The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  Recognizing that a frontier adventure of his own could remedy his wimpish reputation, Roosevelt galloped west, following Buffalo Bill’s tracks. Thus began one of America’s great political makeovers. After returning to Manhattan in 1884, Teddy boasted to the New York Tribune: “It would electrify some of my friends who have accused me of presenting the kid-glove element in politics if they could see me galloping over the plains, day in and day out, clad in a buck-skin shirt and leather chaparajos, with a big sombrero on my head.”95 Wrote Roosevelt, “For a number of years I spent most of my time on the frontier, and lived and worked like any other frontiersman…. We guarded our herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil government, and put down evil-doers, white and red… exactly as did the pioneers.”96

  “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” William Cody, as Buffalo Bill, was the world’s most famous man. Cody created the American idea of the West. His Buffalo Bill character was the prime example of a White manly man who civilized savages. Theodore Roosevelt borrowed from Cody twice: his Ranchman Teddy persona and the “Rough Riders” moniker. Roosevelt was not the first nor the last to be influenced by the power of Cody’s imagery. Gene Autry, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood walked through celluloid landscapes first conjured in the nineteenth-century mind of William Cody. (Library of Congress)

  In fact, Roosevelt had commuted west aboard deluxe Pullman cars, staying for short periods of time to check on his investments and gather material for his books. Ranchman Teddy was to Theodore Roosevelt what Buffalo Bill was to William Cody: a spectacular fiction concocted with an audience in mind.

  When Alice died in 1884, Roosevelt’s first inclination was to flee, as he always had when troubled, and he again headed west. The next year, Teddy published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Three years later, he published Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail. Both books were action packed, beautifully illustrated adventure tales about the “real” West. Roosevelt wrote of hunting and bronco busting and described his rough-hewn ranch house with elk horns lining the walls and the buffalo robes he used to keep warm:

  Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age long past…. Ranching is an occupation like those of vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century; and the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman…. [The Ranchman] must not only be shrewd, thrifty, patient and enterprising, but he must also possess qualities of personal bravery, hardihood and self-reliance to a degree not demanded in the least by any mercantile occupation in a community long settled.97

  Even though Teddy spent much more time writing about the frontier than experiencing it, with these books he became a principal historian of the cowboy and a chief interpreter of the wild Western life.

  UNTIL HIS DEATH, TEDDY would repeat these mythical accounts of his Western adventures, passing them along as fact. But despite his claims to the contrary, Roosevelt spent the majority of his “Western years” in Manhattan. Notes John Milton Cooper Jr. in The Warrior and the Priest, “His commitment to western ways was neither permanent nor deep. Between the summers of 1884 and 1886 he spent a total of fifteen months on his ranch. He did not stay for an entire winter in either year; his longest stretch there came between March and July 1886. The rest of the time he shuttled back and forth to the East Coast.”98

  Teddy would later dissemble that he had lived out West “for three years,” or the “major part of seven years and off and on for nearly fifteen years.”99 But in 1884 he made only three trips to his ranches and lived more than two-thirds of the year in Manhattan, and in 1885 the proportion was about the same. The lone exception was in 1886 when he took two prolonged trips, visiting the West for twenty-five weeks. But except for sporadic hunting trips, after 1886 he became a full-time easterner again. Teddy’s “Western years” were career-building errands.

  And he was hardly a pioneer. Teddy’s two friends—the author Owen Wister (The Virginian) and the sculptor Frederic Remington—were also rich East Coast kids who went west via elegant Pullman coach and Grand Hotel and then spun their short sojourns into careers as interpreters of the West. As Aspen is to a rich college graduate today, so the Dakota Territory was to young nineteenth-century mansion dwellers. “The number of Harvard graduates alone that appeared on the cattle frontier,” Edward White writes in The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience, “is ample testimony to the fact that long hours were spent in the Hasty Pudding Club by scions of wealthy families romanticizing the West as a place for adventure.”100 (Cowpokes laughed when Roosevelt ordered one of his men to round up a stray cow with a patrician “Hasten forward quickly there.”101)

  Teddy’s ranches went bust within two years and he finally abandoned the West. By the end of 1886, half his inheritance was gone. Teddy knew his ranching days were over. John Milton Cooper Jr. writes:

  In his subsequent career on the national scene, no aspect of Roosevelt’s life except his war service made him more of a popular figure than his western sojourn. Nothing did more to make him appear a man of the people. He himself liked to recount how ranching had augmented politics in ridding him of all snobbish inclinations. Actually, his experience was more complicated. In going west, Roosevelt was following a well-beaten track among the upper crust on both sides of the Atlantic. One of his Dakota neighbors was a French marquis, while two others maintained dude ranches for scions of the best British and American families.102

  Teddy’s frontier life was more soft blankets than barbwire, but Roosevelt skillfully projected a different reality. Hermann Hagedorn—the first director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association—describes Teddy’s author photo for Hunting Trips of a Ranchman:

  He solemnly dressed himself up in the buckskin shirt and the rest of [his] elaborate costume… and had himself photographed. There is something hilariously funny… The imitation grass not quite concealing the rug beneath, the painted background, the theatrical (slightly patched) rocks against which [Roosevelt] leans gazing dreamily across an imaginary prairie… with rifle ready and finger on the trigger, grimly facing dangerous game which is not there.103

  Yet the danger had been there—the danger that without sufficient masculinity, Teddy’s political career was doomed.

  In 1886—one year into the creation of the Ranchman myth—Roosevelt ran for mayor of New York. Newspapers hailed the “blizzard-seasoned constitution” of the “Cowboy of the Dakotas.”104 He began writing advice columns for men, such as “Who Should Go West?” in Harper’s Weekly.

  In his two Ranchman books, Teddy established himself as a civilized man with barbarian virtues. In his next four books—a series entitled The Winning of the West—Teddy drew upon the civilization-follows-the-sun myth to glorify how the American Aryan civilized his continent.

  In the very first sentence of his very first The Winning of the West book, Roosevelt declared his theme: “During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance.”105 “English-speaking peoples” was Teddy’s euphemism for the White inheritors of the Aryan tradition; “waste spaces” refers to where non-White Others lived or had lived until their righteous extermination. And Roosevelt certainly meant it when he wrote of “the world’s history”: “The vast movement by which this continent was conquered and peopled cannot be rightly understood if considered solely by itself. It was the crowning and greatest achievement of a series of mighty movements, and it must be taken in connection with them. Its true significance will be lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past race-history of the nations who took part therein.”106

  William Cody’s “Buffalo Bill” (left) was a hunter. Theodore Roosevelt’s “Ranchman Teddy” (ab
ove) was a rancher, the next step up on the evolutionary ladder as understood in the agrarian nineteenth century: the hunter (Buffalo Bill) secures the wilderness and the rancher tames it. Theodore Roosevelt was not the only rich easterner who went west in pursuit of fame. The author Owen Wister (The Virginian) and the sculptor Frederic Remington were also rich East Coast men who went west via elegant Pullman coaches and grand hotels and then spun their short visits into careers as Western manly men. (Bettmann/Corbis)

  Elsewhere the books are full of commentary in line with Aryan mythology:

  The persistent Germans swarmed out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine and north of the Danube [to conquer] their brethren who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the North Atlantic.107

  There sprang up in conquered southern Britain… that branch of the Germanic stock which was in the end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, and by its over-shadowing growth to dwarf into comparative insignificance all its kindred folk.108

  After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of America, a new period of even vaster race expansion began.109

  Roosevelt wrote that Indians’ “life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of the wild beasts110 [who] seemed to the White settlers devils and not men.”111 Originally Teddy had planned to write a fifth The Winning of the West book, but just four years after the publication of his fourth, he became president.

  ON JULY 8, 1905, the first morning rays of sun in the San Francisco harbor revealed busy Manchuria crew members scurrying about. They polished the twenty-seven-thousand-ton behemoth—it was sixty-five feet wide and the length of two football fields. Three thousand excited Californians came to the docks to see the American delegation off. Big Bill was aboard by midmorning. It was easy for the throng ashore to pick out the rotund 325-pound secretary of war as he mingled on deck with passengers and guests.

  The Princess and her party reached the dock about noon. Alice was “attired in a simple traveling dress of gray, trimmed with dashes of deep blue here and there [with] an Eton jacket to match…. Her hat was of deep red straw.”112 Noted the San Francisco Chronicle, “She ascended the gang plank alone, the crowd drawing back to allow her ample room. Just before stepping aboard, she paused, looked over her shoulder and beckoned to Representative Longworth to come to her side. Together they stepped on board and many romance-loving souls wondered if the incident foreshadowed the beginning of a yet pleasant voyage by these same fellow travelers.”113

  SS Manchuria. In 1905 this Pacific & Ocean liner carried the largest delegation of American officials to Asia in U.S. history. (Courtesy of Jonathan Kinghorn)

  Alice “found her spacious staterooms filled with a wealth of beautiful flowers.”114 On a table was an expensively produced souvenir guidebook entitled From Occident to Orient, Being the Itinerary of a Congressional Party Conducted to the Far East by Secretary of War Taft, 1905, as Guests of the Philippine Government. It was “handsomely illustrated with photographic scenes of the countries and three excellent maps showing the route to be traveled.”115

  Alice then joined Big Bill on deck. The San Francisco Bulletin observed, “For a half hour she looked down upon the throng of 3,000 people on the dock, all of them straining to see the president’s daughter. As the whistles sounded at 1 o’clock, the hawsers of the big liner were cast loose and, in command of Captain Saunders, the Manchuria gracefully departed. In response to the cheer that went up, Miss Roosevelt waved her handkerchief and threw a kiss.”116

  And then they headed west. Following the sun.

  Chapter 3

  BENEVOLENT INTENTIONS

  The people of the Island of Cuba are, of right ought to be, free and independent…. The United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.1

  —THE TELLER AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST SPAIN, 1898

  The imperial cruise ventured out into the Pacific Ocean, the largest single physical feature on the planet. Within the past seven years, the United States had made that enormous body of water an American lake. It had taken more than a century for the American Aryan to fill out its continental area as the U.S. Army’s forts became cities. But as the nineteenth century had come to a close, the U.S. Navy had quickly secured the naval links that the Aryan would need to continue westward and capture Asia’s riches.

  The U.S. thrust into the Pacific had been the work of President William McKinley and his administration. As assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt had been a key cheerleader for this naval expansion, and later, as vice president and president, he defended America’s military actions in Asia as a positive example of the White Christian spreading civilization. The whys and wherefores of American expansion into the Pacific would occupy the thoughts of presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. And all three would come to doubt the wisdom of dipping America’s toe into that lake.

  IN 1844, AMERICA ELECTED James Polk to the presidency. At the time of his election, the United States was a small country with states exclusively east of the Mississippi. The Louisiana Purchase territory was unorganized. Great Britain claimed the Oregon Territory in the Northwest, and Mexico held what would later be Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.

  At the end of his inauguration day, Polk told his secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft, that one of his main goals was to acquire California. The U.S. Navy had surveyed the Pacific coast in the early 1840s and reported that San Francisco was “one of the finest, if not the very best, harbour in the world.”2 Writes University of Virginia professor Norman Graebner in Empire on the Pacific:

  It was American commerce with the Far East primarily that focused attention on the harbor of San Francisco. This bay was regarded the unqualified answer to American hopes of commercial greatness in the Pacific area. Geographically, its location opposite Asia would give it a commanding position; its intrinsic advantage would make that position fully effective. Prevailing westerly winds had located this extraordinary harbor on the direct route of traffic between India, China, and Manila and the Pacific ports of Mexico and Central and South America.3

  For its part, the Oregon Territory held world-class ports such as Seattle and Portland. Indeed, one sun-follower declared, “the nation that possesses Oregon will not only control the navigation of the Pacific, the trade of the Pacific and Sandwich Islands, but the trade of China itself on the Pacific.”4 Congressman William Fell Giles of Maryland announced the Aryans’ intention: “We must march from ocean to ocean… straight to the Pacific Ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave…. It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race.”5

  Polk quickly picked diplomatic fistfights with the British and Mexicans. But while Britain ceded Oregon, Mexico held on to its precious Pacific frontage.

  Mexico was a nation of seven million that had won independence from Spain in 1821 and had modeled its constitution after America’s. The internationally recognized border between Mexico and the United States was the Nueces River in south Texas. President Polk decided it should instead be the Rio Grande, 150 miles to the south, and he ordered General Zachary Taylor into Mexican territory between the two rivers. Mexican historians refer to the U.S. Army’s actions as “the American Invasion.” American historians call it “the Mexican-American War.”

  Taylor’s incursion was brutal, with massacres of Mexican civilians and rapes of local women. (The New York Herald wrote of the Mexican women assaulted by U.S. soldiers, “Like the Sabine virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravisher.”6) Polk had initiated the invasion with seven thousand troops and thought the conflict would be over in days. It was a vast miscalculation; the war dragged on for three years, involved one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers,
and resulted in thirteen thousand U.S. casualties and the deaths of countless Mexican civilians. Ulysses S. Grant—who served in Mexico as a young officer—wrote in his memoirs that he regarded the war “as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”7

  With the eventual American victory, the United States could have claimed all of Mexico—but that would have meant absorbing too many non-Aryans. Argued the powerful Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina, “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race…. Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”8 Added Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, “We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory.”9

  IN 1872, THE ARTIST John Gast painted what would become the most popular visual euphemization of the American Aryan’s westering. Gast named his masterwork American Progress, and prints of it became one of the best-selling American images of the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Gast painted American Progress as a lingerie-clad beautiful blonde, pale skinned and voluptuous, floating westward. On her forehead is the “Star of Empire,” and she holds in her right hand civilization’s tome—a “School Book”—and from her left hand trails a telegraph wire. Below her, American civilization advances: farmers till land, pioneers ride in stagecoaches and ox-drawn wagons, miners with picks and shovels make their way, while the Pony Express and three transcontinental railways all head west. Between the Pacific and advancing American civilization stands savagery—a growling bear, wild horses, a bare-breasted Indian woman, one Indian warrior with his hatchet raised, another clutching his bow. Animals and Indians run from the American advance. No violence is depicted—no stacks of dead Indians or decimated buffalo herds. Only one rifle appears, held by a lone buckskin-clad frontiersman. The United States military is nowhere to be seen.