Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Not until 11 January, when he bade them good-bye, did he admit with outstretched arms, “Well, if I had it to do over again, I—don’t—think—I’d—do it.”

  WISTER FLATTERED HIMSELF afterward that the President had surrendered, “in his completest school-boy manner,” to adult reasoning. If so, naïveté soon yielded to impulsiveness again. Roosevelt came to the defense of a beleaguered black postmaster in Indianola, Mississippi, who also happened to be female.

  He knew her territory: Indianola stood not far from where he had hunted bear last fall. Appointed by President Harrison and reappointed by McKinley, Mrs. Minnie Cox was by all accounts a worthy citizen. She administered her office efficiently and even charitably, paying overdue box fees herself rather than embarrass white customers short of funds. But she had also invested her federal salary in local businesses, and become prosperous over the years. By local definition, she had therefore become uppity. At a mass meeting, white Indianolans chose to “persuade” her to resign.

  Since Mrs. Cox was, as Mississippi’s Senator Anselm J. McLaurin allowed, “an intelligent Negro,” she had needed little persuasion. After hurriedly resigning, she had left town on vacation—the mayor of Indianola allowing that if she came back too soon “she would get her neck broken inside of two hours.”

  Roosevelt’s reaction was prompt and precisely articulated. Mrs. Cox was being coerced “by a brutal and lawless element purely upon the ground of color.” He declined to “tolerate wrong and outrage of such flagrant character.” Neither would he stop paying Mrs. Cox her full federal salary. “The postmaster’s resignation has been received, but not accepted.”

  In deference to the feelings of white Indianolans, however, he would not reopen her post office. In future, they could pick up their mail at Greenville, thirty miles away by country road.

  ON 12 JANUARY, news leaked that the President had decided to give Boston a black Assistant District Attorney. In living memory, no Negro had ever received a Northern federal appointment. The report, coinciding with Roosevelt’s defense of Mrs. Cox and his refusal to back down on Dr. Crum, touched off an explosion of editorial criticism similar to that following his dinner with Booker T. Washington. Only now the complaints were heard from as close to home as his own native city. The New York Times accused him of using political operatives to corral black delegates—“not a nice game”—and the New York Herald saw danger of “setting the country back a generation in color prejudice and sectional strife.” Students at Columbia University debated a resolution “that President Roosevelt’s policy of appointing Negroes to offices in states where sentiment is opposed to it, is unwise.” Redneck reactionaries again excoriated the “nigger-loving” President, and the sheriff of Sunflower County, Mississippi, called him “a 14-karat jackass.”

  By now, Roosevelt was used to this kind of invective. More worrying was the prospect of fair-minded Southerners regarding him as socially irresponsible. He pointed out in a letter to the editor of The Atlanta Constitution that merit, not color, was his prime patronage concern. On at least three recent occasions in Georgia, he had chosen to replace black men with white. Conversely, the white citizens of Savannah had not protested when he had retained a Negro as their Collector of Customs—the identical position that Dr. Crum was to hold in Charleston.

  Why the appointment of one should cause any more excitement than the appointment of the other I am wholly at a loss to imagine. As I am writing to a man of keen and trained intelligence, I need hardly say that to connect either of these appointments … or my actions in upholding the law in Indianola, with such questions as “social equality” and “negro domination” is as absurd as to connect them with the nebular hypothesis or the theory of atoms.

  Black leaders tried not to make things worse for him by openly saluting his policies. But William M. McGill, a Tennessee preacher and publisher who knew Mrs. Cox, could not resist issuing a brief statement in her behalf: “The Administration of President Roosevelt is to the Negro what the heart is to the body. It has pumped life blood into every artery of the Negro in this country.”

  ROOSEVELT WORKED OFF his political frustrations in typical physical fashion. He chopped down trees on Cathedral Heights, gunned his big horse Bleistein daily through Rock Creek Park, and, when ice made riding dangerous, hiked for miles in hobnailed boots, crashing over saplings like a bear. His singlesticks duels with Leonard Wood continued: after one session he was so whacked about the right arm that he had to greet his evening guests left-handed.

  ALONG EMBASSY ROW, anticipation of the arrival of new ambassadors from Germany and France mounted. Jusserand was an unknown quantity, but Baron von Sternburg’s previous postings to Washington, not to mention his closeness to the President, allowed for a good deal of gossip—not all of it friendly. “Il est plus anglais qu’un anglais,” sneered the Russian envoy, Count de Cassini, “et plus américain qu’un américain.” Insofar as Cassini himself spoke French at home, and was excessively proud of his Italian surname, this was a qualified condemnation.

  “I see you are to have Specky again,” Cecil Spring Rice wrote enviously from St. Petersburg. “What fun.” With the Venezuela arbitration talks not yet under way, Roosevelt remained guarded. Time enough for “fun” when the Kaiser withdrew his warships, which were ostensibly guarding against any breakdown in the peace process. “He thinks he has me because he is sending an intimate friend of mine to Washington. I know what I mean to do.… The new Ambassador will not influence me any more than Herr von Holleben could.”

  This confidence, shared with the French chargé d’affaires, Pierre de Margérie, let the diplomatic corps know that Roosevelt had not been merely modest in declining to arbitrate Allied claims against Venezuela. He wanted to use the current negotiatory situation to make a powerful, one-sided point. Since Germany and Britain would not deal directly with their debtor, President Castro had asked Herbert Bowen, the United States Minister in Caracas, to represent him at the talks. This awkward choice played right into American hands.

  “Mr. Bowen is a capable man, but his manner is not always, shall we say, diplomatic,” the President said to de Margérie. Rambling on half ruminatively, he enunciated for the first time the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

  The debts will be paid. I’ll do whatever’s necessary to ensure that. There’s the Monroe Doctrine to consider. Since we can’t, on the one hand, tolerate permanent seizure of territory by a European power in any of the American republics … I, on the other, can’t let them hide behind the Doctrine in order to shirk obligations.

  De Margérie speculated that it might have been a delusion to the contrary that caused President Castro to be so cavalier about credit in the first place. “That is precisely what I want no more of,” Roosevelt snapped. If Venezuela refused to abide by the arbitration agreement, he would enforce it himself. “I have the means.”

  ON 22 JANUARY, Roosevelt held another conference, this time with Senators Hanna, Spooner, and Shelby M. Cullom, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations. They discussed the deadlocked Panama Canal Treaty. Bogotá’s latest instructions to Dr. Herrán proposed an annual rent that was at least a half-million dollars more than the United States was prepared to pay for a sea-to-sea strip of jungle six miles wide. Secretary Hay had made a New Year’s concession, offering to begin rental payments within nine years rather than fourteen, but this was still not satisfactory to Herrán. After six weeks of argument, negotiations had broken off, and both men were bedridden with frustration.

  Under the Spooner Amendment—now enshrined in law—Roosevelt was required to revert to the Nicaragua alternative in the event of failure to negotiate a satisfactory agreement with Colombia. His advisers, Panama partisans all, dreaded such a reversal. Recent events in the Caribbean, they said, indicated that trouble with some major foreign power over the Monroe Doctrine was “inevitable.” Prompt construction of a Panama canal was “an absolute vital necessity for the United States.”

  Roosevelt agree
d to offer Bogotá a final concession, more than doubling the original rental figure proposed. The next morning, 22 January, Hay wrote to Herrán:

  I am commanded by the President to say to you that the reasonable time that the statute accords for the conclusion of negotiations with Colombia for the excavation of a canal on the Isthmus has expired, and he has authorized me to sign with you the treaty of which I had the honor to give you a draft, with the modification that the sum of $100,000, fixed therein as the annual payment, be increased to $250,000. I am not authorized to consider or discuss any other change.

  Herrán weighed this note for a few hours only. Its finality was unmistakable. Unbeknown to Hay, Herrán had secret instructions to sign the moment he felt “everything might be lost by delay.” That moment had now come. According to his calculations, Colombia actually had everything to gain. Indeed, by signing now, she would make a profit of $7.25 million on the original protocol. The loss of a few extra rental millions was nothing compared to the catastrophe of losing all. Colombia might have her canal, and Panama too, forever.

  Late in the afternoon, Herrán went to Hay’s house.

  NEWS THAT THE Panama Canal Treaty had been signed reached the White House in time to cheer Roosevelt at another disastrous reception. His problem this evening was not with crowd handling, but with the color of certain guests. Four or five Negroes strolled in to shake his hand. They were federal officeholders, so their attendance at an official, stand-up event was not unusual. This time, however, they made so bold as to bring their wives. Southern Congressmen hurried for the exits, swearing never to visit the White House again. No black women, as far as anybody could remember, had ever been entertained at a private function at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Yet another racial scandal erupted in Dixie.

  “’Pears lak us niggers is on top now, Marse Roberts,” an old field hand teased his boss in Georgia.

  “How’s that?”

  “H’ain’t we got a nigger for President?”

  White reactionaries believed the same, but failed to find it funny. James K. Vardaman, running for Governor of Mississippi, went to the limits of public invective. Theodore Roosevelt was nothing but a “little, mean, coon-flavored miscegenationist,” while the White House had become “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”

  This was not the kind of publicity Roosevelt needed, coinciding as it did with Senate Commerce Committee hearings on his nomination of Dr. Crum and floor debate on his closing of the Indianola post office.

  He was lucky enough to be defended in the latter case by the fastest mind on Capitol Hill. John Spooner addressed the Senate on 24 January, in an atmosphere more rife with sectionalism than at any time since the “bloody shirt” demagoguery of his youth. Speaking with his usual easy rapidity, he affirmed the President’s goodwill toward all law-abiding Southerners. But the principle at stake in Indianola was that for which the Union Army had fought: an unconscionable minority must not be allowed to subvert the sovereignty of the state. Mrs. Cox had been “asked” to resign, after years of exemplary service:

  It is as idle as the wind, Mr. President, to cavil upon the proposition that this was not a forced resignation.… If it was not duress, what was it? It was the power behind it that constituted the duress; it was the fact that that power was executed by the white citizens of that country, and that this person against whom it was addressed was colored.

  Senator McLaurin rose to defend the right of a community to rid itself of personae non gratae. Mrs. Cox must submit to the will of her neighbors; that was the way of the South. Why, he himself had known persons who were asked to leave town in twenty-four hours.

  “I have no doubt the Senator has,” Spooner said.

  Goaded by chuckles, McLaurin launched into a rambling correlation of race domination and rape. White Southerners would never forsake their own moral standards. “It will take a hundred thousand bayonets to restrain them if the virtue of their women is assaulted.”

  Spooner affected polite puzzlement. “Mrs. Cox had not made any improper advances to any woman in Indianola, had she?”

  McLaurin ranted on for another forty minutes, but the debate was over.

  ON 25 JANUARY, Dr. Herrán received new and belated instructions not to sign the Panama Canal Treaty. He cabled home that he had already exercised his previous authority to do so. Now it was up to the Colombian and United States Senates to ratify or reject the agreement.

  “Gladly shall I gather up all the documents relating to that dreadful canal,” he told a friend, “and put them out of sight.”

  IN THE LAST DAYS of January, the press began to notice unusual overtime activity in naval yards and stations. Roosevelt, alarmed by new signs of German truculence, had secretly directed that the Caribbean situation, while still under control, “was that which usually precedes war, and all possible preparations were to be made.”

  The arbitration negotiations, begun in plenary on the twenty-sixth, were not going well. Herbert Bowen was blustering so much about American security that he was neglecting the desperate condition of Venezuela, starved even for bread and salt. Britain was agreeable to a token settlement, but Germany insisted on full retribution. Her envoys now talked of occupying Venezuela’s customs houses for the next six or seven years.

  That sounded, to Roosevelt, ominously like the beginning of another “ninety-nine year lease.”

  “Are people in Berlin crazy?” he burst out to the German chargé d’affaires, Count Albert von Quadt. “Don’t they know that they are inflaming public opinion more and more here?”

  He did not add that one of his own German informants had told him that war fever was on the rise in the Reich. But he counted the hours until Quadt’s new boss arrived at the White House on 31 January.

  BARON VON STERNBURG found the atmosphere along Massachusetts Avenue much changed from the days when he and Sir Michael Herbert had been young men about town together, playing tennis with “Teddy” and courting American girls. Indeed, it had become more formal in the few months since von Sternburg had been the President’s houseguest. Now he represented the full majesty of the German state.

  After his first formal meeting with Roosevelt, von Sternburg told Sir Michael (“Mungo” no longer) that the President had not concealed his impatience for a prompt settlement of the Venezuela dispute. Roosevelt had also, disturbingly, suggested that the Anglo-German alliance was weakening. If so, the Kaiser’s small squadron might soon be left alone in the Caribbean, facing 130,000 tons of American armor.

  Von Sternburg sent a worried cable to the Wilhelmstrasse, just as his predecessor had done in December. He warned that the United States fleet had again been ordered to “hold itself in readiness.” Whether it was this threat, or Bowen’s bullying, or advices from London that the British Government was in danger of collapse, German intransigence at the arbitration table soon moderated.

  ROOSEVELT COULD NOT resist boasting about his sense of burgeoning American power to his next ambassadorial visitor, Jules Jusserand, on 7 February. “I am not for disarmament,” he said. On the contrary, he intended to build up the American Army and Navy until they could handle “foes more formidable than Spain ever was.”

  Relaxing in the silken glow of the Blue Room, the two men took stock of each other. Roosevelt was familiar with Jusserand’s writings, in particular a study of Piers Plowman that had made him temporarily wistful about the low estate of American literary scholarship. Now he saw a dapper, dark-bearded little diplomat, shorter even than Secretary Hay, yet wiry beneath his weight of gold braid. Jusserand’s eyes were a brilliant black, his nose sharply beaked. He had a birdlike habit of cocking his head to one side, and when he did so with his plumed helmet on, Roosevelt had to struggle not to laugh.

  The Ambassador’s own first impression of “the extraordinary President … more powerful than a King,” was one of both relief and surprise. He felt himself being swept away by a joie de vivre that engulfe
d all trouble. Unlike Bowen, he sensed no brutality, only the “force of will to do things.”

  Beaming like a schoolboy proud of his homework, Roosevelt launched into a discussion of Jusserand’s books. He related material in English Wayfaring Life to the habits of hoboes in Colorado, said he had been reading Piers Plowman on his ill-fated trip west, and talked of Chaucer and Petrarch, Shakespeare and Voltaire. Then, perhaps sensing Hay’s polite distress, he intoned a few “cordial sentiments” for transmittal to the Quai d’Orsay, and the interview was over.

  THAT EVENING, Roosevelt the diplomat reverted to Roosevelt the politician. For several weeks he had been log-walking nimbly from one antitrust bill to another, keeping up with the general flow through Congress, waiting to see which would prove the most buoyant and fastest-moving. Already, almost twenty different such measures had jammed or sunk from sight. Knox’s Expedition Bill floated free out front, sure of passage. With a special “antitrust provision” promised out of general appropriations, the Attorney General could now count on the substantial funds and quick process he needed to prosecute rogue corporations. Senator Stephen B. Elkins similarly guaranteed an Anti-Rebate Bill that would satisfy both the Administration and fair-minded railroad executives.

  Congressman Charles Littlefield’s antimonopoly bill lay ponderously low despite House approval, and its sharpest protuberance—a clause empowering the government to subpoena corporate records—seemed certain to jag at the weir of the Senate. Just behind came what was now known (greatly to Roosevelt’s irritation) as the “Department of Commerce and Labor” Bill. Having been subtly reshaped in committee by Senator Knute Nelson, it sought to establish a double agency that would monitor all aspects of industrial production, while giving the President of the United States direct control over the Bureau of Corporations. Thus, Roosevelt alone would decide whether the private workings of trusts should be publicized or not.