters, vol. 3, 277. Actually, Newlands and other lawmakers representing both Eastern and Western interests had been working on sketches for the Reclamation Act since 1900. But TR managed, with considerable skill, to merge the best features of all these proposals into a bill that overcame powerful Republican opposition in Congress. See TR, Letters, vol. 3, 317; Marc P. Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1986), 116–18; and William D. Rowley, Reclaiming the Arid West: The Career of Francis G. Newlands (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 2–6, 102–4.
44 Cannon ignored Rowley, Reclaiming the Arid West, 103; P. P. Wells, “Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Record,” Oct. 1919 memorandum prepared for Joseph Bucklin Bishop (GP); Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 331–33; Lacey, “Mysteries of Earth-Making,” 372.
45 “They must be” TR to National Irrigation Congress, 15 Sept. 1903, Letters, vol. 3, 600. TR’s role in bringing about the Reclamation Act was but a chapter in the overall story. See Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 10–15. For the intellectual and sociological aspects of the reclamation movement, see Lacey, “Mysteries of Earth-Making”; for a view of the Reclamation Act as “the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state,” see Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 115ff.
46 Reclamationists spoke Beer, Hanna, 595. See also Review of Reviews, Apr. 1902. Tweton, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Arid Lands,” quotes The Denver Post: “For the happy termination of an endeavor which … appeared almost hopeless, the people of the West are indebted to President Roosevelt, without whose influence the passage of the bill would have been practically impossible.” For the subsequent application of the Reclamation Act, beginning with Nevada’s Truckee Dam (dedicated 17 June 1905), see Rowley, Reclaiming the Arid West, 1–6, and Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 15–26.
47 DURING THE NEXT Beer, Hanna, 601; Bunau-Varilla, Panama, 247; McCullough, Path Between the Seas, 324; Miner, Fight for the Panama Route, 154–55. At least one bribe of ten thousand dollars in cash was offered to Senator Fred T. Dubois of Idaho, on behalf of certain “New York legal interests.” John T. Morgan to Henry Watterson, 10 Dec. 1903 (JTM).
48 By a margin Review of Reviews, Aug. 1902; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 284. For a full account of the passage of the Panama Canal Act, see Miner, Fight for the Panama Route, 125–56.
49 ROOSEVELT’S EUPHORIA Washington Evening Star, 21 June 1902; Literary Digest, 26 July 1902, qu. Le Temps (France); New York Evening Post, 14 June 1902. See also Healy, United States in Cuba, 201.
50 Somewhat cheered Boston Herald, 26 June 1902; Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 104.
51 Grief; disease; desire EKR’s miscarriage seems to have occurred in mid-May 1902. Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 237. Strangely, however, TR was still boasting about her pregnancy at the end of that month. Possibly EKR kept the news from him. A year later, she miscarried again.
52 At the welcoming The Boston Globe, 25 June 1902.
53 “When we were” Wister, Roosevelt, 7. Wister had just published his epochal Western novel, The Virginian. It was dedicated to TR.
54 The President’s behavior Henry James, Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard University, 1869–1909 (Boston, 1930), vol. 2, 159; Wood, Roosevelt, 100–101. Supplementary details in the following paragraphs come from the Boston Evening Record and The Washington Post, 26 June 1902.
55 At the Alumni Hoar qu. in Fiske Warren diary, 2 Dec. 1903 (MST). The phrase like an impulsive boy is Senator Hoar’s own. For evidence of TR’s sincere veneration of Hoar, see TR, Letters, vol. 3, 276–77.
56 Dr. Eliot began Boston Evening Record, 25 June 1902; unidentified news clips in Presidential scrapbook (TRP). For TR’s incomprehension of financial matters, see, e.g., TR, Letters, vol. 3, 691.
57 Harvard, to Theodore Alfonso, Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines, 56–57; Boston Evening Record and The Washington Post, 26 June 1902.
58 Hay, listening John Hay to TR, 26 June 1902 (TRP); The Washington Post, 26 June 1902.
59 He dropped back Boston Herald, 26 June 1902; Rhodes, McKinley and Roosevelt, 232–33; Douglas, Many-Sided Roosevelt, 136. More than two weeks later, John Hay was still marveling. “Theodore made one of the most striking speeches I ever heard,” he wrote Henry Adams on 11 July. Hay, Letters, vol. 3, 253.
60 Roosevelt had to Boston Evening Record, 26 June 1902, in Presidential scrapbook (TRP).
61 WASHINGTON WAS Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 238–39; William Seale, The President’s House (Washington, D.C., 1986), vol. 2, 669–84.
62 He took up James Garfield diary, 27 June 1902 (JRG). Of the fourteen specific requests TR had made in his First Message to Congress, only three had been granted: the National Reclamation Act, the Canal Act, and the Census Act. TR’s e
leven failures were to get government supervision of trusts; publicity as a remedy for trust abuses; an anti-anarchism measure; stronger immigration laws; modified reciprocity; aid to American shipping; a militia law; a General Staff of the Army; a revised merit system; a Department of Commerce; and reorganizaton of the consular service.
63 Invitations were New York Herald, 15 June 1902; Washington Times, 30 Mar. 1902.
64 Congress adjourned John Hay to Henry Adams, 11 July 1902 (JH); Barry, Forty Years, 274–75; The Washington Post, 4 July 1902; Review of Reviews, Aug. 1902.
Chronological Note: The war had lasted forty-one months. 126,500 Americans had seen service in the Philippines; 4,200 had been killed, and 2,800 wounded. TR’s amnesty specifically excluded the Moros of Mindanao, who, as Muslims, were fanatically determined to fight to the last man. Their terrorism was to sputter on through most of his Presidency. Nevertheless, the former Filipino rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo told William H. Taft that TR’s peaceful gesture “was worth more than many regiments of soldiers.” For the rapid moderation of American domestic argument about the Philippines after Malvar’s surrender and TR’s order, see Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation,” 245–50.
CHAPTER 8: THE GOOD OLD SUMMERTIME
1 Th’ capital iv Dunne, Observations by Mr. Dooley, 186–87.
2 SUMMER RAIN WAS Except where otherwise indicated, the following account of TR’s arrival home on 5 July 1902 is based on the New York American, 6 July 1902; “Oyster Bay: The Summer Capital,” Washington Times, 13 July 1902 (text and illustrations); unidentified news clips in Presidential scrapbook (TRP); and pictures in Albert Loren Cheney, Personal Memoirs of the Home Life of the Late Theodore Roosevelt (Washington, D.C., 1919), passim. Today, the rail approach is much the same, and the “new” station of 1902 still stands, minus only its platform awnings.
3 “There are many” Boston Herald, 3 Aug. 1902. The standard village history is Frances Irvin, Oyster Bay: A Sketch, rev. Jane Soames Knickerson (Oyster Bay, N.Y., 1987).
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