Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  CANNON’S RUMPLED APPEARANCE, his scraggy white beard, perpetual half-chewed cigar, and folksy profanities were all part of a calculated image to disguise one of the most disciplined forces in government. Close inspection revealed his clothes to be of fine quality (a daily fresh pink in his lapel suggested the private dandy), while the beard was kept short and the cigar, when puffed, gave off mellow evidence of Havana leaf. As for the profanities, they were carefully mild. Cannon was actually more at home quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, which he studied every day along with the Congressional Record. His wire-puppet jerkiness was caused by an unusually fast reflex system, mental and physical. Not even Roosevelt was quicker to react to the occasional signals of intent or flexibility that politicians flash in conversation. And back of the quickness was an instant obstinacy whenever any tenet of orthodox Republicanism was threatened. The thin grin would vanish, the blue stare freeze, the long bony forefinger tap with suppressed fury. He was, in the President’s not unaffectionate opinion, “a hard, narrow old Boeotian.”

  After a two-hour lunch, officially described as “social,” Cannon left Sagamore Hill smiling, hinting that he might consider some currency reform in a future session. But when he stopped off in New York, en route to his home in Illinois, he showed no inclination to reassure Wall Street further on that score. “I could not get him to visit a single banker,” Congressman Lucius Littauer wrote Roosevelt. “His constant reiteration was that a time of financial panic was not one in which to discuss the necessity of financial legislation.”

  No sooner had Cannon left town on 23 July than a serious collapse in share values began on Wall Street. Banks canceled credit, and syndicates unloaded their reserve investments of high-grade securities. U.S. Steel common dropped by more than 50 percent. Frantic for more funds, the syndicates put up their newer, underwritten offerings, and got almost nothing for them. J. P. Morgan’s United States Shipbuilding Company went bankrupt, as did the hundred-million-dollar Consolidated Lake Superior. Four major brokers went out of business.

  Like ripples round a dropped stone, waves of desperation ringed outward, but shallowly, failing to shake the calm depths of general investment. Cannon had gotten—perhaps even brought on—the “rich man’s panic” he wanted. Secretary Shaw wrote to reassure Roosevelt, as did James Clarkson: “The country is prosperous every place else except Wall Street, and perhaps the Street is all the better for this experience.”

  So while stockbrokers raged, blaming the Administration’s antitrust policies—“This is a market on which John D. Rockefeller could not borrow on Standard Oil”—Roosevelt kept cool in white flannels. He had discovered a new sport, cricket, and spent many hours with a British professional, learning the difference between topspins, long-hops, and silly mid-ons.

  A THOUSAND MILES SOUTH, the white Democrats of Mississippi prepared to cast their primary votes for Governor and Senator. James K. Vardaman’s vicious rhetoric had somehow turned the contest into one between “Rooseveltism” and racism. On 9 August, the President decided to issue his long-delayed “utterance,” in the form of a public letter to Winfield T. Durbin of Indiana.

  “My dear Governor Durbin,” he wrote, “permit me to thank you as an American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching.” (Durbin had not only dispelled rioters with troops, but proclaimed the right of a black murderer to a fair trial.) “All thoughtful men,” Roosevelt continued, “must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims—on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal.”

  In a minority of cases—fewer than one in four—lynch victims were guilty of rape, “a crime horrible beyond description.” Yet rape’s very bestiality required that society respond to it in a civilized fashion. Roosevelt was at his most impassioned when he commented on the sadistic quality of lynchings:

  There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation.… Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.

  Rollo Ogden congratulated him after the letter was published. “One of your happiest inspirations in the public service.” Other liberal-minded editors praised the strength, if not the promptness, of the President’s statement. They did not see how delaying it had improved Mississippi’s political situation, where Vardaman and Hernando Money both won decisively.

  Roosevelt concluded that for the time being he had done all he could, rhetorically and practically, to help the American Negro. He would not risk his political future by seeming to endorse, in Vardaman’s phrase, “the black wave of ignorance, superstition, and immorality with which the South is perpetually threatened.”

  BY NOW, THE State Department was seriously concerned over Arthur Beaupré’s silence. The Minister to Colombia was notorious for the frequency and verbosity of his cables. Three wordless weeks had given the impression he had been garroted. On 12 August, however, a thousand dollars’ worth of prose suddenly came over the wire. Beaupré summarized no fewer than nine amendments that had been attached to the Panama Canal Treaty in committee. The Colombian Senate now proposed at least five million dollars more in cash, plus huge kickbacks from the Compagnie Nouvelle and the Panama Railroad. The United States would be granted “tenancy” only in the canal zone, and would have to endure Colombian standards of law enforcement and sanitation. Beaupré begged John Hay, who was back in New Hampshire, “for an emphatic statement … or instructions” before the amendments were adopted by the Colombian Senate.

  Hay was enraged. He had sent at least two sets of instructions over the past month, making plain that the United States would accept no amendments whatever. Evidently, Beaupré had not received them. Colombia’s cable service, Hay noticed, malfunctioned with curious regularity whenever the text of the treaty was undergoing serious scrutiny.

  Now there arrived at Sagamore Hill a letter written by a longtime American resident of Bogotá. It described antitreaty sentiment in the capital as increasingly raucous and bitter. Politicians, merchants, planters, and common citizens were complaining that the United States wanted them to make a sacrifice “of untold millions belonging, by right, to their children.” One agitator was quoted as excoriating the “dirty American pigs” already wallowing in Panama mud.

  Neither Roosevelt nor Hay had any public comment or prediction. “I am totally in the dark as to what the outcome in the Isthmus will be,” the President told Senator Morgan.

  The first indication that he was losing patience came on Friday, 14 August, when Shelby M. Cullom, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, emerged from a lunchtime conference at Sagamore Hill. Speaking with obvious authority, Cullom told reporters that no matter what happened in Bogotá, the Administration remained committed to a Panama Canal.

  Q How can the canal be built without the treaty?

  A Well, we might make another treaty, not with Colombia, but with Panama.

  Q But Panama is not a sovereign state.…

  A Intimations have been made that there is great discontent on the Isthmus over the action of the Congress of the central government, and Panama might break away and set up a government which we could treat with.

  Q Is the U.S. prepared to encourage such a schism in a South American republic?

  A No, I suppose not. But this country wants to build that canal and build it now.

  Whatever “action” Cullom was referring to—or anticipating—he could not have more clearly signaled Senate support for any executive powers Roosevelt might avail himself of in the near future.

  That weekend, an
extraordinary naval panoply spread across Long Island Sound. Twenty-two white warships could be seen lying in parallel rows off the entrance to Oyster Bay, a spectacle, in the eyes of one observer, “almost overwhelmingly suggestive of America’s newly-born sea power.” Monday dawned bright and mirror-calm. The sun picked out thousands of white-clad sailors stationing themselves in geometric shapes on decks and in rigging. Oyster Bay bristled with pleasure boats come to witness the President’s review of the fleet.

  Roosevelt came down from Sagamore Hill after breakfast and boarded the USS Mayflower. Nine and a half hours later, he returned home, eyes bloodshot from the glare of white metal and water, buffeted by the roar of continuous twenty-one-gun salutes—sixty-three thousand rounds in all. Hanging smoke thickened the dusk as he walked through the woods. An urgent cable from Beaupré awaited him.

  BOGOTÁ, AUGUST 12, 7 P.M. THE TREATY WAS REJECTED BY THE SENATE TODAY IN ITS ENTIRETY.

  ROOSEVELT WAS STILL digesting this news—“We may have to give a lesson to those jack rabbits”—when a note arrived from John Hay. The Secretary, who had never been a Panama enthusiast, reminded him that he could now revert to “the simple and easy Nicaraguan solution,” rather than press ahead with “the far more difficult and multifurcate scheme” articulated by Senator Cullom.

  Before replying, Roosevelt studied the text of a startlingly aggressive memorandum by John Bassett Moore, the reigning American authority on international law. It had been forwarded to him by Francis B. Loomis, who was fast becoming his preferred contact at the State Department.

  Professor Moore’s memorandum argued that Panama was the only place in the Americas to build a canal “for the world.” The question of Colombian sovereignty was therefore a global rather than a regional one. All nations had a right to benefit from the opening of this great “gate of intercourse” between East and West. One nation could not delay, or demand an exorbitant fee for, that constructive advance. Moore recalled that in 1846, Colombia—then known as New Granada—had guaranteed the United States free transit across the Isthmus “upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may hereafter be constructed.” This “sort of supportive partnership” (Washington promising in return to protect both Colombian integrity and neutrality of the transit zone) must have been contracted in order to bring about, ultimately, a canal. Otherwise, as President Polk had pointed out, the United States had no direct interest in preserving the Colombian federation.

  For almost six decades, successive administrations had honored the Treaty of New Granada, saving Colombia many times from outside attack and internal revolt. The Panama Railroad, designed and built by Americans, had operated continuously, to the profit of both countries. “Colombia has again and again claimed,” Moore wrote, “that it was our duty to protect the route … thus construing the treaty more broadly than we have done and less favorably to her own sovereignty.” This claim in effect “approached the point of making us responsible on the Isthmus.”

  Moore noted, further, that the language of the 1846 treaty guaranteed passage across Panama not only to American citizens, but also to their “Government.” This by definition included military personnel and matériel. As early as 1852, indeed, President Fillmore had deployed troops on the Isthmus with neither permission nor protest from Bogotá. There had been other deployments since, with the express concurrence of the Colombian Senate.

  Throughout the long special relationship, Americans had never “enjoyed the full benefit … that the treaty was intended and expected to secure”—namely, a canal. In view of the fact that Colombians had gotten their own side of the bargain—rail transit and armed protection—Washington could now reasonably “require” Bogotá to ratify the Hay-Herrán Treaty. All other considerations, including last-minute amendments, were superfluous and irrelevant. “The United States in constructing the canal would own it; and after constructing it, would have the right to operate it. The ownership and control would be in their nature perpetual.”

  The effect upon Roosevelt of this vehement document was to make him strangely cautious. He referred it to Hay, suggesting that the Administration “do nothing,” at least not right away. “If under the treaty of 1846 we have a color of right to start in and build the canal, my offhand judgment would favor such proceeding.… What we do now will be of consequence, not merely decades, but centuries hence, and we must be sure that we are taking the right step before we act.”

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, news of revolutionary activity on the Isthmus came within days. “The fathers at Bogotá are eating sour grapes,” Assistant Secretary of State Alvey A. Adee wrote Hay, “and the teeth of the children of Panama are getting a fine edge on to ’em.”

  Hay was pleased that the President wanted to wait “a reasonable time” before deciding what to do next. He warned him against an outright seizure of Panama, which Moore’s memorandum seemed to justify. “The fact that our position, in that case, would be legal and just, might not greatly impress the jack-rabbit mind. I do not believe that we could faire valoir our rights in that way without war—which would, of course, be brief and inexpensive.”

  Gradually, a partial understanding of Colombia’s behavior emerged, together with hopes that President Marroquín might yet save the situation by executive action. Beaupré seemed to feel some responsibility, having deeply offended the Colombian Senate with his imperious notes demanding ratification. He pleaded that the proposed treaty be given its full legal term to expire—some thirty more days.

  “The President will make no engagement as to his action in the canal matter,” Hay replied. From then on, the wires from Oyster Bay and Washington were silent. Apprehension mounted in Bogotá.

  “For the first time I must tell you,” Tomás Herrán wrote William Nelson Cromwell, “that I have lost all hope.”

  AUGUST DROWSED TO an end. Inland, the weather turned cool, but Oyster Bay was reluctant to yield its summer heat. Geese continued to laze in the mudflats, and, when the breeze shifted landward, their guttural conversation could be heard at the top of Sagamore Hill. Other sounds were audible now, as the air sharpened: the distant tolling of a bell buoy, sometimes even the thrum of a steamer out to sea. Evening brought the less welcome whine of mosquitoes. For some reason, they avoided Roosevelt, as he sat on the piazza reading Euripides, and fanned out in search of Secret Service men hiding in the grape arbor.

  Toward the end of the first night watch, about 10:15 P.M. on 1 September, a buggy rolled silently up the driveway’s grass shoulder. Clouds covered the moon. Nobody saw the little vehicle until it got within fifty yards of the house. Then Roosevelt, working behind blinds in his library, heard sounds of scuffling and swearing outside.

  Unthinking, he stepped onto the piazza, and stood with the light behind him. Two of his guards were struggling with a youth in the buggy. “There he is!” the youth screamed, and brandished a revolver. It was knocked to the ground, while other agents rushed out of the dark and shoved Roosevelt back inside.

  “I came to kill the President,” the youth admitted, as manacles were snapped on his wrists. At Oyster Bay police station later, he rambled about Roosevelt’s action in the Government Printing Office matter. “Why doesn’t the President do something for organized labor? He’s said a lot about it, but he hasn’t bettered the condition of the working man.”

  The security detail at Sagamore Hill was increased to a twelve-man, twenty-four-hour alert, while Roosevelt, shaken, reflected on his sudden unpopularity among unions. By insisting that all GPO employees swear obedience to the civil-service law, he had disillusioned thousands of radicals who had come to count on his “partiality” during the great coal strike. Even more damagingly, he had issued an executive order mandating an open-shop policy in every government department. The influential Central Labor Union of Washington, D.C., declared in a nationwide mailing, “The order of the President cannot be regarded in any but an unfriendly light.”

  A providential invitation came for him to review the Labor Day para
de in Syracuse, New York. He accepted, to the delight of the little city: it had not been so honored in many years.

  His speech there on 7 September was so utopian that Jules Jusserand accused him of parroting Sir Thomas More. Actually Roosevelt was identifying with Euripides—like himself, an upper-class celebrant of middle-class virtues—as he mused at length on the vulnerability of republics that failed to preserve their social equipoise. Whichever class arose to dominate others—whether high, low, or bourgeois—always made disproportionate claims on the government:

  Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of medieval Italy, and medieval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the state.… There resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

  Uniquely, the checks and balances of American democracy worked to prevent any such lodgment. National unity was a moral challenge, rather than an economic one:

  The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship lies, not between the man of wealth who acts squarely by his fellow and the man who seeks each day’s wage by that day’s work, wronging no one.… On the contrary, [it] separates the rich man who does well from the rich man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad conduct. This line of cleavage lies at right angles to any arbitrary line of division as that separating one class from another, one locality from another, of a man with a certain degree of property from those of a less degree of property.