by Clay Risen
Not everyone agreed with the rush to war, and all it implied about America’s role in the world. The country had, many believed, been founded in opposition to the old ways of Europe, to the autocracies and bureaucracies and garrison societies that defined the continent’s leading states. They detested the idea of a strong central government, and of a strong centralized military. Above all they detested colonies, for colonies required armies, and armies meant large state systems and coercive police powers and, in no short order, the end of the ideal of radical freedom that many nineteenth-century Americans held dear. Most telling was the way America treated its soldiers. At the end of the Civil War, the Union Army stood victorious, and enormous, with just over a million men under arms. Within a decade that number was brought down to about 28,000 officers and men, smaller than any major army in the Western Hemisphere—even Spain, that long-waning empire, had three times as many soldiers at home, and about five times as many in Cuba. As the New York Times editorialized in 1898, “We could offer no resistance on either coast to a first-class or second-class naval power. And two army corps could traverse the country as far as their commanders chose to take them without meeting any effectual opposition.”8
And yet, as the century came to an end, two facts about America’s place in the world stood clear. First, global economic power required comparable military power to protect it—from pirates, from hostile states—and to persuade difficult trading partners to come around. The United States had grown unchecked by foreign influence in large part thanks to its economic isolation, but its growth, and the geography-shrinking effects of technological progress, were bringing that isolation to an end.
But power, many Americans felt, could not be simply a matter of protecting material interests. This was the second fact: Theirs had never been just a country, in the eyes of its citizens and its admirers abroad; it was an idea, too. Every country likes to think it stands for something, but especially in the nineteenth-century era of realpolitik, that something was usually itself. America, by contrast, stood in the eyes of many for the universal values written into its founding documents, ideas about liberty and equality. These weren’t vague notions bandied about in afternoon salons, either—millions of men had fought, and hundreds of thousands had died, over them during the Civil War. If America was going to be a world power, one that thrust itself and its armies into world affairs, how could it do so in a way that spoke to its values? Or, in a more cynical but no less realistic view, how could those values be used to justify the aggressive assertion of American interests onto the world?
• • •
Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders offered an answer to both of those questions. At a time when the country was rapidly assuming the mantle of global influence yet deeply unsure about how to extend that power through military means, the sudden appearance of nearly 1,000 volunteer soldiers, drawn from all walks of life and all parts of the country, seemingly motivated not by money or servitude or anything other than a desire to do what they thought was right, offered a different way forward. Suddenly, the Army was not a corps of nameless, faceless social rejects and West Point martinets; it was men like Jesse Langdon, the son of a Dakota veterinarian who lied about his age to join the regiment, and Frank Knox, a Michigan boy who would go on to be Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the navy—men whose lives seemed readily familiar and accessible, even if their decision to drop their civilian comforts and fight in a foreign land left those at home in awe. Writing on the eve of the Battle of San Juan Heights, outside Santiago, and just a few days after the Rough Riders’ first engagement with the Spanish, at Las Guasimas, an editorialist for the Philadelphia Inquirer declared a sudden, newfound respect for the American military: “The American soldier is no machine. He is not drawn from the dregs of society. He is not drilled to the extent that he is an automaton. No, he is a patriot and a man of intelligence. When he fights it is for his country, and to love one’s country is better than three years of service as a conscript.” And it was the Rough Riders above all, he said, who showed that America could be both a military power and retain its ideals. “Whether Fifth Avenue millionaires or Western cowboys, they fought together and died together in Cuba for the great American principles of liberty, equality and humanity.”9
Roosevelt and the Rough Riders were everything to everyone. They built on the myths about American history, and created new ones that would guide the country through the next century. The romance of the Wild West was already fast receding into history, yet here, suddenly, it was alive again, miraculously blended with the fin-de-siècle allure of Newport and Saratoga and the Social Register. (The very name “rough rider” was taken from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, itself an act of myth-making.) The regiment brought together the sons of Confederate rebels and Yankee riflemen—proof, to many, that the country had finally overcome the still searing sectional divides wrought by the Civil War. Not coincidentally, there was never even the suggestion of including African American soldiers in the unit, despite the availability of thousands of black veterans who had fought in the Indian Wars. The Rough Riders were rich and poor, a suggestion, declared journalists and Sunday sermonists, that socialism and labor revolution were impossible in America—a concern that in 1898 felt all too real to the moneyed classes. And of course they were all men, a relief for those, like Roosevelt, who spent most of the 1890s fretting about the decline of the virile, Anglo-Saxon American male.
No surprise, then, that despite their being just one regiment within the Army’s massive war effort, celebrity followed the Rough Riders wherever they went. The unit spawned fashion trends: In the fall of 1898, women in New York took to wearing the “Rough Rider,” a roguish style of hat. Thousands of onlookers visited their camp in Texas, while thousands of others waited in the cities and small towns along their train route to Florida. Mothers gave them cakes and fresh milk; daughters asked for brass buttons from their uniforms as souvenirs. Dozens of reporters followed them closely, and hundreds of others dropped in and out of their retinue as they moved from their training grounds in dusty San Antonio to the Army’s staging site at Tampa, to the beaches of Cuba, and finally to the hills east of the city of Santiago, where Roosevelt and his men won glory.
And yet for all their fame at the time, the Rough Riders remain obscure, hidden in plain sight from those who might know the name, but not much else. One reason may be a split among historical treatments of the regiment and the war. Books that discuss the Rough Riders at any length tend to be either biographies of Roosevelt, in which the regiment plays a colorful but passing role, or folksy adventure tales that ignore almost entirely the regiment’s historical importance. In contrast, those books that do discuss the context—the small library’s worth of mostly academic literature on the Spanish-American War—downplay the events of the war itself, including its most famous regiment. These books do an admirable job of answering questions about American imperialism, about the domestic politics behind the war, and about the consequences of America’s rapid conquest of Spain’s far-flung colonies. But rarely do they spend much time on the actual fighting, or the soldiers involved, or the public’s reaction. Intentional or not, they give the impression that because the American war with Spain was so short—the hostilities lasted less than four months—its battles and personalities do not matter much.
Many Americans at the time saw things differently. They followed every development closely. They lauded heroes, and created them when heroes were not forthcoming. They wrote poetry and songs and consumed thousands of pages of newspaper and magazine reporting. And they saw, quite clearly, the central role that the Rough Riders played in this story. It may seem obvious, but the lack of scholarly attention demands it be said: To understand the impact that the war had on the American public and its attitudes about the world, one has to understand the war, and its most famous regiment, as well.
The public supported the American invasion of Cuba because they believed their country was engaged in a diff
erent kind of war, and a more noble use of power, than they were used to seeing play out in Europe. The Rough Riders put a name and a face to that belief, and seemed to promise that American power would always promote not just America’s interests, but its values—a mission that the publisher Henry Luce characterized as the “American century.”
It is only in hindsight that we can recognize how America’s many subsequent interventions, almost always taken under the cover of promoting human rights and liberty, often hurt the country, and the world, as much as they helped (indeed, disgust at the Army’s actions in the Philippines fueled a vocal anti-imperialist movement back home). We can recognize that the story of the Rough Riders became one of the many myths that helped twentieth-century America build an empire yet deny that it had any intention of doing so. We can recognize that Roosevelt’s talk about the Rough Riders as “American through and through” was an advertisement for a type of American “unity” that excluded blacks, Latinos, and women. We can recognize that the rhetoric of human rights and freedom abroad has often been abused by the powerful to promote their own interests. And yet in the Rough Riders’ story, we can also recognize the best of America: citizens who set aside families, careers, wealth, and celebrity to fight and die for something other than themselves. We can recognize, above all, that the story of the American century is neither entirely heroic nor entirely tragic—rather, it is both.
CHAPTER 1
“THE PUERILITY OF HIS SIMPLIFICATIONS”
On January 13, 1898, John D. Long, the secretary of the navy, was sitting in his office in the State, War and Navy Building, a Second Empire jumble of columns and mansard roofs next to the Executive Mansion that Mark Twain had called the ugliest edifice in America. Long, fifty-nine, was a stoop-shouldered, gently cerebral former governor of Massachusetts whom President William McKinley had called out of private legal practice in Hingham, a coastal town south of Boston, to serve in his cabinet. He was an able administrator and politician, but he was happiest writing poetry and reading Latin; one of his proudest achievements was publishing a verse translation of The Aeneid.1
Long was, in other words, the exact opposite of Theodore Roosevelt, his assistant secretary, who at that minute burst into his boss’s morning reverie. Roosevelt shut the door and, Long recalled, “Began in his usual emphatic and dead-in-earnest manner” to run through his latest efforts on the part of the department. Then, his face reddening, Roosevelt turned to Cuba, along with Puerto Rico the last remnant of the once vast Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere, and his certainty that Spain and the United States would soon come to blows over the island’s struggle for independence. “He told me that, in case of war with Spain, he intends to abandon everything and go to the front,” Long wrote.2
The cause of Roosevelt’s eruption that day was an anti-American riot in Havana on January 12. The McKinley administration was putting diplomatic pressure on Spain to reach an end to its war in Cuba; after rumors reached Havana that the government in Madrid had finally agreed to Washington’s demands, Spanish loyalists and soldiers had rampaged across the center of the island’s capital, attacking newspaper offices and the American consulate. Fitzhugh Lee, the consul general in Havana, cabled Washington with the news: While there was little damage to American property, the violence bode poorly for any hope of a negotiated settlement to the nearly three-year war, which had decimated the Cuban economy and killed well over 100,000 civilians, along with tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers and Cuban rebels.3
Long kept quiet as his assistant seethed. One didn’t just listen to Roosevelt; one felt him. He seemed to have no inside voice. He expounded grandiloquently before crowds as small as one, in forums as intimate as the office of the secretary of the navy. He had a slightly high pitch to his voice and he spoke in rapid spurts, with long vowels and chopped-off consonants. He boomed, he hissed, he spat out words—“bully!,” “delighted!”—like a Gatling gun. And he didn’t speak merely with his mouth: His whole body shook in rhythm, his fists banging into his palms to drive home a point. But while he was often full of bluster, it wasn’t hot air. Roosevelt was widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, well-read people in Washington, with a steel-trap of a mind and an ability to recall minor facts consumed years before. Even his detractors found Roosevelt’s extemporaneous orations a thing to behold: He could speak off the cuff about everything from New England wildlife to German politics, whatever fit the moment.4
Still, it could be a lot to take in, and those who tolerated Roosevelt usually did so with resignation, rarely with enthusiasm. In the months since they had joined the department together, Long had learned to manage Roosevelt’s energies, a full-time job in itself. When he wasn’t preparing for war with Cuba, Roosevelt was ordering up new warships, or restructuring the department’s procurement policy, or investigating mismanagement at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “He bores me with plans of naval and military movement,” Long wrote in his journal the night after Roosevelt barged into his office. “By tomorrow morning, he will have got half a dozen heads of bureaus together and have spoiled twenty pages of good writing paper, and lain awake half the night.”5
Roosevelt had been thrust upon Long by President McKinley, and he in turn had been thrust upon McKinley by New York politics and Roosevelt’s close friend Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator from Massachusetts. Long appreciated Roosevelt for his energy, but he would have much preferred a quietly competent career naval officer as his second. Unlike Roosevelt, Long did not think war was coming. If anything, he was naive about the situation in Cuba and Spain’s desire and ability to improve it. “My own notion is that Spain is not only doing the best it can, but is going very well in its present treatment of the island,” Long wrote in his diary. “Our government certainly has nothing to complain of.”6
More than temperament divided the two men. They came from different generations—both born on October 27, Long was exactly twenty years older than Roosevelt—and had vastly different ideas about America and its place in the world. Long’s generation was both scarred and motivated by the experience of the Civil War; they knew what war was, and they believed that their achievements since—social stability, economic growth, industrialization, and the closing of the Western frontier—had made large-scale conflict unnecessary, at least as far as the United States was concerned. Minor wars might embroil Europe, but Europe was far away. Wise, sustained growth and a restrained, conservative foreign policy, the hallmarks of the Republican Party and its domination of national politics in the late nineteenth century, would ensure that America would never again face the horrors of war, domestic or otherwise. With no small amount of self-awareness, Long called a published edition of his diary America of Yesterday.
Roosevelt stood out even among his generation in taking exception to Long’s vision of the world. He had grown up in the shadow of the Civil War and its veterans; he admired (and envied) their experience, but also questioned why, after such a searing war, they should be so afraid of another one that they refused even to prepare for it—an error that, Roosevelt believed, made another war more likely. Even more, it was America’s responsibility, to its own interests as well as the world’s, to use its growing power to shape foreign affairs. In his own autobiography, Roosevelt called the chapter on the Spanish-American War “The War of America the Unready.”
• • •
Born in Manhattan in 1858 and called Teedie by his family, Roosevelt later described himself as a scrawny, sickly child, hindered by asthma and poor eyesight—“a great little home-boy,” his sister Bamie said. To make up for his self-perceived deficiencies, he spent long hours as a boy exercising, hiking, and swimming. He kept daily records of his physical activity and subsequent gains in strength, weight, and stamina. He worked out alone when necessary, but he liked a partner because he favored violent sports, especially boxing. His love for the pugilistic arts continued long after he reached maturity, even after he returned from Cuba—as governor of New York, he had a ring i
nstalled in his mansion in Albany.7
Whatever physical ailments Roosevelt suffered, his greatest debilitation was his hero worship of his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. “My father was the best man I ever knew,” Theodore Junior said. In letters and diary entries, he called his father “Greatheart,” after the heroic giant-slayer in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Theodore Senior was born into wealth and proved a proficient if sometimes distracted businessman; he engaged with politics but resisted the opportunities that America’s unbound postwar corruption offered. He cofounded New York institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. But he had also avoided service during the Civil War by hiring someone to go in his place—a legal, not uncommon avenue for wealthy Americans to get out of their martial obligations, but one that his son could never quite square with his faith in his father’s courage. Nor was his father able to give him the paternal support his son needed; Roosevelt Senior loved his family deeply, but was also often absent from it, away on business. And then he died, of stomach cancer, when his Teedie was nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard. What this all amounted to, in the figure of Theodore Junior, was a man who burst with energy and intelligence, came from sufficient wealth to give him room to exploit his gifts, and carried an enormous chip on his shoulder. A man who had nothing to prove seemed to believe that he had everything to prove.
While still a teenager, Roosevelt climbed mountains in Maine and Switzerland, Germany and upstate New York. He taught himself taxidermy, and practiced it avidly, frequently emerging from his room covered in the blood of some animal he had killed on a weekend hunting trip. At Harvard he lifted himself from a middling B average as a freshman to Phi Beta Kappa; he was invited to join the Porcellian Club, the most exclusive undergraduate social organization on campus; and on the side wrote a book, The Naval War of 1812, that remained a standard text in college classrooms for decades. Along the way, he built himself from being “a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development,” as one classmate recalled, into a physical brute, strutting about the Yard, often shirtless, with gnarly muttonchops bewhiskering his cheeks. He once rowed from Long Island to Connecticut, alone, in a single day, a full twenty-five miles. Some of the stories told about Roosevelt as a Harvard man later proved apocryphal, but like so much in his life, their veracity is beside the point: The myth is inextricable from the man. Roosevelt also developed a reputation as an ill-tempered, prudish elitist—uninterested in anyone not of the “gentleman-sort”—and as a result had few friends around Cambridge. In fact, what he disdained were the leisure classes. He admired those whom he judged, fairly or not, to come from hearty, hardy New England stock, whether they had used their brains and brawn to build wealth or simply earn a good day’s pay. He had no time for those who took to the lighter side of life, who accepted the “gentleman’s C,” at Harvard or later as adults.8