by Clay Risen
This was not true. There were no black men in the regiment, or any regiment save the specially designated, segregated units. Roosevelt’s impromptu speech revealed what passed for national unity in 1898, with its diversity rooted in shades of whiteness, and what would increasingly come to define “America” in the eyes of its white citizens.
Behind Roosevelt, the rest of the Rough Riders were filing down the gangplank. They did not trot, or run; they practically crawled. They were a motley sort: Some wore hats, and others wore towels or kerchiefs tied around their heads. Some had on coats, others just their tunics. They carried their belongings in whatever they had—some still had their Army-issue packs, while others toted their belongings in potato sacks. But it was their faces, and their bodies, that shocked. A woman in the crowd remarked, “Why they look just like other men,” but in fact they did not look like other men, not most of them, not at that moment—sunburnt and emaciated, many had lost thirty pounds. A man shouted, “How are you, Sullivan?” To which Sullivan—there were two in the regiment, Patrick and William, and Edward Marshall, who recorded the event, doesn’t say which—replied, “I’m well, thank God. But more than half of my troop were left behind among the dead and sick at Santiago.”21
Arthur Cosby, who had been wounded on San Juan Heights and sent home early, was there to meet them, his arm in a sling. “It was a heartbreaking sight,” he said. “The men had suffered from exhaustion, exposure, bad food and diseases like typhoid fever. They all looked depressed, thin and weak.” Worse, mothers and fathers and girlfriends of men in the regiment were in the crowd, looking in vain for their loved ones. “At the end, the landing of the troops at Montauk had a tinge of sadness cast over it, in sharp contrast to the exuberant joy with which it had begun,” Marshall wrote.22
Before they could enter the general camp, the Rough Riders, like every regiment brought into Montauk, had to spend five days in quarantine. To get there, they marched three miles up a hill; dozens fell out of line from exhaustion, and had to be carried the rest of the way. But once they arrived, they found rows of large, spacious tents that construction crews had rushed to erect for them—even working on a Sunday. Thousands of soldiers from other regiments were already there, some of whom had been in Cuba, others who were merely shifted north from Tampa. The food on offer was still terrible, but Roosevelt ordered a massive delivery of delicacies from the city: fresh fruit, eggs, milk, food of the sort that haunted their dreams in Cuba. Only after they were released from quarantine, on August 19, were they allowed to reunite with their fellow troopers from Tampa, and to mount their horses once again.23
Because the camp was only a few hours by train from New York, it was soon overrun with sightseers. By now the Rough Riders were used to the star treatment—the same had happened in San Antonio, in Tampa, and in every town they stopped at in between. This time, the visitors were welcome. They brought food and drinks; young women came to flirt; boys came to awe at the Rough Riders’ uniforms and martial prowess, which they gladly demonstrated on the fields outside the camp, re-creating some of their battles and showing off their horse riding and marksmanship.24
Along with the crowds coming to see the Rough Riders came political suitors to see Roosevelt. Publicly, he abjured politics until the regiment mustered out. Privately, he was already scheming, and welcoming visitors who pitched him on his next move. Lemuel Quigg, an emissary from Senator Thomas Platt, the most powerful man in New York State politics, came to Montauk with a peace offering, and a proposal. Not two years earlier, Platt had engineered Roosevelt’s ouster as head of the police board in New York City, a move that sent him to Washington, the Department of the Navy, and the Rough Riders. Now, recognizing that the colonel might be the Republicans’ only chance to win the governor’s mansion that fall, Platt was willing to set past differences aside—though he saw full well the consequences of his action. “If he becomes Governor of New York, sooner or later, with his personality, he will have to be President of the United States,” Platt wrote. “I am afraid to start that thing going.”25
Roosevelt had already received a visit from John Jay Chapman, of the reformist party known as the Independents, a fellow member of Harvard’s Porcellian Club who encouraged him to seek the nomination of both his party and the Republicans. The Independents were mostly breakaway Republicans, sick of the Platt machine and eager to change state politics—a natural fit for Roosevelt. But the colonel was playing a longer game, and he needed the Platt Republicans and their ilk to climb higher still. Nevertheless, he endorsed Chapman’s plan to nominate him, for the moment, and the next day he authorized the same from Quigg. Then he left for Sagamore Hill, his home in Oyster Bay, outside New York City, to see his family.26
Roosevelt arrived to find the entire town turned out to greet him, with banners and chants and a welcome-home bonfire. The next day, in between reading correspondence and roughhousing with his children, he entertained a long list of even more well-wishers. Among them was Robert Bridges, an editor from Charles Scribner’s Sons. Scribner’s was a New York publisher that, through its book and magazine arms, had already done much to publicize the latest writing about the Spanish-American War, including the work of Richard Harding Davis. Would Roosevelt write up his experiences in a book? In fact, Roosevelt said, he already had one blocked out in his mind. Scribner’s, with its well-regarded magazine, was in a position to offer him a stellar deal: The book would first run serially, spread over six articles to run in the magazine, beginning in early 1899, for which he would be paid $1,000 each (more than $30,000 in 2018). They would then be rolled into a single book, which would come out a few months after the final installment. With all his free time between mustering out the regiment and running for governor—this was Roosevelt, after all—writing a memoir would not be a problem.27
• • •
The sprawling facility at Montauk was named Camp Wikoff, after Colonel Charles Wikoff of the 22nd Infantry, who was killed on San Juan Hill on July 1. Men continued to pour in; about 29,000 would pass through in its two months of operation. The tents, inviting at first, grew tattered and grimy with overuse. It resembled “a mushroom town of the frontier during a ‘boom,’ with a military post thrown in to account for the uniforms,” wrote one trooper.28
The real problem was, as usual, the makeshift Army hospitals, where sanitation was close to nonexistent. Some 430 men were convalescing there at any one time. One of the assistant surgeons, a woman surnamed More, told a reporter for Leslie’s about men lying in their own filth, their tent floors waxed with days-old vomit and feces. “She found men covered with vermin,” the magazine wrote. “She found men fighting mad in delirium so desperate they would escape from the tents and run down the hill until pursued and brought back. She found ice wanting, milk wanting, and on some days, water wanting.” The men had quinine, but no medicine for dysentery. In all, nine men, including two Rough Riders—Alfred Judson and Fred Gosling—died of disease in the camp (though their illnesses were likely contracted in Cuba, not in Montauk). Several others arrived ill in stateside hospitals, including Stanley Hollister and William Tiffany of the Rough Riders, both of whom died shortly after.29
Those who managed to stay out of the hospitals, happy to be back in temperate, relatively bullet-free climes, faced a different challenge: boredom. They ate eggs, oranges, vegetables, pastries, as much as they wanted, shipped in by thankful donors in New York, and they had all the tobacco they could smoke. They flirted with nurses and played in the water. Horses were easy to come by. Billy McGinty would take long rides out on the beach, between the camp and the lighthouse at the end of Long Island, about five miles away. One day, while riding back, he passed twin piles of clothing on a beach on the Atlantic Ocean called Ditch Plains, where the surf was especially strong. When he returned to camp, he heard that Wheeler’s son, who had joined the Army and was likewise encamped at Montauk, and a friend were missing. McGinty rode back to the beach; the clothes were still there. That evening someone found the
ir drowned bodies washed up on the shore nearby.30
• • •
On Tuesday, August 23, Theodore Miller was laid to rest in Akron’s Glendale Cemetery. Three weeks earlier his brother John, an officer in the Navy stationed at Guantánamo Bay, had received permission to collect Theodore’s remains and escort them home to Ohio. He caught a boat to Santiago, and then rode the recently reinstated train between Santiago and Siboney. When he arrived, he found a casket sent by his father. He also found the major in charge of handling burials, who led John up a steep, rough path to a small clearing in the brush, where eleven flat stakes marked eleven graves, not far from where Miller and the Rough Riders set out for Las Guasimas two months before.31
Miller’s body was exhumed, and a detail of soldiers carried it back to the train and then to Santiago. The port city was busy with American soldiers and Cuban civilians and furloughed Spanish soldiers and Red Cross workers, all under the control of Leonard Wood. The next morning Miller’s casket was placed on a barge and tugged out to La Grande Duchesse, a converted passenger liner already filling with 1,200 returning soldiers from the 71st New York Volunteers and the 16th Infantry. After hours spent floating alongside the giant ship, the casket came aboard, and stevedores nestled it in the far corner of a hold. A regimental band played the national anthem as the ship sailed away from Santiago, down the length of its narrow bay and between the zigzag passage it cut between two looming promontories before emptying into the Caribbean Sea. Above the forts that crowned each hilltop flew an American flag. His brother, on board, recalled: “Theodore, who lay quietly in death on board the ship, had done much in gaining this place for our flag, but could not join with the rest in enjoying the glorious result of his efforts and sufferings.”32
They went first to Montauk, for quarantine, then to Jersey City, New Jersey, where John Miller met another brother, Ed. The two carried Theodore’s casket onto a train and arrived in Akron at 7 a.m. on Sunday, August 21. “Thus in silence,” John wrote, “Theodore returned home after a most pleasant and honored life among the heroic Rough Riders and after a glorious death in the land of the enemy and in the front ranks of our glorious army, fighting for his country, and for a cause in which he thoroughly believed in.”33
Hundreds of Akron residents turned out for Theodore Miller’s funeral two days later. A week earlier, Roosevelt, a great admirer of Lewis Miller’s Chautauqua Assembly—he called it “the most American thing in America”—had written Lewis Miller expressing his condolences and his regrets that he could not attend. Miller’s brother-in-law, Thomas Edison, and his sister Mina were there, despite Mina having given birth a month earlier—on the day, in fact, when a telegram arrived at the Edison home in Orange, New Jersey, with news of her brother’s death. The Edisons had named their new son Theodore.34
When the masses of Akronites had settled into their pews, and the choir had sung its verses, Bishop John Heyl Vincent rose to the pulpit. Like his close friend Lewis Miller, Vincent had been born too early to serve in the Civil War, and like Miller had lived most of his adult life hoping, and then expecting, that he would never have to come so close to the tragic effects of combat again. And yet here he was, eulogizing the son of his best friend, who had died fighting a war against a foreign enemy in a foreign land.
Did Vincent rue the war? Did he wish Theodore had never volunteered? Did he worry that his country, having tasted victory in a foreign conflict, would seek out more? If he did, he hid those thoughts, and instead delivered a treatise on the new place of the soldier in American society, and the new place of America in the world that men like Miller and the Rough Riders had made possible.
Miller, Bishop Vincent said, was not just one man. In his life, and even more so in his death, he represented America itself: “When you look into his closed eyes you see constitutions, history, laws, rights, prerogatives, powers. When you touch his cold body you touch a sacred thing, and you hear drum-beat and bugle call and the thunder of armies.”
Miller’s death was just because the war was just, Vincent said, and the war was just because America was just. In a passage that could well be a blueprint for the opening of the American century, Vincent said:
The war, across the black clouds of which the bow of peace now springs, has united the nation, north, south, east and west, in bonds stronger than any that have yet been woven or forged. It has given to the nations of the Old World a larger knowledge of our power, progress, distinctive civilization, and approved our right to a voice in the affairs of the planet. It has increased the confidence of our people in our system of government. It has emphasized the radical bent of a civilization in which caste and priestcraft are dominant. It has brought the classes of society together, and aimed a blow at anarchism and socialism. It has taught the youth of today, the men and women of tomorrow, larger respect for national ideas. It has given notable lessons in religious fidelity, reverence, the knowledge of God, the value of sobriety. It has elevated into prominence young men, as distinguished for their humility and religious faith as for their heroism and their skill. It has brought out of the black blackness of despotism, millions of people who have for ventures been under the galling yoke of bondage.35
After the public service, the family and close friends retreated to Oak Place, the Millers’ home in the West Hill neighborhood. They gathered in the library for a small, short ceremony. Then a squad of Theodore Miller’s Yale classmates carried his casket outside to a horse-drawn hearse. A detachment of veterans from the Akron Grand Army of the Republic outpost led the mourners and the hearse a half a mile to Glendale Cemetery. They climbed up a steep hill, past the fields where young Theodore had played, through the wrought iron gate that marked the cemetery’s entrance, past the neo-Gothic Civil War memorial chapel, to the Miller family plot. Theodore was placed into the ground near his sister Emily, who had died a year before, and near the spot where another sister, Jane, would be buried the following year. By the time she entered the ground, her father was already nearby. He died seven months and nine days after his beloved Theodore.36
Not long after Miller’s death, the poet Meredith Nicholson published a short verse in his memory. It read, in part,
’Tis of such brain and brawn that God has made
A nation, setting wide its boundary bars
And to its banner giving the high aid
And courage of the stars.
He called his poem “A Rough Rider.”37
• • •
Roosevelt, having barely settled in at Sagamore Hill, came rushing back to Montauk on August 25. He had heard that Russell Alger was paying the Rough Riders a visit. The secretary of war wanted to put a positive spin on what many in the press were calling yet another disaster in the making, this time at Montauk; three men died on the day he came to the camp. Still, Alger told the New York Tribune that “I did not find things in nearly so chaotic a condition as I expected, and by the time I left this afternoon I think the camp was pretty well organized.” By the time Roosevelt arrived the secretary was gone, having promised to send medicine and better food.38
Alger also ordered camp officials to start dispensing passes to New York City, to relieve pressure on the facilities. Charles Knoblauch, who had been a wealthy stockbroker before joining the Rough Riders, got one of the first. “Boys, if there is anything of any thing that you want to eat, name it and we’ll get it,” he said as he left. More valuable than any victuals Knoblauch brought back were the words that he left with his rich and eager friends on Wall Street. He told them to send food, cigarettes, and whatever else they could think of to make his regiment’s life easier. Within days whole trainloads of gifts were en route to Montauk for the Rough Riders.39
It was becoming clear that the regiment was unlikely to see combat again—after the armistice with Spain, thousands of troops had already been deployed from San Francisco to the Philippines, where a war with indigenous rebels would drag on several years and involve a level of cruelty and torture that mirrored many of
the worst excesses of General Weyler’s time in charge of the Spanish army in Cuba. Though some of the men from the Rough Riders ended up in the Philippines, the regiment, as a whole, was scheduled to be decommissioned.
• • •
The regiment’s impending end did not dim its celebrity. Poetry about the Spanish-American War was commonplace that summer, and that August, America’s would-be bards turned their talents to the Rough Riders. Newspapers and magazines overflowed with doggerel, song, and even short fiction about the regiment. On August 11 the New York Times featured “Song of the Rough Riders,” sung to the tune of “The Irish Fusiliers,” which included lines like “Rough Riders were we from the west, gallant gentlemen the rest, of colors the best; rallied to the flag at Roosevelt’s behest to carve out way to glory.” It continues like that for eleven verses.40
In New York, women flocked to Wanamaker’s, a department store on Broadway, to snatch up the “Rough Rider,” a hat available in black, pearl, and nutria—the pelt of a rodent-like animal that, coincidentally, was later introduced to the Louisiana swamps by Edward Avery McIlhenny, whose older brother John had joined the Rough Riders at San Antonio. Those who went out to see the regiment, and were lucky to come back with a pin or bullet casing from one of the troopers, were the envy of the town. “The picturesque character of the Roosevelt Rough Rider has appealed strongly to the fevered imagination of the small boy whose literature consists of dime novels, detective stories, etc.,” wrote one correspondent. After men from the regiment arrived in the city, a father came up to one of them with his two children and said, “My boys have been nearly crazy to meet a Rough Rider.” Another trooper was glancing absentmindedly in a shop window when a stranger approached, his hand outstretched. “I want to shake the hand of a Rough Rider,” he said. “You are the only people in New York right now.”41
