Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  A civilized commonwealth, enjoying “the true liberties which can only come through order,” depended on square dealing between representatives of capital and labor. Just as the former had accepted a limited degree of public scrutiny, so must the latter face up to their own public duty. In any recession acerbated by strikes and union violence, “the first and severest suffering would come among those of us who are least well off at present.”

  William Jennings Bryan would not have used the last two words. It was little touches like that—innocent, optimistic—that endeared Roosevelt to his audiences, even when he was trying to be severe.

  BY MID-SEPTEMBER, predictions of Panamanian independence were being published almost daily in American and European newspapers, and voiced aloud even in Bogotá. Isthmian delegates to the Colombian Congress began to pack their bags and head for home. Senator José Domingo de Obaldía called out to the secretary of the American legation, “We’ll meet within a few weeks in the new Republic of Panama.”

  Desperate to keep Colombia intact, President Marroquín ignored Obaldía’s open rebelliousness and appointed him Governor of Panama. Tomás Herrán, in Washington, was reminded of Spain’s panic just before the loss of Cuba. Only a last-minute ratification of the treaty, he cabled his minister, could save Colombia now. Otherwise, the Colossus of the North would “indirectly” favor the coming revolution, and would doubtless jump to recognize an independent Panama. “President Roosevelt is a decided partisan of the Panama route, and hopes to begin excavation of the canal during his administration. Your excellency already knows the impetuous and vehement character of the President, and you are aware of the persistence and decision with which he pursues anything to which he may be committed.”

  Proposals for a “resumption of negotiations” came by return of wire. Some last-chancers in the Colombian Senate were under the impression that the United States would pay forty million dollars, rather than ten, for canal rights, in exchange for a legislative finding that canceled the Compagnie Nouvelle’s extended concession. Hay ignored this transparent attempt at fraud. “It is altogether likely,” he wrote the President, “that there will be an insurrection on the Isthmus against that regime of folly and graft that now rules in Bogotá. It is for you to decide whether you will (1) await the result of that movement, or (2) take a hand in rescuing the Isthmus from anarchy, or (3) treat with Nicaragua.”

  Roosevelt had already opted for the first choice, but made plain his perfect willingness “to interfere when it becomes necessary so as to secure the Panama route without further dealing with the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá.”

  As the Panama Canal Treaty died, so did summer. Around Cove Neck, lilies and pale beach rosemary gave way to goldenrods and coarse asters, bristling against fresher breezes. Edith Roosevelt put away her white dresses. Archie and Quentin started wearing shoes again. Ted and Kermit braced themselves for another year at Groton. Their father industriously chopped wood.

  The thudding ax and sprays of chips did not quite work off an onset of autumnal melancholy. A harvest of tart political fruits awaited him when he returned to the White House. Relations with Russia and Colombia had deteriorated sharply. His Syracuse speech did not seem to have reduced tensions between business and labor. Government antitrust policies were being blamed for the “rich man’s panic.” The Postal Service’s corruption probe had spread into his own state. Local Republicans warned that if the upper house in Albany were implicated, he would “certainly” lose New York in 1904.

  These problems were complicated by another, more painful and personal. Elihu Root (currently representing him at the Alaska Boundary Tribunal in London) wanted to return to the practice of corporate law, after four and a half years as Secretary of War. Roosevelt had long dreaded this resignation as “the worst calamity that could happen to me officially.” But he could not deny his old friend’s need to recoup lost income. Fortunately, Root was willing to stay on until an adequate successor could be found.

  Roosevelt took one last daylong row with Edith, down to the salt marsh at the end of Lloyd’s Neck. They ate their lunch there and watched the white sails of coasters passing up and down the Sound. Then he pulled home, exulting in the opposition of the wind and tide. “Next Monday I go back to Washington,” he wrote his sister Corinne on 23 September, “and for the thirteen months following there will be mighty little letup to the strain.”

  He was confident of nomination to another term in his own right, but not at all sure of election. “I suppose few Presidents can form the slightest idea of whether their policies have met with approval or not—certainly I cannot.… As far as I can see these policies have been right, and I hope that time will justify them. If it does not, why, I must abide the fall of the dice, and that is all there is about it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The Most Just and Proper Revolution

  An autocrat’s a ruler that does what th’ people wants

  an’ takes th’ blame f’r it.

  THE PRESIDENT’S FIRST visitor when he returned to his desk on 29 September 1903 was Secretary of the Navy William Henry Moody. With the expected retirement of Elihu Root, the forty-nine-year-old Moody was seen as the new “strong man” of the Administration, remarkable for ambition, breeding, and intelligence. As a young Massachusetts lawyer, Moody had caught the favorable attention of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he had also impressed—and sometimes infuriated—Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Although Moody had not been willing, in those days, to “whoop to war” with Spain, he now felt as grandly as the President about America’s future as a world power. Her principal engine of advancement must be an ever-expanding navy, in whose wake freedom would spread like foam.

  Since joining the Cabinet sixteen months before, Moody had been much at Roosevelt’s elbow—on his ill-fated tour of New England, as an adviser during the coal strike and the Venezuelan crisis, a fellow passenger on the presidential train to California. The two men looked like brothers: stocky, hard-chested, ruddy, with big strong heads and ragged mustaches. They shared Harvard manners, blunt speech, and a constant heartiness. But whereas Roosevelt’s warmth was genuine, there was a core of coldness in Moody, a Puritanism none could thaw. He was the only bachelor member of the Cabinet, walking home alone every night with a slight, rheumatic limp.

  Emerging from the White House, he made an official statement of policy on the canal situation. He said that Roosevelt would refrain from action “as long as there was the least possible hope” of a change of mind by the Colombian Congress. The President, Moody stressed, “takes the ground that this is a most important question, and the final decision is a decision for centuries.”

  HAVING THUS TRIED to dispel rumors that he wished to use force against Colombia, Roosevelt braced himself for a showdown with Samuel Gompers and other executives of the American Federation of Labor. He scheduled their visit for an unusually late hour—after dinner—and made a thorough study of the Government Printing Office case, which was sure to be an item on the agenda. His instinct was to give Gompers “a good jolt.” Labor must be made to understand that it was subject to the same Square Deal as capital, in the Rooseveltian scheme of things.

  In this particular matter I would be as incapable of considering my own personal future as if I were facing foreign or civil war, or any other tremendous crisis. It is a sheer waste of time for these people … to threaten me with defeat for the Presidency next year. Nothing would hire me even to accept the Presidency if I had to take it on terms which would mean a forfeiting of self-respect. Just as I should refuse to accept it at the cost of abandoning the Northern Securities suit, or of repealing the trust regulation of last [sic] year, or of undoing what I did in the anthracite coal strike, so I should refuse to take it at the cost of undoing what I did in this matter of Miller and the labor unions.

  William A. Miller was the GPO foreman whose dismissal he had overridden as an unjust re
prisal for increasing the productivity of the bindery division. Now the bookbinders were trying to get Miller out on morals charges, saying that he kept three wives. Roosevelt, embarrassed, could argue only that the foreman’s morals, or lack thereof, constituted “a new case,” subject to routine review.

  This apparent sanction of both the open shop and open marriage was bringing in some of the most hostile mail he had ever received. Unions in more than a dozen states had pledged opposition to his candidacy in 1904. Plainly, he risked losing his most hard-won constituency if he failed to satisfy the AFL delegates. He drafted a “reply” to what he guessed they were going to say, asked Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou to check it, then had it typed pending release. This document was in his dinner-jacket pocket when Gompers came to the White House at 9:15, accompanied by four aides.

  One of them was John Mitchell, shockingly changed from the handsome union executive of one year before. Mitchell’s eyes were hollow from drink, his body had thickened, and a hernia stiffened his gait. For all the fame he had won in the great strike, his miners were still unrecognized and overworked, their 10 percent raise already eroded by inflation.

  Roosevelt sized Gompers up as “a sleek article,” and found that he could handle him with ease. The AFL leader was plainly anxious to avoid a confrontation in threatening economic times. Not until toward the end of a general review of labor matters did Gompers drop the name Miller, enabling Roosevelt to produce his statement.

  “I thank you and your committee for your courtesy,” the President read aloud, “and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you.” They had to hear him out.

  I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely with the relation of the government to its employees. I must govern my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer, and which differentiate any case in which the government of the United States is a party from all other cases whatsoever. These laws are enacted for the benefit of the whole people.… I can no more recognize the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or against him, than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him.

  Miller’s habits at home were irrelevant to his freedom, as a federal employee, to take an antiunion stance on principle. Reinstating him was a matter of executive privilege. “And as to this my decision is final.”

  The delegation trooped out, looking grim under the lights of the porte cochere. Secretary Loeb distributed copies of Roosevelt’s statement to reporters. Gompers, aware that he had been scooped by a master of press relations, refused any comment. “It would not be respectful,” he said, and strode down the dark driveway.

  Editorial opinion the next morning almost unanimously supported the President. Radical unions remained resentful, but Gompers bowed to the popular mood, and saw to it that anti-Roosevelt resolutions were defeated at the AFL convention. The open shop became official government policy. “It seems to me that this was the greatest act of your administration,” gushed Ray Stannard Baker. Baker did not realize that the President was already working on something that better deserved that superlative.

  “YOU MAY HAVE noticed that I have not said a word in public about the canal,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna on 5 October. “I shall have to allude to it in my Message.” He had decided to call a special session of Congress in November, ostensibly to secure bicameral approval of the Cuban-reciprocity treaty, but also to have legislative support at hand, in case emergency action was needed in Panama.

  There was no doubt now that the province would soon—must—secede from the Colombian federation. Bogotá’s rejection of the canal treaty, and Washington’s apparent acceptance of that rejection, amounted to dual deathblows to the Istmusenos. Not only had they lost their long-dreamed waterway, spilling wealth on both sides forever, but their railroad, too, would become redundant, once the Nicaragua Canal opened for business. With no paved highways, no bridges, little industry, and less commerce, they might just as well revert to jungle living.

  The President could not help feeling sympathetic. Here was a little ridge of country, about as wide as southern Vermont, a half-drowned hogback of mostly impenetrable rain forest, walled off from the rest of Colombia by mountains. Geographically, it belonged to Central America. Its only surface communications with the southern continent were by sea or mule train. Letters took fifteen days to get to Bogotá, if they got there at all; about the only reliable deliveries were those carrying tax money out of the Isthmus.

  Panama’s political status as a provincia of Colombia was equally tenuous. It had spontaneously joined the New Granadian Federation in 1821, and seceded with its disintegration in 1830. Bogotá had reasserted control twelve years later, and from then on Panama had alternated stormily between semi-autonomy and subjugation. Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846. None had been perpetrated with any American help. On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogotá’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.

  In doing so, it had argued that it sought only to protect the railroad’s neutral right-of-way, which civil war might compromise. Now an infinitely greater right—that of all trading nations to enjoy the benefits of a Panama Canal—had been denied by the “corruptionists” of just one government. “This does not mean that we must necessarily go to Nicaragua,” Roosevelt wrote. “I feel we are certainly justified in morals, and therefore justified in law, under the treaty of 1846, in interfering summarily and saying that the canal is to be built and that they must not stop it.”

  The therefore was characteristic, an example of the Rooseveltian rationality that so often amused Root and Knox. It did not amuse Hanna. The Senator’s only suggestion was that the Compagnie Nouvelle should be paid to continue its halfhearted excavations in Panama, while Congress thought up some new way of settling with Colombia.

  This advice contrasted with the roarings of Albert Shaw in Review of Reviews, the nation’s most influential journal of opinion. Bogotá’s “blackmailing adventurers” had insulted the United States by demanding a ten-million-dollar “bribe,” Shaw wrote. Washington should “look with favor” upon separatists in Panama, with a view toward supporting their revolution.

  Roosevelt tried to calm the editor down, informing him that “as yet, the people of the United States are not willing to take the ground of building the canal by force.” But the theme of blackmail, like King Charles’s head, could not be kept out of his draft Message to Congress:

  It is out of the question to submit to extortion on the part of a beneficiary.…

  The interest of international commerce generally and the interest of this country generally demands that the canal should be begun with no needless delay. The refusal of Colombia properly to respond to our sincere and earnest efforts to come to an agreement, or to pay heed to the many concessions we have made, renders it in my judgment necessary that the United States should take immediate action on one or two lines: either we should drop the Panama Canal project and immediately begin work on the Nicaraguan canal, or else we should purchase all the rights of the French Company, and, without any further parley with Colombia, enter upon the completion of the canal.… I feel that the latter course is the one demanded by the interests of this Nation and I therefore bring the matter to your attention for such action in the premises as you may deem wise.

  He was careful not to predict any “misconduct” that might be to America’s advantage on the Isthmus. William Nelson Cromwell bustled in to see him on 7 October, and bustled out none the wiser—“a typical revolutionist,” in Roosevelt’s opinion, “mysterious, and in it for the fun of the game.” Three days later, however, the President received someone much harder to deflect.

  Philippe Bunau-Varilla was escorted by Assistant Secretary of State Loomis. Tiny as the Frenchman was—he barely reached his companion’s sternum—Rooseve
lt saw at once that he was a shrewd and aggressive personality. The globular head bulged with intelligence, and the eyes—“duellist’s eyes”—were as chill as glass. Most people were overawed when they entered the Executive Office for the first time, but Bunau-Varilla was calm. Roosevelt felt himself being sized up.

  He knew that there was “an underlying motive” for the visit, which would not be stated directly. Loomis introduced Bunau-Varilla as the new co-owner of Le Matin in Paris. For a while they all made polite conversation about French journalism, avoiding any reference to Panama. Then Loomis mentioned the Dreyfus affair. Bunau-Varilla took the cue:

  BUNAU-VARILLA Mr. President, Captain Dreyfus has not been the only victim of detestable political passions. Panama is another.

  ROOSEVELT Oh yes, you have devoted much time and effort to Panama, Mr. Bunau-Varilla. Well, what do you think is going to be the outcome of the present situation?

  BUNAU-VARILLA Mr. President, a revolution.

  ROOSEVELT A revolution … Would it be possible? (To Loomis) But if it became a reality, what would become of the plan we had thought of?

  Loomis remained rigidly mute. The President, for all his air of fake surprise, was referring to John Bassett Moore’s proposal to “require” Colombia to sign the canal treaty. Roosevelt asked what made Bunau-Varilla think that a revolution was coming.

  “General and special considerations, Mr. President.” Bunau-Varilla spoke with careful vagueness, not wanting to embarrass Roosevelt with details. But he could not resist asking if the United States would be supportive of an armed uprising in Panama.

  Roosevelt ignored the question.