In time to come, he wrote, when the Americans built the Nicaragua canal, Panama would remain one of the greatest ruins on earth, a relic of swindle and death and of the tragic old man who had been so misguided as to believe in a Panama passage.
*This same Marquis de Mores had also challenged a young American rancher to a duel not very long before this, when de Mores was establishing himself as a cattle baron in the Bad Lands of Dakota Territory. The American was Theodore Roosevelt, who responded by informing de Mores that he harbored no ill will toward him but that he would be willing to face him if de Mores insisted, whereupon de Mores let the matter drop. In his days in the Bad Lands, de Mores had built a thirty-room mansion on a high bluff overlooking the Little Missouri and was known behind his back as “the crazy Frenchman.” He lost most of his wife’s money in the venture, because of, he asserted, the Jewish-controlled beef trust.
*Since Ferdinand de Lesseps was a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, he could be tried only in an appeal court–that is, without a jury–and this meant that the others accused had to be tried in the same court.
*Neither de Lesseps was a man of wealth, as attorney Barboux would substantiate for the court and as time would bear out. Charles’s total assets amounted to less than 400,000 francs, less than $80,000. And while it was true that Ferdinand de Lesseps had at one point sold his Panama founders’ shares for 1,400,000 francs, he had invested 1,778,000 francs, including part of his wife’s savings, in the canal, all of which was lost. So he too had suffered financially from the collapse. His avowed disinterest in ever making money from the venture was genuine; he could have, several times along the way, just as at Suez, but he had not.
BOOK TWO:
STARS AND STRIPES FOR EVER
1890–1904
9
Theodore the Spinner
. . . the universe seemed to be spinning round and Theodore was the spinner.
–RUDYARD KIPLING
I
On a summer day in the year 1901 there was, as the guidebooks said, no pleasanter place in Washington to sit and pass the hours than Lafayette Square. In the shade of a southern magnolia or a flowering Chinese paulownia (or perhaps an elm or a beech planted by Jefferson) one could watch the flow of traffic along Pennsylvania Avenue or contemplate the north façade of the White House; or try to fathom–as nearly everyone did–what marvelous bit of ingenuity kept the equestrian bronze of Andrew Jackson in such uncanny equilibrium.
Flower beds were carefully tended, paths swept clean. Tourists came and went, and pretty girls on their noon hour passed by in twos and threes, wearing the wide-brimmed straw hats and crisp white shirt-waists that had become the fashion.
Especially satisfying was the sense one had of being at the very center of things. It was the nearness not just of the White House but of the elegant private residences fronting on the other three sides of the square, of the Arlington Hotel, the Cosmos Club, the easy proximity of the Metropolitan Club, the Treasury Building, and that great baroque pile, the State, War, and Navy Building, that made it such a rarefied and endlessly fascinating world within the world of Washington.
On the east side of the square, next door to the Cosmos Club, lived Senator Hanna–Number 21 Madison Place, the “Little White House.” At the buff-colored Cosmos itself, once the home of Dolly Madison, could be found such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell or Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian. The Arlington, diagonally across from the Cosmos, on H Street, was the city’s largest “distinguished hostelry.” Virtually every President since Grant had been accommodated there the night before his inauguration.
Secretary of State John Hay, who had first come to Washington as Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, and Henry Adams, that cultivated lineal descendant of two Presidents, lived in adjoining houses at the corner of H and 16th streets, just across from beautiful little St. John’s Episcopal Church. A comparatively new addition, built in the eighties, this Hay-Adams edifice was the one “unconventional” note on the square. It appeared to be one massive red-brick bastion with trimmings of light-colored stone, innumerable windows, imposing stone steps, and dark carved doors set within deeply shadowed archways–all trademarks of Henry H. Richardson, the most brilliant architect of the day. It seemed the safest possible refuge for the two fragile gentlemen who resided within, both of whom were looked upon as national treasures of a sort. Adams wryly referred to his address as the only position of importance he had attained in life and he reigned there over the nearest thing thus far to an American salon. To be asked to breakfast at 1603 H Street was to have “arrived.”
For John Hay, author of the “Open Door” policy in China, his house was little more than a block from his office at the State Department or from the Metropolitan on 17th Street, the city’s most fashionable club, or from the French embassy, the large yellow house beside the Metropolitan. “Life,” wrote Adams, “is a narrow valley, and the roads run close together.” It was a view one might well have conceived from so privileged a vantage point.
But at summer’s end, on September 6, 1901, the comparative tranquillity of Lafayette Square, like the whole order that had evolved in Washington, ended when two shots from a .32-caliber revolver were pumped point-blank into the unsuspecting William McKinley at Buffalo, New York. He had gone to attend the Pan-American Exposition and was standing in the Temple of Music beside a potted palm shaking hands with a long line of people, one of whom, a deranged young anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, stepped forward, his right hand wrapped in what appeared to be a bandage. Eight nights later McKinley was dead.
“Now look!” Mark Hanna is said to have exploded on hearing the news. “That damned cowboy is President of the United States.”
The sudden advent of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House was to mark the most dramatic shift in Presidential style and attitude since the inauguration of Andrew Jackson, the first avowed “man of the people,” when tubs of liquor had been put out in Lafayette Square to divert an overjoyed mob from the White House grounds. Roosevelt’s own inaugural was a rushed, solemn little ceremony held in an over-stuffed Victorian parlor in Buffalo. But it can be said that the twentieth century truly began when he took the oath of office.
At age forty-two he was not only the youngest President in history, he was an entirely novel figure in American politics–an eastern Republican with national appeal (phenomenal national appeal, as the campaign had shown). Where McKinley had been Midwestern, “of the plain people,” “TR” was big-city gentry, raised among nursemaids and gilded mirrors. He was a Harvard-trained, Harvard-sounding reader of books (two a day on the average); he was the Rough Rider, author, historian . . . a bird watcher! . . . and the most tireless political warrior the country had ever encountered. As the Vice-Presidential candidate he had been seen in twenty-four states, traveled twenty-one thousand miles, made nearly seven hundred speeches, all in one tour, while William McKinley, as was his custom, kept to the shade of his front porch in Canton, Ohio.
Violent fate in the form of Leon Czolgosz had put Roosevelt in power at a time when the country was prospering, just as Mark Hanna had promised; when his party was in control of Congress; when the national spirit was expansive, confidence boundless; when the average American felt “400 percent bigger” than he had before the turn of the century, as Senator Chauncey Depew observed.
And he had every intention of exercising power as it had not been in a very long time. “I did not care a rap for the mere form and show of power,” he would write, “I cared immensely for the use that could be made of the substance.”
The first weeks in office would remain a vivid memory for all who were on hand. “He strode triumphant among us,” recalled Lincoln Steffens, “talking and shaking hands, dictating and signing letters, and laughing. Washington, the whole country was in mourning, and no doubt the president felt that he should hold himself down; he didn’t; he tried to, but his joy showed in every word and movement.” To Harry Thurston Peck, the literary crit
ic, he was “a stream of fresh, pure, bracing air from the mountains, to clear the fetid atmosphere of the national capital.” He himself, at the end of his first week, confided to Henry Cabot Lodge, “It is a dreadful thing to come into the Presidency this way; but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it. . . .”
He saw more people, he handled more paper work, he cut more red tape in the next several months than anyone who had ever held the office. And he adored the role. No man ever had a better time being President.
There were some, to be sure, and particularly within his own party, who were considerably less than ecstatic over the prospect of such a person in power. Hanna was the outstanding example. “We need not tell our readers that up to this time we have discovered in Mr. Roosevelt very little cause for serious rejoicing,” declared the conservative Washington Post. “He has at all times been far too theatrical for our taste.” Even the venerable Henry Adams, who had found Roosevelt the Vice President “breezy and a tonic,” returned home gravely unsettled by his first social evening with Roosevelt the Chief of State. Everything at the White House had been too informal for Adams, the meal indifferent and badly served. Worse, Roosevelt had lectured him, the former Harvard professor. “As usual Theodore absorbed the conversation,” wrote a disgruntled Adams to a friend. “If it tired me ten years ago, it crushes me now . . . really, Theodore is exasperating. . . .”
But for reporters and the reading public he was a dream come true. He would give a Presidential view on any subject any time. The monologues were likened to Niagara Falls. To get him to listen, the story went, it was best to see him about 12:40, just before lunch, when he was being shaved.
He was the first President to call his official residence the White House (rather than the Executive Mansion), the first to be known by his initials, the first to take up tennis, which he played badly but with explosive verve, the first to be photographed jumping on horseback. (When the photographer missed his shot, the President gladly obliged by jumping several times again.) He also brought to Washington the large, young, and exuberant family that was to dominate the popular imagination in ways that had never been known or that would never quite be equaled again. Edith Carow Roosevelt looked so youthful driving about the city in her carriage that she was sometimes mistaken for her stepdaughter, seventeen-year-old Alice; and Alice, as the country quickly discovered, was a “handful.” The five other children, the eldest just turned fourteen, seemed wholly unaffected by the aura of their new surroundings. Visitors were to encounter Roosevelt off-spring racing the White House halls on stilts. A Cabinet meeting would have to be halted temporarily due to the noise overhead. The President himself, it became known, was in the habit of “looking in” on the children before state dinners, by which he meant a terrific pillow fight.
It all seemed to agree with him, as did everything in life. He had acquired some poundage in recent years, but physical bulk was in style for men of position, and he was by no means fat. He stood only five feet eight inches tall, yet most people, when they saw him for the first time, were struck by how big he seemed. His frame was big, his neck and shoulders were big, and he stood with his shoulders thrown back, which gave him an even more imposing look. His weight during the time he was President was something over two hundred pounds. “His walk,” recalled William Allen White, “was a shoulder-shaking, assertive, heel-clicking, straight-away gait, rather consciously rapid as one who is habitually about his master’s business.”
Mainly Theodore Roosevelt was interesting, interesting as no President had ever been. He was someone who would make things happen.
II
The obvious differences in age and nationality aside, there were striking similarities between Theodore Roosevelt and Ferdinand de Lesseps. Both were the products of cultivated, worldly families. Both were raised on the ideal of patriotic service and the heroic exploits of adventurous kinsmen. There is the common love of the out of doors, of shooting, and of horses; the common joy in children, books, theatrics, popular acclaim. In his boundless love of life, his immensely attractive animal vitality, Theodore Roosevelt might have been a direct descendant of Ferdinand de Lesseps. There is even a kind of continuity to such traits as they were sometimes despised for–craftiness, self-glorification, self-deception.
Nor was Roosevelt ever anything but positive about the need for a Central American canal to rival Suez. “No single great material work which remains to be undertaken on this continent is of such consequence to the American people,” he declared in his first message to Congress. Whether he or any of those around him suspected then that the canal would become the great material set piece of his Administration, as well as the work in which he would take the most personal pride, or that it would be the subject of more controversy than anything else he did while in office, is impossible to say. But his eagerness to get on with the job was unmistakable.
Roosevelt, however, looked upon the canal quite differently than de Lesseps had, differently, in fact, than nearly everyone. It was very well for others to talk of it as the dream of Columbus, to call it a giant step in the march of civilization, or to picture as de Lesseps so often had its immeasurable value to world commerce. Roosevelt was promoting neither a commercial venture nor a universal utility. To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital–the indispensable– path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.
All other benefits resulting, important or admirable as they might be, were to him secondary.
His guiding light in this regard, the beloved prophet and teacher, was a tall, spare, beaked, painfully shy, deadly serious naval officer and scholar, who looked like a predatory bird. As bald nearly as an egg, with pale hooded eyes, Alfred Thayer Mahan had been a member of the faculty at the Naval war College at Newport, Rhode Island, when Roosevelt, years before, had been invited to lecture there on one of his specialties as a historian–the war of 1812. The two had liked each other instantly and remained fast friends and earnest correspondents. And for some fifteen years, first in the war College lectures developed following his Panama experience, then in his famous book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, as well as in magazine articles and private correspondence, Mahan had been preaching a strident, uncompromising canal doctrine. His role as teacher and prophet had been a factor of the greatest importance, giving the old dream of a Pacific passage a meaning it had not had before.
Like Mrs. Stowe, earlier in the nineteenth century, Mahan had happened out of the blue. Born at West Point, New York, in 1840, he was the son of Dennis Hart Mahan, a noted professor at the Military Academy who had taught Grant, Sherman, Lee, Jackson, and who was the author of a mathematics text familiar to a whole generation of cadets, including several who were eventually to build Theodore Roosevelt’s canal. The younger Mahan’s naval career had been undistinguished, however. He and his father agreed that he might have done better in some other profession. By the time he was appointed to the staff of the war College, after thirty years in the service, he was still, in his own words, “drifting on the lines of simple respectability as aimlessly as one ever could.” An Annapolis classmate would subsequently remember him as the most intellectual man he had ever known, yet nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to him; he was not an especially able line officer–he was never able to do knots, the square knot was the “top of his ability”–and he had written nothing to indicate any literary gifts or penetrating grasp of world history.
His world-shaking Influence of Sea Power upon History, the result of four strenuous years “in the closet,” as he said–reading, writing, rewriting–was published in May of 1890 by Little, Brown & Company. The essence of his views was contained in the first ninety pages. By tracing the rise and decline of past maritime powers, he had arrived at the extremely simple
theory that national greatness and commercial supremacy were directly related to supremacy at sea. This, he declared, was the towering truth of history. Like many earthshaking concepts, it was not exactly original; numbers of his own contemporaries in the Navy had been thinking along similar lines for some time. He, however, had developed the thesis historically, and that, he also asserted, no one had done before. Also, like many such iron-willed theorists, he had a knack for making his case so that it seemed indisputable.
In England, predictably enough, the book was taken as gospel and had its earliest success. Clad in dress uniform, wearing a sword beneath red-silk academic robes, the author received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge and later dined with the queen at Buckingham Palace.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had telegraphed his friend Poultney Bigelow, son of old John Bigelow, to praise the book: “It is on board all my ships and constantly quoted by my captains and officers.” On the other side of the world Mahan was adopted as a text for the Japanese military colleges.
Not to be outdone by Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale conferred honorary degrees, and in the United States Senate such powerful “expansionists” as Lodge and John Tyler Morgan were immediately won over. “It is sea power which is essential to every splendid people,” Lodge lectured the nation from the Senate floor.
Most important, however, was the overwhelming effect on the ambitious young man with the eyeglasses and the flashing teeth who was then serving on the Civil Service Commission. Roosevelt, it is a matter of record, was the first person of influence to read the book and to grasp its import. Probably not another ranking political official in the country had ever heard of Mahan at the time the book appeared. But for Roosevelt, who received one of the first copies and who wrote the first major review for the Atlantic Monthly, the prophet had arrived. The book, he immediately informed Mahan, was “very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind with which I am acquainted. . . . A very good book . . .”
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 357