The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Posterity will not grudge him that boast. The Navy was, indeed, in superb fighting trim as he prepared to resign from office.91 What it lacked in sheer weight of metal is made up in efficiency and combat toughness. Never before had it been so strategically deployed; never was it so ready for instant action.92 In comparison, the Spanish Navy, though numerically superior in ships and manpower, was ill-armed, untrained, and grossly mismanaged.93 Thanks to Roosevelt’s ceaseless publicizing of the service, schoolchildren across America could recognize and chant the praises of such romantic vessels as the Iowa, the Oregon, and the Vesuvius. His revolutionary Personnel Report, though not yet enacted into law, had already brought about a new harmony between staff and line officers, easing one of the Navy’s most difficult administration problems. His enthusiastic championship of torpedo-boats and submarines, not to mention Professor Langley’s “flying machine,” had pushed naval technology several years into the future. He had magnified the scope and influence of the Assistant Secretaryship. He had personally set the stage for one of the greatest sea dramas in American history. Most important of all, from the point of view of his later career, he had acquired a fund of naval expertise unmatched by any politician in the country.94 It would prove a priceless asset when he began to deal with “ships, ships, ships” again, as President of the United States.

  At three o’clock in the morning on 19 April 1898, Congress resolved for Cuban independence. Without waiting for the diplomatic niceties of a final ultimatum, rejection, and declaration, the country whooped to war.95 Roosevelt was surely reminded that he had assumed his duties as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on 19 April 1897. It had taken him exactly one year to bring the war about.

  DISCORDANT CRIES OF PROTEST rose above the patriotic din when news leaked out that he had applied for a position on the staff of General Fitzhugh Lee. “What on earth is this report of Roosevelt’s resignation?” wrote an agitated Henry Adams. “Is his wife dead? Has he quarreled with everybody? Is he quite mad?” Winthrop Chanler accepted the last alternative. “I really think he is going mad … Roosevelt is wild to fight and hack and hew … of course this ends his political career. Even Cabot says this.” John D. Long, too, doubted Roosevelt’s sanity. “He has lost his head,” the Secretary typed sadly in his diary. “… He means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration—desertion—vain-glory; of which he is entirely unaware.”96

  Nearly every major newspaper in the country urged Roosevelt to stay on in the Navy Department, where his services were now needed more than ever. Even the Sun, while acknowledging “the instinctive glowing chivalry of his nature,” lamented the Assistant Secretary’s decision. “Is not his work of organizing war infinitely more important to the country than any part, however useful and glorious, which he could play as an officer in the field? … We are convinced that it is.” One acid opinion, expressed by John Jay Chapman of the reformist periodical Nursery, was that “his departure was the cowardly act of a brave man.”97

  But all this clamor only served to convince Roosevelt that he must do what he had to do. Evidently his friends and admirers had never quite believed his vow to fight when the time for battle came. It was therefore vital that he prove himself, once and for all, a man of his word. If he backed down now, what of any future promises he might make to the American people? “I know perfectly well that one is never able to analyze with entire accuracy all of one’s motives,” he wrote in formal reply to the Sun. “But … I have always intended to act up to my preachings if occasion arose. Now the occasion has arisen, and I ought to meet it.”98

  ON WEDNESDAY, 20 APRIL, President McKinley signed the Cuba resolution, with its noble disclaimer of any “intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island,” and its promise “to leave the government and control of the Island to its people” once liberation had been achieved.99 On Thursday the American Minister in Madrid was told that diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain had been severed. On Friday morning before dawn, warships of the North Atlantic Squadron slipped quietly out of Key West Harbor and headed southeast into the Caribbean.100

  On Saturday the President issued a call for 125,000 volunteers to swell the ranks of the 28,000-man Regular Army. Included in this general summons was an extraordinary provision for three regiments “to be composed exclusively of frontiersmen possessing special qualifications as horsemen and marksmen.”101 Secretary Alger would not have to look far for someone to be colonel of the first regiment, since the nation’s most prominent frontiersman, horseman, and marksman was already pounding on his desk at the War Department. That same day, he offered the command to Theodore Roosevelt.102

  As long ago as 1886 Roosevelt had talked of leading a troop of “harum-scarum roughriders” into battle, without much conviction that such a dream would ever come true. Now, miraculously, it had; fate seemed to be adapting itself to his own peculiar abilities. Here at last was supreme opportunity for personal and military glory. Yet with supreme self-control Roosevelt turned the offer down. He told the Secretary that while he had been a captain in the New York National Guard, he lacked experience in hard military organization. He was sure he could “learn to command the regiment in a month,” but that very month might make the difference between fighting at the front or languishing behind and missing the war. He would be happy to serve as lieutenant colonel if the colonelcy went to Leonard Wood.103

  After some deliberation, Alger accepted this arrangement.104

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Sunday, 24 April, Secretary Long dispatched the order that Dewey had been expecting since Roosevelt’s “Keep full of coal” cable of two months before. Within forty-eight hours of receipt the Commodore put out of Hong Kong and vanished into the vastness of the China Sea.105

  WAR PROPER WAS DECLARED by Spain the same day. Icily formal to the last, the United States replied on 25 April with a declaration backdated to 23 April.106 But by now Roosevelt was too busy to be bothered with diplomatic trivialities. As chairman of the new Naval War Board, he was responsible for putting into execution the war plan which he had argued before President McKinley the previous September.107 As second-in-command of the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, he had to assist Leonard Wood in recruiting and equipping the new regiment.

  Although neither man had yet received his commission, the announcement of their appointments was made on 25 April, and by 27 April sacks of applications were thumping in from all parts of the country.108 The majority of these applications (which eventually numbered twenty-three thousand, enough for an entire division) were addressed to Roosevelt. He, Secretary Alger, the President, and Congress might imagine Wood to be the true commander of the regiment, but the American public was not fooled. Already Western newspapers were hailing the formation of “Teddy’s Terrors,” and every day brought a fresh crop of suggested names, all with the same alliterative connotation: “Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas,” “Teddy’s Gilded Gang,” “Teddy’s Cowboy Contingent,” “Teddy’s Riotous Rounders” (and then, gradually, as the Lieutenant Colonel let it be known he did not like the nickname), “Roosevelt’s Rough ’Uns,” and “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.” The last name stuck, and was soon common usage. “Colonel Wood,” commented the New York Press, “is lost sight of entirely in the effulgence of Teethadore.”109

  Wood, fortunately, was an offstage personality who did not mind operating in the shadow that surrounds the spotlight. Roosevelt could grin and posture as much as he liked, as long as he heeded quiet orders coming from the wings. Moving with remarkable speed and efficiency, the colonel completed in two days all the preliminary work of organizing the Rough Riders in Washington. Then, leaving Roosevelt behind to handle Northeastern applications and ensure that his requisitions passed smoothly through the Ordnance and Quartermaster Bureaus, Wood departed for the regimental muster camp in San Antonio, Texas.110

  LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 1 May 1898, Americans were stunned to hear of a near-incredible naval victory by an unfamiliar commander in an
archipelago on the other side of the world—about ten thousand miles away from what they imagined to be the likely theater of naval operations. In seven hours of stately maneuvers off Manila, George Dewey had destroyed Spain’s Asiatic Squadron. Almost every enemy ship was sunk, deserted, or in flames; not one American life had been lost, in contrast to 381 Spanish casualties. The victorious Commodore (who was promptly promoted to Rear-Admiral) modestly ascribed his success to “the ceaseless routine of hard work and preparation” demanded of him by the Navy Department. His government patron lost no time in taking due credit. “You have made a name for the nation, and the Navy, and yourself,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt on 2 May. “And I can’t say how pleased I am to think that I had any share in getting you the opportunity that you have used so well.”111

  Assured of leaving the Navy Department in triumph, he telegraphed Brooks Brothers for an “ordinary cavalry lieutenant-colonel’s uniform in blue Cravenette,” and prepared to receive his commission on 6 May. Some instinct to have done with his past, with youth itself now he was nearing forty, caused him to sell off his few remaining cattle and give away his Elkhorn Ranch to Sylvane Ferris. He took out life insurance. He drove his recuperating wife through the blossoming countryside. He wrote a moving farewell to Secretary Long. “I don’t suppose I shall ever again have a chief under whom I shall enjoy serving as I have enjoyed serving under you … I hate to leave you more than I can say.” He acknowledged gifts of maple syrup, poetry, clockwork, and spurs. When he left for San Antonio on 12 May he took the spurs with him.112 It remained only to win them.

  “A man of unbounded energy and force,” Secretary Long remarked in his diary. “He thinks he is following his highest ideal, whereas, in fact, as without exception every one of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark.”113

  “Without waiting for diplomatic niceties … the country whooped to war.”

  A troop of black volunteer soldiers en route to Tampa, 1898. (Illustration 23.2)

  CHAPTER 24

  The Rough Rider

  These and many more like these,

  With King Olaf sailed the seas.

  “THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF of the American Army,” reported a Madrid newspaper in the early days of the war, “is one Ted Roosevelt, formerly a New York policeman.” By way of background information, the paper added that Roosevelt had been “born near Haarlem,” but “emigrated to America when young,” and was educated at “Harvard Academy, a commercial school.” He now went about the country accompanied by a bodyguard of toughs, fittingly known as “rough-rioters.”1

  Commercial or not, Harvard supplied a sizable number of recruits to the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, as did the other Ivy League schools and the better clubs of Manhattan and Boston. Roosevelt had enlisted fifty of these “gentleman rankers,” as he called them, in order to give the regiment its necessary tone. He made it clear, however, that no man would earn a commission save through bravery and merit, and that once in Texas, “the cowboys and Knickerbockers ride side by side.”2 In choosing them, Roosevelt paid as much attention to physique as ancestry. There was his old classmate Woodbury Kane, a yachty dandy who “fought with the same natural ease as he dressed.”3 There was Joseph Sampson Stevens, the world’s greatest polo player.4 There were Dudley Dean, the legendary Harvard quarterback; Bob Wrenn, tennis champion of the United States; and Hamilton Fish, ex-captain of the Columbia crew. There were high-jumpers from Yale and football players from Princeton, and huntsmen with names like Wadsworth and Tiffany. For good measure Roosevelt added a Scottish friend of Cecil Spring Rice, and two blue-blooded Englishmen, one of whom insisted on arriving in San Antonio with a delicate walking-stick, in the belief that “cavalrymen carried canes.”5

  “This was the rocking-chair period of the war.”

  Piazza of the Tampa Bay Hotel, early summer 1898. (Illustration 24.1)

  The Lieutenant Colonel admitted to some qualms in sending such men to Texas, and their appearance caused much amusement among the more leathery Rough Riders.6

  ROOSEVELT REACHED San Antonio on the morning of 15 May 1898, wearing a new fawn uniform with canary-yellow trim.7 The official name of his destination, in the state fair grounds two miles outside of town, was Camp Wood, but a sign at the railroad station already proclaimed, “This Way to Camp of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders.”8

  There was a wave of disappointment among the recruits when he arrived at regimental headquarters. “The big objection,” recalled one onlooker, “was that he wore glasses.”9 After years in Dakota, Roosevelt was used to this attitude, and if he felt mistrust in their stare, it did not bother him. He gazed back at them through the same offending lenses, with interest but no feelings of novelty. These weather-beaten faces and sinewy, bowlegged bodies were as familiar to him as the aristocratic lineaments of Woodbury Kane (who, he noticed with approval, was cooking and washing dishes for a troop of New Mexicans). He had ridden many a roundup with such men in his youth, and proved himself as tough as they. He had described them intimately in Thomas Hart Benton and The Winning of the West. As he got to know their thousand names—soon he would memorize every one—time and again it was as if the creatures of his pen were reincarnated before him. Here was young Douglass Campbell, grandson of the man who led the cavalry up King’s Mountain in 1780.10 Here was an Indian named Adair: Roosevelt had spent hours poring over the “ponderous folio” his Cherokee ancestors had written 150 years before.11 Here was another Indian, named Colbert—perhaps one might trace his origins back to the half-Scottish, half-Chickasaw Colberts who dominated the eastern Mississippi in the eighteenth century. Roosevelt interviewed him and found that he was “as I had supposed, a descendant of the old Chickasaw chiefs.”12 Perusal of the muster-rolls disclosed a Clark and a St. Clair, no Boone but two Crocketts, and several apiece of Adams, Hamilton, and Jackson.13 Surely, in those early days of dust and mounted drill, the line between past and present (never clearly demarcated in Roosevelt’s mind) must have blurred until he found himself galloping, not across the plains of Texas, but over the wooded hills of Revolutionary Kentucky. “More than ever,” he confessed to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I fail to get the relations of this regiment and the universe straight.”14

  DAWN AT CAMP WOOD disclosed a flat grassy park, rather the worse for hoofprints, five hundred wedges of dewy canvas, a grove of cottonwood trees, and in the background the sluggish silver of the San Antonio River. A certain surgical precision in the layout of tents, the neatly swept “streets,” and gleaming latrines all testified to the medical instincts of the commanding officer.15 Reveille sounded at 5:30, and within half an hour a thousand bleary men were answering roll call.16 The range of the accents, from New England drawl to Southwestern twang, from Idaho burr to Pawnee grunt, was matched by an early-morning variety of costume that Wood may have deplored, but Roosevelt cheerfully tolerated. The “Knicks” and Harvard men wore Abercrombie and Fitch shirts and custom leather boots; the polo set wore British breeches, tight at the knee and blossoming around the thighs; the cowboys, who numbered about three-quarters of the total regiment, scorned their Army felt hats for sombreros, and insisted on carrying their own guns.17

  At 6:10 the ranks broke for stable call—twenty minutes of rubbing down and feeding horses, followed by breakfast. Between 8:30 and 9:30 the animals were watered in the river, then saddled up for mounted drill. This, the main exercise of the day, lasted at least an hour and a half under the climbing sun. Roosevelt was required to supervise it while Colonel Wood occupied himself in the cool of headquarters with problems of requisition and supply. Clouds of dust reduced visibility to nil as the troopers thundered raggedly across the Texas plain. “Our lines were somewhat irregular,” Roosevelt admitted when describing the early maneuvers.18 According to other accounts, there were often no lines at all. It would have taxed the powers of a Genghis Khan to place a thousand individualistic
riders, accustomed to the freedom of polo, hunting, and the open range, upon a thousand half-broken horses, and then get them to advance, wheel, fan out, and divide in formation. Roosevelt’s high-pitched orders led to endless bucking, biting, striking, and kicking. His first success was rewarded by an anonymous salute of six-shooter fire, causing a stampede into the San Antonio River.19

  Spare time before “dinner” at 1:30 was usually given over to bronco-busting. Then the horses were put to rest while the men assembled on the parade-ground for skirmish practice, again under Roosevelt’s command. High-heeled boots and bandy legs caused further problems of drill: the order to change step often led to a general domino-like collapse of the ranks. When Roosevelt reproved Trooper Billy McGinty for his inability to keep step, the little Oklahoman replied that “he was pretty sure he could keep step on horseback.”20

  By 3:30 a thick coating of dust, mixed with sweat, had rendered the likes of William Tiffany and “Dead Shot” Jim Simpson indistinguishable. Only two spigots of brackish water were available for shower baths, so most men took their soap down to the river.21

  There followed another stable call at 4:00, and another roll call at 5:00, then the troops reassembled for fifty minutes of dress parade. Scrubbed and spruce in their slouch hats, blue-flannel shirts, brown trousers, leggings, and boots, and sporting loosely knotted neckerchiefs—already the Rough Rider emblem—they looked, in Roosevelt’s fond opinion, “exactly as a body of cowboy cavalry should look.”22