Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  What he had just observed—evidence of America’s passion for work, its impatient refusal to loiter a moment longer than necessary—was pleasing, if not surprising. For several years, both he and the world had been aware that the United States was the most energetic of nations. She had long been the most richly endowed. This first year of the new century found her worth twenty-five billion dollars more than her nearest rival, Great Britain, with a gross national product more than twice that of Germany and Russia. The United States was already so rich in goods and services that she was more self-sustaining than any industrial power in history.

  Indeed, it could consume only a fraction of what it produced. The rest went overseas at prices other exporters found hard to match. As Andrew Carnegie said, “The nation that makes the cheapest steel has other nations at its feet.” More than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil flowed from the American cornucopia, and at least one third of all steel, iron, silver, and gold.

  Even if the United States were not so blessed with raw materials, the excellence of her manufactured products guaranteed her dominance of world markets. Current advertisements in British magazines gave the impression that the typical Englishman woke to the ring of an Ingersoll alarm, shaved with a Gillette razor, combed his hair with Vaseline tonic, buttoned his Arrow shirt, hurried downstairs for Quaker Oats, California figs, and Maxwell House coffee, commuted in a Westinghouse tram (body by Fisher), rose to his office in an Otis elevator, and worked all day with his Waterman pen under the efficient glare of Edison lightbulbs. “It only remains,” one Fleet Street wag suggested, “for [us] to take American coal to Newcastle.” Behind the joke lay real concern: the United States was already supplying beer to Germany, pottery to Bohemia, and oranges to Valencia.

  As a result of this billowing surge in productivity, Wall Street was awash with foreign capital. Carnegie calculated that America could afford to buy the entire United Kingdom, and settle Britain’s national debt in the bargain. For the first time in history, transatlantic money currents were thrusting more powerfully westward than east. Even the Bank of England had begun to borrow money on Wall Street. New York City seemed destined to replace London as the world’s financial center.

  It was hard to believe that the United States had struggled out of a depression only five years before. Prosperity was everywhere for Roosevelt to see—if not through drawn blinds at the moment, then memorably on his recent trip to Minnesota. The weather-stained barns of poorer days, the drab farmhouses and blistered grain elevators, were pristine with new paint. He had seen corrugated dirt giving way to asphalt, rotten boardwalks smoothing to stone, shards of shacks pushed aside by new redbrick houses. Not so long ago, Midwestern towns had glowed dully at night, if they glowed at all. Now they were constellations of electricity, bright enough to wake the sleeping traveler. Equally bright, by day, were silver threads of irrigation in the green fields, and new, steel-roofed sheds and schoolhouses.

  Behind Roosevelt now (he could reopen his blinds, as the train gathered speed), Buffalo receded into a cyclorama of modern industrial development. Louis Sullivan’s “skyscraper,” the Prudential Building, bespoke a modern, defiantly native school of architecture. Scores of dockside cranes dipped and reared like hungry pterodactyls. Horseless carriages trailed plumes of dust and engine smoke in and out of town. Hydroelectric-plant towers loomed against the mists of Niagara, sending invisible thrills of power through the industrial suburbs. Wherever the sun shone, it glinted on countless telephone and telegraph wires, weaving block to block in warps and woofs of copper.

  Trees soon barred Buffalo from sight, but the wires pursued the train effortlessly, rising and falling from pole to pole. Already news of Roosevelt’s departure had flashed along them, flickering into every corner of the land. Wires like these, connecting with other wires in Albany and yet more wires in the Adirondacks, had summoned him from the peak of Mount Marcy. In about twelve hours, they would broadcast the details of his arrival in Washington.

  EMPTY LAKESIDE LAND BEGAN to roll by. Roosevelt relaxed with the morning newspapers. Almost every editor in the country, it seemed, approved of his promise to continue “unbroken” the policies of President McKinley. The New York Herald featured an on-the-spot sketch of him taking the oath, hand held high, saying that he deserved “golden praise.” The Albany Journal and The Washington Post contributed their share of fine ounces. The New York Sun, banner journal of business conservatism, hailed his “responsible” desire to keep the Cabinet intact. “Nothing so sobers a man as the possession of great power.”

  The funeral train slowed to ten miles an hour as it approached Aurora, first village on the line. Farmworkers crowded the embankment, doffing their hats to the passing catafalque. Schoolchildren knelt in the cinders, holding up streams of black bunting. Thinly, through the hiss of steam and rumble of wheels, came the sound of their voices singing:

  Nearer my God to Thee,

  Nearer to Thee …

  The train did not stop. Accelerating again, it moved out of the flat country into a narrow valley splotched with red maple trees. Roosevelt returned to his newspapers.

  The foreign papers indicated that British opinion was in his favor. Even The Times, which had been critical of him during his bellicose Navy Department days, said that he had “great gifts” as a leader, and hoped that his “impulsiveness” was a thing of the past. The Daily Chronicle welcomed him as a benign, if formidable, new force in world affairs. “He believes in a big America. He is an expansionist and an imperialist, … [but] we are safe in thinking that this youngest of Presidents will prove one of the greatest.”

  Continental comment was reported to be cooler. Misgivings about Roosevelt’s peculiar brand of Pan-Americanism had been expressed in both Paris and St. Petersburg. In Berlin, the Kreuz-Zeitung feared that the new President might be “anti-German.” But the Neueste Nachrichten recalled that as a teenager he had lived and studied with a Dresden family. Surely this meant that he would have more sympathy than his predecessors for the Teutonic point of view.

  On one thing most nations were agreed: under Theodore Roosevelt, American sea power was sure to burgeon rapidly. The man who had prepared Admiral Dewey for Manila Bay was unlikely to let the United States Navy remain fifth in the world.

  LOEB ANNOUNCED THE Secretary of War. Roosevelt willingly cast aside his newspapers. Elihu Root was the one person on the train he felt he could talk to freely. Soon, both men were deep in conversation, swaying in their seats as the train sped south. About 9:30, its momentum slowed so that a farm boy was able to race it through the fields, waving a flag. The outbuildings of Arcade, N.Y., came into view, followed by a little railroad station. Almost reluctantly, the train stopped. About twenty Grand Army veterans snapped to attention on the platform. Their ancient tunics looked pinched and trussed, but they held themselves stiff with respect for a fallen comrade. A few much younger soldiers stood to one side. Their uniforms were intimately familiar to Roosevelt: he had worn that khaki himself (hand-tailored by Brooks Brothers) in the Spanish-American War. He drew the blinds, afraid they might salute him rather than McKinley.

  For ten minutes, while the locomotive took on water, Roosevelt and Root sat in semidarkness, listening to the sound of a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee.” Evidently they were to hear little else on their long way to Washington. Between strophes, there was a crunch of boots in the gravel, and an old soldier’s voice called quaveringly: “We’re all heartsore for Major McKinley.”

  Much as Roosevelt coveted the respect of Grand Army veterans, he knew they would never love him as they had loved his predecessor. McKinley had marched with them at Antietam, when “Teedie” Roosevelt had been but a child in a zouave suit. A gulf, not merely of years but of ideology, separated him from these heroes of the past. They had fought to preserve the Union; he had fought to create a world power. The old soldiers had cheered when the young soldiers liberated Cuba, but they fell silent when similar “freedoms” were imposed on Pu
erto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. They had watched with worried eyes as the Stars and Stripes rose over Hawaii, Wake Island, and half of Samoa, and Secretary Hay began negotiations to purchase the Danish West Indies. Was their beloved republic, they asked, taking on the trappings of an imperial power?

  The ideological gulf had yawned even wider when the young soldiers persuaded McKinley that occupation of Spain’s former colonies should continue well beyond armistice. Cuba and Puerto Rico would need two or three years to perfect new constitutions and build independent economies. The Philippines would need much longer, half a century perhaps. Seven million largely illiterate tribesmen could not be left to govern themselves without reverting to the laws of the jungle.

  Powerful commercial, strategic, and moral arguments to this effect had been advanced by the young soldiers—Theodore Roosevelt prominent among them—campaigning for McKinley’s re-election. They had trumpeted the islands as new markets for America’s superabundant production, cited naval research in favor of a global defense system, and looked to Congress to ensure that America would hold on to what the Supreme Court euphemistically called its “unincorporated territories.”

  The old soldiers remained fiercely opposed to expansionism. They asked how a nation that had won its own independence in a colonial war could force dependence upon others. They rejected McKinley’s assurance, “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind.” So did most intellectuals, and Democrats looking for an issue to break the Republican Party. As yet this anti-imperialist lobby remained a minority, but its numbers were growing, and its propaganda was powerful. Roosevelt could see the day when it might paralyze his foreign policy.

  “World duties,” he felt, were the inevitable and welcome consequence of America’s aggrandizing power. Old men and “mollycoddles” had no understanding of the huge historical forces at work. Just two weeks ago in Minnesota, he had dismissed the cliché that all great nations come to dust:

  So they have; and so have all others. The weak and the stationary have vanished as surely as, and more rapidly than, those whose citizens felt within them the lift that impels generous souls to great and noble effort. This is only another way of stating the universal law of death, which is itself part of the universal law of life.…

  While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, … [it] really continues, though in changed form, to live forever-more.

  His vision was too grandiose to be merely territorial. He had no interest in square miles as such. Expansion, to him, meant a hemispheric program of acquisition, democratization, and liberation. Cuba, for example, was already eligible for freedom (of sorts) and should have it (in a way) as soon as Congress worked out a policy for tariff reciprocity with the island. Puerto Rico was semi-independent, in the sense that Secretary Root had ended the military government there and given most powers to a native legislature. The real problem was what to do about the Philippines. “Sometimes,” Roosevelt confessed, “I feel it is an intensely disagreeable and unfortunate task which we cannot in honor shirk.”

  Clearly, a vast, primitive archipelago, divided by seven thousand waterways, seventy dialects, and the world’s most mutually incompatible religions—Christianity and Islam—needed an authoritarian government to hold it together. If not America’s, whose? There were also reasons of strategy to consider. Given half a chance, base-hungry powers such as Germany or Japan would annex and enslave the islands in perpetuity. The United States could at least be trusted not to hold them a day longer than democratic scruples required.

  President McKinley’s enduring ambition was noble, yet Filipinos seemed ungrateful. Rebellion had been raging on the archipelago for almost two years; Root needed a seventy-thousand-man army to control it. Some measure of peace had at last been achieved. Today’s papers were blessedly free of bad news from “over there.” But neither Roosevelt nor Root cared to speculate what nice, clean-cut American boys were doing to keep that peace.

  THE TRAIN BEGAN to move again. Root took his leave, and Roosevelt finished going through the newspapers. Great Britain offered “sincere expressions of sympathy” to the “bereaved” United States. No doubt the sympathy was sincere—an Anglo-American rapprochement had been under way for at least three years. Moscow confirmed another plot to assassinate Tsar Nicholas II—in Marseilles, of all places. One would have expected it rather in Tokyo: the most dangerous current rivalry in the world was that between Russia and Japan.

  Both powers were circling like wolves about that sick mammoth, China. Their first snap and snarl would probably be over the mammoth’s Manchurian extremity, Kwangtung Province. Other wolves were on the prowl: German ones trailing the Russian pack, British behind the Japanese. America had its own “Open Door” trade relations with China to protect, and a corollary pledge to “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative integrity.” Roosevelt’s instinct was to stand watchfully aside for the moment. He might one day have to leap in—as into those hounds in Colorado!—and sort out the predators with his bare hands.

  Worldwide, the balance of power was to his advantage. As long as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (his likely enemy, he felt, in any foreseeable war) remained preoccupied with the Tsar, and the Tsar and the Meiji Emperor of Japan continued to mass forces around Kwangtung, the President of the United States could surely perfect a partnership with King Edward VII to control the Western Hemisphere. Of course, he must do most of the controlling. The United States acknowledged Britain’s dominion of Canada (what a pity, he always felt, that President Polk had not “taken it all” in 1846!), but he intended to end, once and for all, a languid argument about the southern Alaskan boundary line. “I have studied that question pretty thoroughly and I do not think the Canadians have a leg to stand on.” They were entitled to the few miles of coast that were theirs by treaty, and not a pebble more.

  This was the only issue dividing the English-speaking powers. Elsewhere, there was benign assent. Britain seemed willing to accept the Monroe Doctrine, which Roosevelt, on the whole, held in greater reverence than the Nicene Creed. Lord Lansdowne’s Foreign Office had forsworn any role, strategic or territorial, in the construction of a canal across Central America. The second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, now at the point of ratification, approved American management of such a project, and granted the United States exclusive right to fortify the canal.

  Roosevelt could claim a large share of credit for the latter clause. As Governor, he had been outraged by the first Hay-Pauncefote treaty, which had allowed for neutrality and openness of the canal in the event of war. His criticism had been outspoken, and had hurt John Hay, but the Senate had agreed with him. Now there was this new, tougher treaty. It gave the United States Navy freedom to maneuver through the canal in wartime, while preventing other belligerents from doing so. He looked forward to signing it as soon as Hay laid it on his desk.

  There remained the question of where to build the canal: Nicaragua or Panama. Nicaragua was the overwhelming preference of Congress: old John Tyler Morgan, chairman of the Senate Committee on Interoceanic Canals, had been croaking its praises for a decade. Roosevelt privately favored Panama, despite the failure of French engineers there. But his public attitude must be noncommittal. All he could urge now was that the canal be dug by American hands, and the first spade sunk during his Presidency. The stupendous task was uniquely that of the United States: “We must build the Isthmian Canal, and we must grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the east and the west.” Otherwise, Germany might start digging. The thought of the Kaiser acquiring land rights anywhere in the Americas was enough to freeze Roosevelt’s blood. A presidential commission was studying the choice of route, once and for all. It would probably recommend Nicaragua, and he would abide by its decision.

  Even so, Panama remained an attractive alternative. The Isthmus was at its narrowest there—fewer than forty miles from se
a to sea—and his nature was to love shortcuts. There were rumors that the entire French operation, both equipment and excavations, would soon be for sale. And the political situation in Panama was promising. That reluctant appendix to Colombia was having one of its annual rebellions against the authority of Bogotá—the forty-eighth or forty-ninth, by Roosevelt’s count. Since Colombia was itself waging war against Venezuela, there was a chance that, for once, Panama might succeed. If so, the rebels would surely offer their canal route to the United States, in exchange for a share of revenue and guaranteed independence from Colombia.

  THE ALLEGHENY FOOTHILLS turned black and greasy near Olean. Discarded oil drums dribbled into Cuba Lake. The very ground seemed to ooze. Here, in 1627, Franciscan explorers had discovered a spring of “thick dark water that burned like brandy.” Later settlers found this same crude seeping out of rocks all over the Alleghenies. They had cursed it as poison for the soil, until Indians persuaded them it was medicinal. Roosevelt himself came from a generation of children who had been rubbed with evil-smelling “rock oil” whenever they had chest colds.

  Olean Valley now was a landscape inconceivable to its discoverers. The slopes bristled with filthy derricks and flaming chimneys. Double-headed pumps toggled crazily, sucking tarry sludge out of the earth. High in the sky floated an oily miasma that seemed to drain the world of color.

  Apocalyptic though the scene was, Roosevelt was aware of something more disturbing above and beyond it all, “a new and dark power” that shadowed every prospect in American life. The power had its source in a contract between executives of the industry he looked upon, and the carrier transporting him.