Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Only one voice of authority expressed doubt as to such a scenario. Brigadier General William S. McCaskey, commander of the Army’s Southwestern Division, cautioned the War Department in a telegram received on 18 August:

  CITIZENS OF BROWNSVILLE ENTERTAIN RACE HATRED TO AN EXTREME DEGREE … PROVOCATION GIVEN THE SOLDIERS NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT.

  Some damaging hard evidence, however, indicated that the allegations were not altogether fanciful. Major Penrose reported that he had been presented with seventy or more Army-rifle shell casings that matched those clean rifles. Exhibit B was a dropped soldier’s cap. Regretfully but unanimously, Penrose and his four white junior officers concluded that men of the Twenty-fifth Infantry must be guilty.

  Roosevelt waited no longer than 20 August before deciding, on the basis of a second appeal from the Brownsville citizens’ committee, that Fort Brown should be “temporarily abandoned.” He ordered the battalion to march to nearby Fort Ringgold, pending a full investigation by the Capitol Army Chief of Staff. No sooner had he done so than a preliminary report from the Assistant Inspector General of the Southwestern Division persuaded him to move them much farther, beyond posse range. Major Augustus P. Blocksom confirmed most of Major Penrose’s findings, and unequivocally described the rioters as “soldiers.” Blocksom allowed that no positive identifications had been made, but, in words not calculated to delay the President’s action, warned of possible “mob violence” if the soldiers were not moved soon.

  Roosevelt then sent the bulk of the battalion to quarantine in Fort Reno, Oklahoma. Twelve suspects fingered by another Army inspector were to be held in the guardhouse at San Antonio, while he awaited further evidence of their guilt from Major Blocksom.

  It came on 29 August, and was unequivocal. “That the raiders were soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry cannot be doubted,” Blocksom wrote. Their commanding officers were not responsible for permitting the violence, since at first sound of gunfire downtown they had imagined the fort was being attacked, and issued a defensive call to arms. Only when the mayor of Brownsville showed them the casings the next morning had they realized their misapprehension. Major Penrose was now conscientiously trying to identify the perpetrators himself, but could not get a single black interviewee to name names. It was clear to Blocksom that the men, veterans and juniors alike, were engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. If they did not break ranks soon, they should all “be discharged from the service and debarred from reenlistment in the Army, Navy and Marine Corps.”

  Blocksom added a personal observation that “the colored soldier is much more aggressive in his attitude on the social equality question than he used to be.”

  THE SAME COULD BE said of Theodore Roosevelt. Over the last year and a half, his Negro policy had noticeably hardened. He remained incapable of the race hatred of Benjamin R. Tillman, or even the patrician disdain of Owen Wister. Yet he had no quarrel with those whites in Brownsville who believed that blacks were “inferior socially.” Nor, with another round of congressional elections looming, did he want to jeopardize his new popularity in the South. That region’s white voters had welcomed him extravagantly last fall, in part because he had atoned for his early radicalism. His one outburst against “lynch law” was forgiven, if only because it had been provoked by the Governor of Arkansas.

  More ominously, he had begun to sound a theme that played well in Brownsville: “The colored man who fails to condemn crime in another colored man … is the worst enemy of his own people, as well as an enemy to all the people.”

  THE PRESIDENT’S SANGUIS was again in evidence on 3 September, when a fighting fleet three miles long saluted him in Long Island Sound. “By George! Doesn’t the sight of those big warships make one’s blood tingle?”

  It was the greatest naval display of his presidency so far. Three out of every four of these white leviathans had been built since the war with Spain. During his first term alone, Congress had authorized thirty-one new vessels, including ten battleships. Two new all-big-gun battleships were due to begin construction in the fall. The United States Navy, fifth in the world when he took office, was now third. Admittedly, that ranking had been rendered academic by Great Britain’s recent introduction of HMS Dreadnought, a ten-gun, turbine-driven monster stronger, quicker, and smoother than anything else afloat. But the mere fact that sea power was entering a new age augured well for Roosevelt’s future defense proposals. Already, thanks to Dreadnought, he had been authorized by Congress to build a battleship of unlimited displacement, and guns as heavy as it could carry.

  He looked forward to sailing on the newest of his completed battleships, the Louisiana, in a couple of months’ time. Construction of the Panama Canal was well under way, and he wanted to see “the dirt fly” with his own eyes. In the meantime, he braced for the likelihood that a few of these white ships might soon be required for active duty in Cuba—exactly the last place he wanted to send them, at a time when the Democratic Party was looking round for a fall campaign issue.

  An uprising by “liberals” had taken place on the island eighteen days before, in protest against alleged election-rigging by President Tomás Estrada Palma and his regime of “moderates.” The fighting since then had been fierce enough to make both party names jokeworthy. But what was less funny was the obligation of the United States to intervene in any such dispute, under an amendment attached years before to a bill long since forgotten, by Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut. The Platt Amendment in effect made Cuba an American protectorate, should she ever become unable to govern herself, and thus invite the greedy interest of foreign powers.

  Having fought for the liberty of Cubans in 1898, bestowed it himself in 1902, and preached the “moral” virtues of a reciprocity treaty with them, Roosevelt was unwilling to see any more cartoons of himself in Rough Rider uniform. For a day or two after the naval review, an amnesty offer by Estrada Palma encouraged hopes of peace. But the insurrection could not be quelled, and on 8 September came the inevitable request for naval intervention by the United States.

  Roosevelt authorized the dispatch of two warships, along with a harsh warning by Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon that the President considered intervention to be “a very serious thing.” Before landing any Marines, he would have to be “absolutely certain” that the Cuban government was indeed helpless.

  “Just at the moment I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” he wrote to Henry White on 13 September. “All that we wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere.” It was particularly galling to be called back there just after Elihu Root, who had made the improvement of North-South relations his priority as Secretary of State, had told Latin Americans: “We wish for no victories but those of peace; for no territory except our own; for no sovereignty except the sovereignty over ourselves.”

  Roosevelt’s annoyance reflected the fact that both Cuban factions were gambling on seeing the Stars and Stripes rise again over Havana—the moderates because they hoped to be kept in power, the liberals because they believed they would consequently get a free and fair election. Thus, he was presented with a paradox of foreign policy. By not intervening, he would encourage civil war; by intervening, he would strengthen both sides, and therefore have to stay.

  To his further annoyance, he heard that Bacon had, against instructions, authorized the landing of a party of Marines in Cuba. The Assistant Secretary was the best-looking man in the Administration, if not its brightest. “You had no business to direct the landing of those troops without specific authority from here…,” Roosevelt furiously cabled him. “Unless you are directed otherwise from here the forces are only to be used to protect American life and property.”

  Hoping still to avoid direct intervention, he summoned Bacon and Taft to Oyster Bay for a crisis meeting. His latest Secretary of the Navy, Charles J. Bonaparte, joined them. Bonapar
te was a small man with a large signature, fully six inches long, proclaiming that the blood of the great Emperor flowed in his veins. He was therefore something of an expert on foreign adventures, and, as a lawyer well-read in history, qualified to warn of their consequences. Bonaparte had not approved of Roosevelt’s youthful jingoism, but otherwise identified with him as a fellow patrician bent on reform.

  It was agreed that the President should make a final appeal to Cubans to “sink all differences” and “remember that the only way they can preserve the independence of their republic is to prevent the necessity of outside interference.” Roosevelt sent a letter to this effect to the Cuban minister in Washington, and released it to the press. He announced also that Bacon and Taft were being dispatched immediately to Havana, in the hope that they could broker some sort of truce.

  THE FIRST DAY of fall found the President in limbo at Sagamore Hill. A final week of vacation stretched ahead, with no visitors on his calendar, and no news yet of any break in the Brownsville investigation—except that a grand jury in San Antonio had failed to indict any of the twelve main suspects. Roosevelt consequently had time to ponder three important replacement problems.

  That of a successor to Justice Brown was the most urgent, with the Supreme Court due to reconvene in October. Once again, Taft had turned him down. Or rather, Helen Taft had begged Roosevelt not to appoint her husband. She was already mentally redecorating the White House. Taft sounded sincere in protesting a continued sense of obligation toward the Philippines (where an Army unit commanded by General Leonard Wood had recently slaughtered six hundred of his “little brown brothers,” against a resurgence of Moro violence). Yet he sounded just as sincere in saying that he would jump at the job of Chief Justice. Behind Taft’s jolly-fat-man facade, there lurked a love for titles.

  For much of the summer, Roosevelt had hesitated between appointing William Henry Moody and Horace H. Lurton, a Democrat recommended by Taft. He favored the Attorney General, except that Moody came from the same state as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Not only that, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department was just beginning what promised to be an exciting prosecution of the Standard Oil Company; any move of Moody would seem either precautionary or defensive. So Lurton had loomed as the next Justice until Henry Cabot Lodge, to whom all Democrats were lepers, entered a passionate protest against him. The President, accordingly, remained undecided.

  He was much more certain of the absolute necessity of getting a new British Ambassador to replace Sir Mortimer Durand. During last year’s peacemaking efforts, and again during the Algeciras Conference, he had been maddened by Durand’s disinclination to unbend in private conversation. He interpreted it as stupidity. (Actually, the Ambassador was a shy but perceptive man, well aware that Roosevelt equated “privacy” with persuasion.) Sir Mortimer also disliked slogging through the thickets of Rock Creek Park, another essential locale for diplomatic dialogue. Without doubt, the British government must recall him. But how, and how soon, could such a delicate matter be arranged? And what chance was there of Cecil Spring Rice being sent instead? Answers would not be forthcoming until the arrival in early October of a possible intermediary, Arthur Lee, MP, secretly summoned from England.

  The least urgent yet most momentous question Roosevelt had to consider was that of his own successor. Mrs. Taft did not know it, but his personal preference always had been for Elihu Root. “I would walk on my hands and knees from the White House to the Capitol to see Root made President. But I know it cannot be done. He couldn’t be elected.” The Secretary of State was considered by many who knew him to be a great man—something never said of Taft. Intellectually formidable, tireless, brave, unbeatable in any negotiation, Root was hampered by his identity as a corporate lawyer. However honorable, that was simply the wrong thing to be at a time when Roosevelt himself had declared war on laissez-faire.

  Taft was warm dough to Root’s cold iron. He presented no hard edge to the public, or indeed to the President, who imagined that the dough could be permanently imprinted “T.R.” There were other possible Republican candidates, of course, such as Speaker Cannon and Senator Foraker on the right, and Senator Beveridge on the left. Roosevelt was not averse to flattering any of them in front of reporters, but as long as Chief Justice Fuller stayed alive, he saw his successor in Taft.

  The Washington Post joked that he did not really need one. “There is but one man who can prevent the Republican party from nominating Theodore Roosevelt for re-election in 1908, and that man is Theodore Roosevelt himself.”

  JOSEPH B. FORAKER gave early notice of being as much a presidential scourge in the next session of Congress as he had been during the last. In an unctuous telegram received just before Roosevelt’s departure from Oyster Bay on 28 September, he wrote, “I fear it may be unwelcome to call your attention to the fact that under our treaty with Cuba … consent is given to the United States, not to the President, to intervene on certain specified grounds.” Congressional approval was required before troops could be sent and local authority usurped. “Pardon me for saying this is an awfully serious matter, with far-reaching serious consequences.”

  Roosevelt could not deny the treaty, nor the serious view Foraker took of everything, even jokes. He replied with polite restraint. “I am sure you will agree with me that it would not have been wise to summon Congress to consider the situation in Cuba, which was changing from week to week and almost from day to day.… You, my dear Senator, are the last man to advocate my playing a part like President Buchanan or failing to take the responsibility that the President must take if he is fit for his position.” So far, he had taken only “tentative” steps toward intervention, and would look to Congress for a “permanent policy” in December. In the meantime, he reserved his right to intervene directly if necessary. There had been a near-total breakdown of government in Havana, with Estrada Palma insisting on full American control rather than any power-sharing with the insurrectos.

  Privately, Roosevelt seethed at the censorious tone of Foraker’s telegram. The Senator had known him since his first participation in a Republican presidential convention, at Chicago in 1884. They had been fellow sponsors of a resolution nominating a black man as temporary chairman of the proceedings. Since then, their relations had been formal rather than friendly, although Foraker had supported Roosevelt’s nomination for the vice presidency and publicly praised him for entertaining Booker T. Washington. Now, however, Foraker had presumed to question his authority as Commander-in-Chief.

  “He is a very powerful and very vindictive man,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge, “and he is one of the most unblushing servers and beneficiaries of corporate wealth within or without office that I have ever met. It is possible that he has grown to feel so angry over my course, that is, over my having helped rescue the Republican party and therefore the country from the ruin into which, if he had his way …”

  Lodge was so used to Theodore’s eruptions that he did not notice, or choose to notice, incipient signs of executive paranoia. He was more concerned with protecting the President in the event of any open clash with Foraker. After many years of side-by-side service in the Senate, Lodge knew that “Fire Alarm Joe” could be a dangerous adversary.

  Foraker was now sixty years old. Tall and spare, with steel-gray hair and more steel, apparently, infusing his spine, he personified the railroads he defended. As a result, he was often caricatured as the ultimate Old Guard reactionary. If Roosevelt’s predominant humor was blood, Foraker’s was phlegm: his coldness repelled as much as it intimidated. Only in oratory, at which he excelled, did he live up to his nickname. He was primarily a negative force, resistant to change.

  IN ONE OF THE few light moments of a grim summer, the President responded to a request from Attorney General Moody as to the correct orthography of Justice Department press releases. “I can only advise you to follow the example of the younger Mr. Weller just prior to the moment when he was in such unseemly fashion advised by the elder Mr. Weller how t
o spell his own name—and this to the great scandal of the court.”

  “Simplified Spelling” was now, by presidential edict, compulsory usage in all Administration documents. Roosevelt had become a convert of a philological reform movement emanating from Columbia University. An impressive phalanx of academics with letters trailing after their names sought to remove as many letters as possible from words that only a typesetter could love. They cited the carefree irregularities of spelling in past centuries (pointing out that the Swan of Avon himself never seemed to know how to spell Shakespeare), and asked why contemporary stylists had become so obsessed with standardization. The answer was, of course, that unpronounced letters caused confusion—hence, incredibly, 1,690 variants of the noun diarrhea, a word of common significance if there ever was one. Spelling, free of ambiguities, they argued would do away with the need of standardization, and schoolchildren and civil servants could take exams without fear.

  In its Circular number 6 for the summer of 1906, Columbia’s Simplified Spelling Board, flush with a gift of ten thousand dollars from Andrew Carnegie, declined to propose “any change in the spelling of proper names, especially of surnames,” thus ensuring that their donor would not feel obliged to sign any future checks Andru Karnegi. The President, similarly content not to become Rozevelt, embraced the Board’s recommendations with the enthusiasm of a man of letters who had long since objected to the practice of putting a u in honor.