On the roof of the palace, Lieutenant Frank McCoy prepared for flagstaff duty. The Stars and Stripes hung above him, its folds barely heaving. Below, in the Plaza de Armas, a dense crowd sweated with anticipation. Thousands more Cubans jammed the adjoining streets and every balcony, turret, and tree with a view. Even the harbor swarmed. Boats heavy with spectators jostled at anchor, under a shimmer of bunting.
“—and I hereby declare the occupation of Cuba by the United States and by the military government of the island to be ended.” Wood saluted President Tomás Estrada Palma and handed over the documents of transfer.
From far across town, the Cayabas cannons boomed. Lieutenant McCoy remained at attention. He had to count forty-five concatenations, one for every state of the Union, before he hauled down a flag that he would have preferred to keep flying. Both he and General Wood felt they were abandoning a “saved” people to perdition.
By any standards, Wood’s two-and-a-half-year governorship had been a spectacular success. A trained surgeon, he had transformed Cuba from one of the world’s most pestilential countries into one of its healthiest. He had achieved the “miracle” of eliminating Stegomyia fasciata. As a result, Cuba was free of yellow fever for the first time in almost two centuries. The miracle had not happened gently. Doors barred against Wood’s sanitation teams had been smashed open, hidalgos forced to pick up their own litter, and public defecators horsewhipped at the scene of the crime. Buildings in Havana and Santiago de Cuba had been purged with disinfectant so strong that “even insects came out of the ground to die.” But, thanks to this draconian treatment, Havana was now a more sanitary city than Washington, D.C.
The cannons continued to thud as the crowd grew restless. Cubans had mixed feelings about what was happening. The old “Cuba-Libre” coalition—intellectuals, radicals, and peasants—welcomed the departure of the yanquis. Yet what Wood called the island’s “better class”—businessmen, teachers, merchants, plantation owners—regretted the hasty withdrawal of funds and social services. Wood, after all, had built three thousand new schools. He had paved Havana’s dirt streets, and transformed its parks from dangerous jungles into safe gardens. He had catacombed the city with new sewer systems, water mains, and conduits for power and communications. He had even protected the Cuban economy from exploitation by American entrepreneurs.
What protection, the “better class” wanted to know, could President Palma guarantee? Who would teach in the new schools, and out of what textbooks? Who would buy the sugar sacks already crowding every warehouse?
The forty-fifth cannon blast sounded. Lieutenant McCoy stepped to the flagstaff and undid the halyards. Old Glory seemed reluctant to descend. It sank a few feet, then the cords snagged, and it briefly rose.
There were groans and catcalls in the plaza. McCoy pulled till the cloth tumbled about him. To thunderous cheers, General José Miguel Gomez, hero of the war against Spain, appeared on the roof to hoist the colors of Cuba Libre. But the cords snagged again, and Gomez asked for a lighter flag. It fluttered aloft amid screams, tears, and ragged blasts of artillery.
“IT FLUTTERED ALOFT AMID SCREAMS, TEARS, AND
RAGGED BLASTS OF ARTILLERY.”
Independent Cuba raises her flag, 20 May 1902 (photo credit 6.1)
As soon as protocol permitted, General Wood bade President Estrada Palma farewell. He drove down to the harbor, escorted by troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, and boarded the USS Brooklyn. The white cruiser weighed anchor at four o’clock. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes watched it steam north past the wreck of the Maine, upon which some grateful islander had tossed a chain of flowers.
CHAPTER 7
Genius, Force, Originality
What’s all this about Cubia an’ th’ Ph’lipeens?
What’s beet sugar?
THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL lack of inhibition—some said, of decorum—was much discussed at Washington dinner tables in the spring of 1902. Whether exercising, working, or pricking the bubbles of solemnity around him, he seemed unconcerned by his growing reputation as “the strangest creature the White House ever held.”
On 28 May, he was seen hanging from a cable over the Potomac, presumably in some effort to toughen his wrists. Owen Wister caught him walking behind John Hay on tiptoe, bowing like an obsequious Oriental. This might or might not have been connected with the fact that Roosevelt was currently studying jujitsu. White House groundsmen, unaware that he was a published ornithologist, were puzzled by his habit of standing under trees, motionless, for long periods of time. Hikers in Rock Creek Park learned to take cover when he galloped by, revolver in hand; he had a habit of “popping” shortsightedly at twigs and stumps with live ammunition.
Petitioners visiting the Executive Office learned to keep talking, because the President usually had an open book on his desk, and was quite capable of snatching it up when the conversation flagged. One day, the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon, found Roosevelt supine on the sofa, kicking his heels in the air. Cambon invited him to attend the dedication of an American monument to Comte de Rochambeau, whereupon Roosevelt, still kicking, yelled, “All right! Alice and I will go! Alice and I are toughs!”
On another occasion he appeared in George Cortelyou’s antechamber and jumped clean over a chair. He encouraged his big horse, Bleistein, to similar arts of levitation at the Chevy Chase Club. Photographs of them airborne together soon appeared in the Washington Times. Roosevelt was delighted—“Best pictures I’ve ever had taken!”—and passed out autographed copies to his Cabinet.
“THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL LACK OF INHIBITION …
WAS MUCH DISCUSSED AT WASHINGTON DINNER TABLES.”
Graduation ceremony at United States Naval Academy, 1902 (photo credit 7.1)
Hay, who as Secretary of State stood next in line to succeed Roosevelt, pretended to be annoyed at Bleistein’s easy clearance of the rails. “Nothing ever happens,” he complained.
ROOSEVELT MIGHT HAVE said the same about the Fifty-seventh Congress. Only one of the requests in his First Annual Message had been enacted: the establishment of a permanent Census Bureau. Senators Aldrich and Allison were maddeningly vague about what remained on the calendar. The President despaired of being able to affect them with any sense of social urgency. Friends took the brunt of his impatience. “Get action; do things; be sane,” he snapped at a former Rough Rider. “Don’t fritter away your time.… Be somebody; get action.”
Behind the harsh ejaculations lay anger at his failure to “get action” himself—in particular the Philippines civil-government bill, which he needed to show that the Administration’s colonial policy in the Far East was as enlightened as it had been in the Caribbean. It galled him that Senator Hoar was still calling for Philippine independence, in tones of majestic condemnation:
You have wasted six hundred millions of treasure. You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives—the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit.… I believe—nay, I know—that in general our officers are humane. But in some cases they have carried on your warfare with a mixture of American ingenuity and Castilian cruelty.
Hoar was addressing himself to Republican imperialists generally, but the words you and your sounded uncomfortably specific, as far as Roosevelt was concerned.
At Arlington National Cemetery, on Memorial Day, the President came to the defense of his Philippines policy. “Oh my comrades,” he cried at grizzled ranks of Civil War veterans, “the men in the uniform of the United States who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons.” They were fighting to impose “orderly freedom” upon a fragmented nation, according to rules of “just severity” sanctioned by Abraham Lincoln. On Mindanao as at Gettysburg, “military power is used to secure peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power.”
Roosevelt reminded his
audience that legislation to that effect was now before Congress. There was scattered applause. “We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands … how to make good use of their freedom.”
The year’s first hot sun beat down on bald heads and bright medals. A breeze came off the Potomac, stirring hundreds of flags up the hill, and swaying the oaks over Roosevelt’s head. Invisible choirs of seventeen-year cicadas buzzed in counterpoint to his voice. Perhaps Filipinos would govern themselves the next time locusts sang at Arlington. Perhaps not. “When that day will come,” Roosevelt shouted, “it is not in human wisdom to foretell.”
For the time being, America’s global interests mandated a continuing presence in Manila. “The shadow of our destiny …”
He had been working on his speech for weeks, in an attempt to make it the first great oration of his Presidency. But another shadow darkened his face, and he improvised a sudden, disastrous apologia for the recent military scandals:
Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines—worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it.
Had he spat upon the porch of the Custis-Lee Mansion, he could not have more effectively unified Democratic opposition to the Philippines bill. The ugly word lynchings, which he had so far avoided using in public, sounded deliberately provocative. “I do not think the South will care much for Mr. Roosevelt after this,” said an outraged Dixie Senator. “He is dead so far as my section is concerned.”
Sure enough, when the bill came up for vote on 3 June, the Senate divided along party lines. The Republican majority prevailed (Senator Hoar alone dissenting), but Roosevelt took no credit for the vote. Neither could he console himself with Northern reaction to his outburst: even the New York newspapers called it “indiscreet,” “unfortunate,” and “in extremely bad taste.” Bruised and rueful, he hoped for passage of his Cuban reciprocity bill, as a sign that Congress was not totally hostile toward him.
ANOTHER MEASURE, HOWEVER, had precedence in the legislative logjam. On Wednesday, 4 June, Senator Morgan called for the reading of House Resolution 3110, “To provide for the construction of a canal connecting the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” Despite January’s Canal Commission turnaround on Panama, Morgan was confident that the Nicaragua route would prevail. His own Committee on Interoceanic Canals had reported in favor of it, seven to four. Parliamentary rules required a reading of Senator Spooner’s half-forgotten amendment to the resolution:
Be it enacted & c. That the President of the United States is hereby authorized to acquire, for and on behalf of the United States, at a cost not exceeding $40,000,000, the rights, concessions, grants of lands [etc.] owned by the New Panama Canal Company, of France.… The President is hereby authorized to acquire … a strip of land, the territory of the Republic of Colombia, ten miles in width, extending from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean … and to excavate, construct, and to perpetually maintain, operate and protect thereon, a canal, of such depth and capacity as will afford convenient passage of ships of the greatest tonnage and draft now in use.
Morgan laid down his copy of the amendment with an old man’s tremor, and made his final, weary plea for the Nicaragua route. He had no new technological arguments to present. Instead, he spent half an hour condemning Panama as a cesspool of racial and political squalor. He expressed Alabaman disgust for its “low grade” population. Panamanians were not only unclean, but unstable: they lived—always had lived—in “a chronic state of insurrection and violence” against the authority of Bogotá.
Senator Hanna sat listening, the stillest man in the room. Morgan pointed out that the Treaty of New Granada (1846) actually obligated the United States to hold Colombia together, in exchange for railroad rights across the Isthmus. A commitment was a commitment.
Storming on, the withered little Senator waxed prophetic. Should Washington show the least inclination to ignore the treaty, “There is no doubt that Panama would eagerly seek protection under the folds of the flag of the United States.” And should an American President be so rash as to extend that flag, “It would poison the minds of the people against us in every Spanish-American republic in the Western Hemisphere.”
As soon as Morgan sat down, Hanna was on his feet. “Mr. President, I desire to give notice that I will address the Senate tomorrow at two o’clock on the pending bill.”
WHEN SENATORS RECONVENED on 5 June, they were surprised to find the chamber festooned with maps and diagrams. One twenty-foot projection, hanging from the visitors’ gallery, showed red and black dots splotching Central America. The dots represented volcanoes, active and extinct. Those in red were lined up mainly with Nicaragua. Panama was dot-free.
Hanna entered to a whirring of press telephones. Latecomers hurried to their seats as he sorted a mass of books and papers. He began to speak in his customary lackluster style. “Mr. President, the question of transportation is one of the important items of the day.”
The chamber settled down to being informed rather than entertained. Not for Hanna the old-fashioned eloquence of Senator Hoar. He deemed it irrelevant to a new, statistical century. Of his eighty-eight listeners, forty-one were for Nicaragua, thirty-five for Panama, and twelve undecided. Data, not dramatics, would get him the ten further votes he needed. “I was once,” he admitted, “in favor of the Nicaragua Canal.” But after two years of reflection, “I have been forced by stubborn facts and conditions to change my mind.”
For the next one and a half hours, Hanna funneled his “stubborn facts” like wheat into the Senate granary. Every dry grain had its kernel of persuasion. “The Panama route is forty-nine miles long, as against one hundred eighty-three miles of the Nicaragua.… Trade winds blow every day in the year from sixteen to twenty knots across the Nicaragua route.… The annual cost of operating the Nicaragua Canal is one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or, say one million, three hundred—”
“Oh, do make him sit down,” came a woman’s voice from the gallery. It was a cry of concern more than boredom: Hanna’s arthritis was visibly tormenting him. He said that he would conclude his speech the next day.
Polls in smoke-filled rooms that night indicated that the majority of senators favoring Nicaragua had already diminished. Cromwell and Philippe Bunau-Varilla lobbied like men possessed, while Senator Morgan’s lieutenants tried to fight attrition with scandal. They whispered that French shareholders of the Compagnie Nouvelle would not see a dime of the forty-million-dollar transfer fee, and that President Roosevelt, Secretary Hay, and Senator Spooner were the likely beneficiaries, along with Hanna, Cromwell, and Bunau-Varilla. Even “Princess Alice” was rumored to be in on the deal.
HANNA RESUMED HIS speech as soon as the Senate reopened for business on Friday, 6 June. Pointing to the splotched volcanic map, he said he wished to discuss “the burning question” of igneous activity in the Caribbean region. Just the previous month, Mont Pelée in Martinique had erupted, killing forty thousand people. Panama was “exempt” from this kind of danger. Not so Nicaragua, which lay along an almost continuously volcanic tract extending northwest from Costa Rica. Senator Morgan’s canal would cut straight across that tract—“probably the most violently eruptive of any in the Western Hemisphere.” Mount Momotombo, a hundred miles from the proposed route, had blown up only two months prior to Pelée. Had it done so with equal force, it would have precipitated “enough cinders and lava … to fill up the basin of Lake Managua.”
For another hour, Hanna cited alarming seismological, social, and navigational evidence against Nicaragua. Even as he spoke, Mont Pelée was erupting again. Reports of his speech in the evening newspapers jostled news of sky-darkeni
ng clouds and six-foot fluctuations of sea level.
AS LONG AS THE canal debate lasted, the President kept his own counsel. Two senators visited him with learned arguments for Nicaragua, and he listened to them solemnly, scribbling on a notepad. Had they been able to look over his shoulder, they would have seen that he was merely doodling the names of his children, over and over again.
MEANWHILE, HIS CUBAN reciprocity bill was being lobbied to death. The House of Representatives had authorized him to grant a 20 percent tariff reduction on all Cuban exports to the United States—with the exception of refined sugar, which could come in free. But this last, seemingly generous provision guaranteed opposition in the upper chamber. Senators beholden to the American refining industry—mainly Easterners, mainly Democrats—objected to foreign favoritism, while Senators from states that produced beet sugar—mainly Westerners, mainly Republicans—condemned the bill as antiprotectionist. “I wish,” Roosevelt sighed, “that Cuba grew steel and glass.”
Common sense suggested that he leave trade policy to such experts as Nelson Aldrich. But his always active conscience (“In this particular case of reciprocity a moral question is concerned”) plagued him. And morality aside, he believed that commercial sweets would reconcile Cubans to the sour taste of a United States garrison at Guantánamo.
On 13 June, Roosevelt took the bold step of sending Congress a “Special Message on Cuba.” He did so knowing that the Message could well fail, and advertise to the world that he had no power of presidential persuasion. It might even lead to a general tariff battle, a split party, and defeat for himself in 1904. His hope against hope was that the warring senators would be shamed into a compromise. “Cuba is a young republic,” he wrote, “still weak, who owes to us her birth, whose future, whose very life, must depend on our attitude toward her.”
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