The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  The Moro Massacre, March 1906. President Roosevelt called it a “brilliant feat of arms” that “upheld the honor of the American flag.” Mark Twain called it a “slaughter [by] Christian butchers.” (National Archives)

  Meanwhile, Alice decided she had to marry Nick. She later wrote, “I felt I had to get away from the White House and my family.”6 Alice remembered that she broke the news to Edith in the First Lady’s bathroom “while she was brushing her teeth, so that she should have a moment to think before she said anything.”7 Nick informed Teddy in the White House study downstairs. Congressman Longworth’s well-known reputation as a boozing womanizer apparently didn’t faze the president. Nick was well born, wealthy, and a fellow member of Harvard’s exclusive Porcellian Club. (Roosevelt wrote to friends, “Nick and I are both members of the Porc, you know.”8)

  When the press asked Congressman Longworth if he had asked Alice for her hand while on the cruise, Nick was less than gallant: “I don’t really know. I’ve been in what you might call a trance for so long that I am somewhat mixed as to dates…. I did not know officially that I was engaged until the announcement.”9

  Nicholas Longworth, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Theodore Roosevelt, the White House, February 17, 1906. Alice later wrote, “I felt I had to get away from the White House and my family.” At the end of the day, Alice’s stepmother, Edith Roosevelt, told her, “I want you to know that I am glad to see you leave. You have never been anything but trouble.” (Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

  Alice and Nick were married in the East Room of the White House on February 17, 1906. “Trinkets,” Alice had answered when asked about her preference for wedding presents. “Preferably diamond trinkets.”10 Guests marveled at the gifts that overflowed the Blue Room. There were costly items from everyone who sought the president’s favor, plus extravagant baubles from foreign friends: a solid gold jewelry box with a diamond-encrusted lid from King Edward VII, a Gobelin tapestry from France, a lifetime supply of silk from China, a stunning pearl necklace from Cuba.

  At the end of her big day, the bride said goodbye to her stepmother. “Mother,” declared Alice, “this has been quite the nicest wedding I’ll ever have. I’ve never had so much fun.”

  Edith responded, “I want you to know that I am glad to see you leave. You have never been anything but trouble.”11

  While steaming across the Pacific the previous summer, Alice had written of Nick in her diary: “He will go off and do something with some horrible woman and it will kill me off.”12 Years later, the longtime doorkeeper of the House of Representatives called Congressman Longworth “one of the greatest womanizers in history on Capitol Hill.”13 By 1912, Alice contemplated divorce. “He hates me and I him,”14 she wrote. Twelve years later, forty-year-old Alice found herself pregnant with the child of her own illicit lover, Senator William Borah. Her best friend wrote in her diary, “Poor Alice. She feels humiliated about the baby and dreads what people will say.”15

  Alice gave birth to Paulina Longworth on February 14, 1925, exactly forty-one years to the day Alice’s mother and grandmother had died. The New York Times caption under a photo of Nick holding Paulina mocked, “Longworth Poses as Fond Father.”16 Nicholas Longworth would later die at the age of sixty-two on April 9, 1931, in the home of one of his lovers, who then traveled to his funeral on a train with another of his mistresses.

  As she grew into a shy, awkward girl, Paulina disappointed her outgoing mother. Alice often finished her daughter’s sentences. Alice’s brother Kermit referred to Paulina as “Sister’s competition.”17 Paulina tried to kill herself a number of times and received shock therapy in mental institutions. On January 27, 1957, Paulina fatally swallowed too many sleeping pills. Alice denied it was suicide.

  In her old age, Alice was one of Washington’s supreme hostesses, known for her biting wit. The pillow on her living room couch was embroidered with “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody come sit next to me.”

  February played a special role in Alice Roosevelt’s life. In that month over the years she had been born, her mother and grandmother had died, she had married Nick, and she had given birth. Alice died at the age of ninety-six on February 20, 1980. She was buried wearing the pearl necklace given to her seventy-four years earlier by American-ruled Cuba when she had been a young bride named Princess Alice.

  AN IMPORTANT TEST OF any chief executive is how well he chooses and grooms his successor. Five months before the election of 1908, Roosevelt wrote the British historian George Otto Trevelyan that “always excepting Washington and Lincoln, I believe that Taft as President will rank with any other man who has ever been in the White House.”18 Writing to Taft, Roosevelt was even more effusive: “I have always said you would be the greatest President, bar only Washington and Lincoln, and I feel mighty inclined to strike out the exceptions!”19

  Roosevelt was more confident than Taft was. Years earlier, Taft had written to one who encouraged him to be president, “I have no ambition in that direction. Any party which would nominate me would make a great mistake.”20

  Taft possessed none of Roosevelt’s public-relations genius. During the 1908 presidential campaign, an irritated Teddy chided his friend: “I am convinced that the prominence that has been given to your golf playing has not been wise, and from now on I hope that your people will do everything they can to prevent one word being sent out about either your fishing or your playing golf…. I never let friends advertise my tennis, and never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear.”21

  Taft pleased his wife and Roosevelt by becoming president, but—as he had predicted—he was all thumbs as a chief executive. “The honest greenhorn at the poker table,” the New York Times called him.22

  Roosevelt’s decision to oppose Taft in 1912 for the presidency was a disaster: it ruined the Roosevelt-Taft friendship, divided old loyalties (Alice supported her father while Nick supported Taft), and guaranteed victory for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson.

  In 1921, President Warren Harding appointed Taft to be chief justice of the Supreme Court, where he served up until a month before he died on March 8, 1930, at the age of seventy-seven. William Howard Taft is the only president besides John F. Kennedy buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

  ROOSEVELT’S FRONTIER HEROES HAD triumphed in North America because, through immigration and extermination, they had eventually outnumbered the continent’s Indians. No such glorious result would manifest itself in the Philippines. After cheerleading the expenditure of millions of taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, Roosevelt eventually threw in the towel and admitted the islands’ strategic and economic worthlessness. On August 21, 1907, Roosevelt wrote Taft, “I don’t see where they are of any value to us…. the Philippines form our heel of Achilles. They are all that makes the present situation with Japan dangerous.”23 And later as ex-president, Roosevelt wrote, “I do not believe that America has any special beneficial interest in retaining the Philippines.”24 But such private conclusions would not find their way into his big stick proclamations regarding the Aryan role in Asia.

  The United States would free the Philippines after World War II, only to leave it under the rule of descendants of the entrenched oligarchy that William Howard Taft had taught democracy’s masquerade.

  NOTHING WOULD SHAKE ROOSEVELT’S belief that what was good for White Christian males was good for the world. In his postpresidency, Roosevelt delivered exuberant speeches with titles such as “Expansion of the White Races,” in which he repeated the ideas that had earned him his Harvard degree and propelled his rise to best-selling author and president:

  It is undoubtedly true that the Indian population of America is larger today than it was when Columbus discovered the continent, and stands on a far higher plane of happiness and efficiency…. Doubtless occasional brutalities have been committed by white settlers but these brutalities were not an appreciable factor in the dying out of the natives.

  Of c
ourse, the best that can happen to any people that has not already a high civilization of its own is to assimilate and profit by American or European ideas, the ideas of civilization and Christianity,… the prerequisite condition to the moral and material advance of the peoples who dwell in the darker corners of the earth.

  I am sure that when international history is written, from the standpoint of acclaiming international justice, one chapter will tell with heartiest praise what our people have done in the Philippines.25

  Roosevelt never lost his belief in the need for the White man to retain his barbarian virtues through righteous war—where the Whites would triumph over the dark Others. In 1907, Andrew Carnegie scolded Roosevelt: “Disputants are both seeking righteousness, both feel themselves struggling for what is just. Who is to decide? No one. According to you they must then go to war to decide not what is right but who is strong.”26

  Professor Burgess of Columbia had taught young Teddy that only those Whites with Teutonic blood were fit to rule. In 1910, Roosevelt wrote Burgess: “Your teaching was one of the formative influences in my life. You impressed me more than you’ll ever know.”27

  If Theodore Roosevelt traveled from Manhattan to his Sagamore Hill estate today, he probably would not be pleased by what he would see on the drive. Many Koreans live in that part of Long Island, and numerous signs in the Korean language dot the landscape. Roosevelt believed the Koreans to be an uncivilized, dying race. How would he deal with the fact that the average Korean immigrant in the United States often has a higher family income than a White native-born American?

  And Roosevelt continued to see Hawaii as America’s racial bulwark in the Pacific, recommending the importation of “tens of thousands of Spaniards, Portuguese or Italians or of any of the other European races… in order that the islands may be filled with a white population of our general civilization and culture.”28

  In a 1910 speech at Oxford University, Roosevelt pointed out that the White races had overspread much of the world, but unlike the Aryans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons, the modern-day conquerors had allowed the captive races to survive. Therefore, the White gains might be temporary. He told Oxford’s White Christian males that “all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent… the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples.” Roosevelt termed this salutary process “ethnic conquest.”29

  ROOSEVELT WON ACCLAIM AS an author with his interpretation of America’s westward expansion as the continuation of an inherited civilizing instinct. As president he cut through complex questions of foreign affairs by tallying who had longest followed the sun. No analysis of Roosevelt’s worldview makes sense unless one first gazes through Teddy’s race lenses at his galaxy of Aryans, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons, wops, dagos, Huns, Chinks, Japs, and a distasteful assortment of Negroes. According to Roosevelt, China would crumble and the obedient Honorary Aryans would help the English and the Americans pick up the shards. Instead, he failed to recognize the 1905 spark of Chinese patriotism that would leap to 1911 and be a raging fire by 1949. Roosevelt could not imagine the rise of third-world nationalism. It would contradict his belief that patriotism pulsed only in White veins. So Roosevelt ignored China and linked the future of the United States in Asia with Britain just before the British Empire collapsed. And instead of a White band of civilization that would bring peace to Asia, over two hundred thousand Americans and millions of Asians died battling each other in places like Zamboanga, Iwo Jima, Incheon, and Khe Sanh.

  Roosevelt’s Japanese buddies had repeatedly assured him that their nation would help the United States penetrate the China market, but after 1905, America’s Open Door demands drove Japan into Russia’s arms. In 1907 and 1910, Russia and Japan renegotiated the Treaty of Portsmouth and divided Manchuria between them. The Japanese diplomats, businessmen, and military men who flowed into Manchuria spoke among themselves of the Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.

  In 1905, when he green-lit Japanese expansion, Roosevelt was forty-six years old and Baron Kaneko was fifty-two. Roosevelt would be dead fifteen years later, while Kaneko would live to hear Franklin Roosevelt criticize Japan for doing what Theodore Roosevelt had recommended.30 Americans in 1905 clearly understood that Japan was going to expand onto the Asian continent. After the Battle of Tsushima, the famous American minister’s sermon had been “Japan’s Victory—Christianity’s Opportunity,” and readers of the New York Times nodded in agreement when they read about Prime Minister Katsura announcing that Japan would soon force “upon Korea and China the same benefits of modern development that have been in the past forced upon us.”31 Would the history of the twentieth century be different if the American Aryan had not made the Honorary Aryan his civilizing surrogate in Asia? Maybe my father didn’t have to suffer through World War II in the Pacific. Maybe the world would be more peaceful if Teddy hadn’t initiated an American foreign policy that relied primarily on a benevolent big stick.

  AS I BEGAN WRITING The Imperial Cruise, I realized that the Theodore Roosevelt most of us know is a character that Teddy had created and historians have accepted and passed on. As a best-selling author from his early years, he had long experience in projecting imagery for public consumption. With his Ranchman and Rough Rider poses in photo studios, he created his own legend. In his diplomatic white vest, the warmonger masqueraded as a man of peace. Even his private correspondence to his children—called posterity letters—were self-consciously written to enhance his historical legacy. After studying his life for twenty-seven years, the author Kathleen Dalton wrote in Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life, “Thrown off the trail by their hero’s careful presentation of himself, too many writers have accepted at face value his explanation of his own behavior.”32

  Most books on Theodore Roosevelt mention his biases but often employ obscure coded phrases and euphemisms. Probably the best-known biography is the Pulitzer Prize–honored The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. In his acknowledgments, Morris praises one author and one book:

  To Carleton Putnam, a man I have never met, I express gratitude and admiration for his Theodore Roosevelt: The Formative Years (Scribner’s, 1958), an essential source for students of Theodore Roosevelt’s youth. It is a tragedy of American biography that this grave, neglected masterpiece was never followed by other volumes.33

  Carleton Putnam wrote another book, entitled Race and Reason: A Yankee View. The book’s genesis was Putnam’s letter to President Dwight Eisenhower protesting the recent integration of America’s public schools. Putnam lectured Eisenhower that the Black man was three thousand years behind the White man and that it was dangerous to allow the races to mix. Putnam told Eisenhower to heed the wisdom of a past president:

  As Theodore Roosevelt wrote… Teutonic [and] English blood is the source of American greatness: Our American Republic, with all its faults, is, together with England, the fine flower of centuries of self-discipline and experience in free government by the English speaking branch of the white race.34

  So many still follow the sun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”1

  —MARK TWAIN

  A heartfelt thank-you to Gaea Anonas, Donald Belanger, Susan Buckheit, Chris Cannon, David Carvalho, John Dower, Max Eisikovic, Robert Eskildsen, Tony Estrada, Jerry Finin, Peggy Freudenthal, Norihasa Fujita, Richard Gordon, Wayne Kabak, Preston Lurie, Lynnette Matsushima, Liese Mayer, Gary McManus, Tina Miao, Hirohiko Nakafuji, Ambeth Ocampo, Maritza Pastor, Bob Rapoport, Jo Ann Rerek, Amanda Robinson, Barbara Russo, the Rye Free Reading Room, Margaret Shannon, Eric Simonoff, Ge Shuya, Yoshikuni Taki, Richard Wheeler, Fei Xu, Ni Yang, and Mr. Zhu.

  I especially want to thank my children—Michelle, Alison, Ava, and Jack—for their understanding and support.

  I am fortunate to be represented by the world’s finest literary agent, Owen
Laster, who christened this voyage and provided invaluable guidance throughout.

  My biggest thank-you is to Geoff Shandler, who edited this book. While on this six-year journey across an ocean of cultures and centuries, I periodically found myself washed up on the rocks. Geoff always showed me the way forward, and I will be forever grateful.

  Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “Peace may only come through war.” In my lifetime the United States has benevolently spent trillions of dollars trying to prove that erroneous notion. In the twentieth century, America extended its military to Asia. Now it’s time to work on the human links between cultures. For the past ten years, the James Bradley Peace Foundation and Youth For Understanding have sent American students to live with families overseas. Perhaps in the future when we debate whether to fight it out or talk it out, one of these Americans might make a difference.

  James Bradley

  September 15, 2009

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: ONE HUNDRED YEARS LATER

  Caption:

  Taft: TR to Taft, August 7, 1908. TR Papers, PLB83, series 2, box 29.

  1 TR to John Barrett, October 29, 1900, TR mss as cited in Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 174.

  2 TR to Benjamin Ide Wheeler, June 17, 1905. TR Papers, Library of Congress, series 2, reel 338.

  3 TR to John Barrett, October 29, 1900, TR mss as cited in Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power, 174.