An editorial in the Philadelphia Record described TR’s role as commissioner: “His colleagues were quiet men, who supported him to a considerable extent, but he did the fighting in the newspapers, before Congress and everywhere else … he became recognized as the leading spirit of the Commission.” Sixty-two years later, one of the commission’s chairmen said that stories of Theodore’s accomplishments “are handed down from generation to generation of Commission employees.”
Theodore accepted President Cleveland’s invitation to remain at the commission, but once again he was preoccupied with family problems when twenty-nine-year-old Anna Roosevelt died of diphtheria. Anna’s mother took custody of the three children, but the following May four-year-old Elliott Jr. also died of diphtheria. His father, who had been sober for four years, began drinking again. “Elliott has sunk to the lowest depths,” Edith wrote to her mother. He “consorts with the vilest women.” Theodore and his sisters received “horrid anonymous letters about his life,” she wrote. “I live in constant dread of some scandal of his attaching itself to Theodore.”
For his part, Theodore ignored his brother and wanted his younger sister to do the same. “I do wish Corinne could get a little of my hard heart about Elliott,” he complained to Bamie. “She can do, and ought to do, nothing for him. He can’t be helped, and he must simply be let go his own gait.” But their brother soon ceased to be a problem.
In August 1894, in a fit of delirium tremens, which is hallucinations and disorientation experienced by some chronic alcoholics, Elliott had a convulsion and died in the Manhattan apartment where he lived with his mistress. Theodore was “more overcome than I have ever seen him,” Corinne wrote, and he “cried like a child for a long time.”
By that time Theodore wanted to move back to New York. After six years in Washington, he felt he needed to reestablish himself in the Republican Party in his home state. He said years later that it was during his time as civil service commissioner that he first started thinking about being president. “I used to walk past the White House, and my heart would beat a little faster as the thought came to me that possibly—possibly—I would some day occupy it as President.” Being mayor of New York City or governor of New York State was a good stepping-stone to the presidency.
The Republicans had asked Theodore to run for mayor of New York in 1894, but Edith was dead set against the idea. She had given birth the previous April to her fourth child, Archie. The worst recession in the nation’s history had begun that year, and she worried that Theodore might lose the election, leaving them with five children and no income. The Roosevelts were already having so much financial trouble that they considered selling Sagamore Hill.
An opportunity to move back to Sagamore Hill, as well as double his salary, came in 1895 when New York’s new mayor William Strong offered Theodore a $6,000-a-year job as one of the city’s four police commissioners. The mayor, a businessman with no political experience, had won the election by promising to clean up corruption in city government. The police department was especially corrupt, and Theodore knew the job would be difficult. But he accepted it, telling Bamie, “I must make up my mind to much criticism and disappointment.”
As usual, Theodore soon got the attention of local journalists. “We have a real Police Commissioner,” wrote one in the New York World. “His teeth are big and white, his eyes are small and piercing, his voice is rasping … he looks like a man of strength … a determined man, a fighting man, an honest, conscientious man.” Another article praised Theodore because “he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant—inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion.”
Despite the initial fanfare, the job proved frustrating and ultimately impossible. Theodore’s three colleagues had made him president of the commission, but personality and political differences soon made them uncooperative. And he lost public support when he began enforcing the law that prohibited saloons from opening on Sundays.
Over three-quarters of New York City’s population was foreign-born. Many of these immigrants enjoyed spending Sundays, often their only day off, at neighborhood saloons with beer and friends. Theodore said he had to choose between “closing all of the saloons and violating my oath of office.” But the public protest was so loud that even Mayor Strong began ridiculing the commissioner’s efforts. Being police commissioner was the most frustrating job Theodore would ever hold, so he was glad for the opportunity to take time off in 1896 to campaign for former Ohio governor William McKinley, who was running for president.
Theodore called that election the biggest crisis the nation had faced since 1861. It was an exaggeration, but it did express how Republicans felt about a third party gathering strength in the Midwest and South.
Third parties rarely do well in American politics, but the Populist Party was more successful than most. It was organized by small farm owners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers who felt excluded from the two established political parties and exploited by the railroads, banks, and other big businesses. They wanted, among other things, the government to take over the railroads and banks. And they wanted U.S. senators to be elected directly by the people rather than appointed by conservative state legislatures. In 1896, the Democrats and the Populists joined in an uneasy alliance to back the Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, a handsome thirty-six-year-old lawyer whose gift for public speaking drew huge crowds. The Democrats and Populists had lots of enthusiasm, but little money. They raised only about $300,000 for Bryan’s presidential campaign.
That’s about how much money Standard Oil alone gave to the Republican candidate, who collected a total of $7 million for his campaign. While farmers in the Midwest paraded for Bryan, stockbrokers and bankers in New York paraded for McKinley.
Theodore plunged into battle, ridiculing farmers and other rural Populists: “A taste for learning and cultivated friends, and a tendency to bathe frequently, cause them the deepest suspicion.” Theodore was equally caustic about the Democratic candidate. “Instead of government of the people, for the people, and by the people, which we now have, Bryan would substitute a government of the mob.” McKinley comfortably won the election by about six hundred thousand votes.
“You may easily imagine our relief over the election,” TR wrote to Bamie. “It was the greatest crisis in our national fate, save only the Civil War. And I am more than glad I was able to do my part in the contest.” McKinley rewarded his star campaigner with a new job, and Theodore returned to Washington to set in motion the events that would make him a national hero.
7
“TO PREPARE FOR war is the most effectual means to promote peace,” Theodore quoted one of his favorite presidents, George Washington, in a June 2 speech at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. It was his first major speech since he had started his new job as assistant secretary of the navy on April 19, 1897. He kept the job for only one year. Yet those dozen months were momentous for both the man and the nation.
While Assistant Secretary Roosevelt was a relatively minor figure in Washington, he had big objectives. The United States had the world’s fifth-largest navy, but he wanted to make it bigger. “We need a large Navy,” he said, “a full proportion of powerful battleships able to meet those of any other nation.”
A strong navy would also help accomplish other goals. President McKinley, like previous presidents, was reluctant to get involved in the affairs of other nations, but Theodore wanted the United States to exert its influence beyond its own borders, especially on neighboring countries. “I hope to see the Spanish flag and the English flag gone from the map of North America before I’m sixty,” he stated. It was unlikely that the United States could chase Great Britain out of Canada any time soon, but Spain was another matter. The Spanish, who once had one of the world’s largest colonial empires, now possessed only a group of far-flung islands. The most significant of these islands were Cuba in the Caribbean and
the Philippines in the Pacific Ocean.
Theodore had his eye on Cuba, just ninety miles south of Key West, Florida, where insurrectos, or rebels, were fighting for a Cuba libre. Cubans had been trying to win independence from Spain for decades. The latest fighting began in 1895, and U.S. newspapers covered it closely. One reason they paid close attention was that the Cuban rebels kept an office in New York City and fed stories to the press. Plus, stories and photographs about the conflict sold newspapers. The public didn’t mind reading about the bloody rebellion, but most people felt the United States shouldn’t get involved. Not Theodore.
“We ought to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba,” TR wrote to his older sister. “It would be a good thing, in more ways than one.” The assistant secretary, who worked at a Civil War-era wooden desk with an American flag carved in the front and carved cannons protruding from the sides, did his best to make that happen.
He began by collecting a group of people who shared his interest in expanding America’s influence abroad. These like-minded and influential individuals included Cabot Lodge, who had been appointed to the Senate three years earlier. (Senators were not directly elected by voters until 1914.) The group also included Commodore George Dewey, one of the navy’s highest ranking officers; William H. Taft, a federal judge; and Captain Leonard Wood, an army doctor and President McKinley’s personal physician. These men and others often got together over lunch at Washington’s exclusive Metropolitan Club to talk about foreign policy.
In the summer of 1897 Theodore urged his boss, Secretary John D. Long, who was nearly sixty, to take a long vacation. In early August, he did just that, going to his Massachusetts home for two months. “The secretary is away,” Theodore told a friend, “and I’m having immense fun running the Navy.” And just two weeks later, the New York Sun reported, “The decks are cleared for action. Acting Secretary Roosevelt … has the whole navy bordering on a war footing.”
“I did not hesitate to take responsibilities,” the assistant secretary recalled. “I have continually meddled with what was not my business.” Even when Secretary Long returned from his vacation, Theodore continued to meddle. One day, while his boss was out of the office, Theodore read a letter addressed to Long. It was from a senator recommending that Commodore John A. Howell be given command of the navy’s fleet of warships in the Pacific Ocean. Theodore thought his friend Commodore Dewey would be a better commander, especially if there was war with Spain.
Theodore called Dewey and told him to quickly send one of his friends in Congress to speak to the president. A few hours later, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont called on President McKinley. Unaware that another naval officer had been recommended for the position, McKinley sent a letter to Secretary Long asking him to give Dewey the job. The secretary had to agree to the president’s “request.”
That fall, in time for Theodore’s thirty-ninth birthday, Edith and the children moved to Washington. The family had barely settled into their home when, on November 19, Edith gave birth to her fifth child, Quentin. The newborn, just as his three brothers had been, was immediately put on the waiting list for admission to the exclusive Groton School, a boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts.
Edith was slow to recover from Quentin’s birth. No doubt remembering his first wife’s fate during childbirth fourteen years earlier, Theodore consulted several doctors. One said Edith had an abscess near her hip and might die if she didn’t have an operation. But surgery at that time was primitive and dangerous, so Theodore was hesitant about following the doctor’s advice.
Ten-year-old Ted was also a concern. He had frequent headaches and was withdrawn, which was not normal for a Roosevelt. The doctor said the boy was overwrought from trying to live up to his father’s expectations. Theodore wanted his children to be tough, and he tended to push them even when playing. He was, his oldest daughter recalled, “the instigator of all those perfectly awful endurance tests masquerading as games!”
Theodore made no secret of what he expected. “I want my boys trained to be hardy, self-reliant, positive men … rather than see them grow up namby-pamby weaklings I would rather see them put to death.” He especially pushed Ted, his namesake, because the boy had the potential “to be all the things I would like to have been and wasn’t, and it has been a great temptation to push him.” But the doctor’s diagnosis made Theodore vow to “never press Ted in body or mind,” which he didn’t for a while.
As Theodore worried about Edith and Ted, early in 1898 riots broke out in Havana, Cuba’s capital and largest city. The president sent the battleship USS Maine to protect American citizens and businesses there. On February 15, while the Maine was anchored in Havana’s harbor, an explosion sank the battleship and killed 262 American sailors. No one knew who or what caused the explosion, but Theodore called it “an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards.”
Because of the Maine disaster, war fever spread across the country. Newspapers published hundreds of stories, many of them exaggerated or completely untrue, about Spanish atrocities in Cuba. “Blood on the roadsides, blood in the fields, blood on the doorsteps, blood, blood, blood! The old, the young, the weak, the crippled—are all butchered without mercy,” screamed a typical article in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Such stories, called “yellow journalism,” sold lots of newspapers while inflaming public anger. “To Hell with Spain! Remember the Maine!” was a popular expression summing up the public’s mood.
Meanwhile, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt continued to meddle. Before leaving his office one February afternoon, Secretary Long, well aware by now that his assistant had no qualms about making major decisions on his own, told him not to do anything that would affect “the policy of the administration without consulting the President or me.” After Long left, the assistant secretary telegrammed Commodore Dewey, who was now in Hong Kong with the Pacific fleet, to prepare for “offensive operations in the Philippines.” He also ordered large supplies of ammunition and guns. Then he sent messages to Congress asking for legislation to recruit thousands of new sailors. In a single afternoon, one historian observed, the assistant secretary had the navy more prepared for combat than at any time since the Civil War.
“During my short absence,” Secretary Long marveled the next day, “I find that Roosevelt, in his precipitate way, has come very near causing more of an explosion than happened to the Maine … the very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon.” Although angry, Long didn’t change the orders. He knew that his assistant secretary was quite knowledgeable about naval affairs and his decisions were usually right, regardless of how impulsive they seemed.
Elsewhere in the nation, people debated the pros and cons of a war. The United States was just recovering from a major economic recession, which was called the Panic of 1893. Big business, which had contributed record amounts of money to elect McKinley in 1896, initially opposed a war because it might slow economic recovery. But as the public clamor to avenge the Maine grew louder, Wall Street joined in. Spain hadn’t been a major military power for centuries, and its warships were old, so the United States would certainly win without too many casualties. And Republican politicians felt that a successful war would help their candidates in congressional elections that fall and in the 1900 presidential election.
On April 11, the president, as specified in the Constitution, asked Congress for a declaration of war. The legislators debated for eight days. On the morning of April 19, 1898, exactly one year after Theodore had become assistant secretary, both the House and the Senate voted to declare war on Spain.
President McKinley ordered Dewey to attack Spanish warships at Manila, Spain’s colonial capital of the Philippines. In the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, in just a few hours the American navy destroyed all eleven enemy ships, killing some 150 Spanish sailors while losing only one man, from heat stroke.
Theodore resigned as assistant secretary on May 16 because he wanted to go to war himself. “If I am to be any use in politics it
is because I am supposed to be a man who does not preach what he fears to practice… . For the last year I have preached war with Spain. I would feel distinctly ashamed … if I now failed to practice what I have preached.” Or, as he said on another occasion, “I have a horror of people who bark but don’t bite.”
Friends and family tried to convince Theodore that at age thirty-nine he was too old to be a soldier. His eyesight wasn’t good enough, he had no military training, and he had six children to consider. Twice, the president asked Theodore to stay in Washington to help manage war operations. He “has lost his head,” Secretary Long wrote 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.”
Edith, who had nearly died after finally having her operation in early March, did not want her husband to go to war either, but she knew she couldn’t stop him. “I know now,” Theodore said later, “that I should have turned from my wife’s deathbed” to fight in Cuba.
As adults, both Alice and her cousin Corinney said they thought Theodore had been embarrassed because his father hadn’t served in the Civil War. “He felt,” Corinney commented, “he had to explain it always, about the father he admired so hugely.”
Secretary of War Russell A. Alger gave Theodore an army commission as a lieutenant colonel and gave him permission to recruit his own regiment of cowboys from out west. It had been common during the Civil War for prominent men to recruit and command their own regiments. And several men in addition to Theodore recruited regiments for the Spanish-American War. Colonel Roosevelt had no military training and he wisely suggested that he serve as second in command under his friend, career soldier Leonard Wood, who had been promoted to full colonel. But everyone, Colonel Wood included, knew who was really in charge.
Michael L. Cooper Page 5