The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  CHAPTER 4

  “THE DAYS OF ’61 HAVE INDEED COME AGAIN”

  On the morning of May 7, 1898, in a ceremony in his office at the State, War and Navy Building, Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. He had already turned in his letter of resignation, but he had promised Secretary Long that he would remain in place until his successor arrived, so he was still holed up at the Department of the Navy. But he spent most of his days in late April and early May 1898 getting ready to leave for war.1

  Outside dozens of reporters, onlookers, and applicants thronged in to join Roosevelt’s volunteer regiment. Just two weeks old and still more idea than fact, the First United States Volunteer Cavalry was already the hottest story in Washington. On Roosevelt’s desk towered a looming stack of letters from more would-be enlistees. More sat on the floor—in all, he received twenty-seven sacks of applications to join the regiment in the first few weeks of the war.2

  Roosevelt took no small satisfaction in having the spotlight cast on him and his fledgling regiment, and that afternoon he showed off for reporters. The letter-writing supplicants, he told a reporter from the New York Sun, “are too late.” President McKinley and Secretary of War Alger had already determined that most of the spots would be selected by the governors of the New Mexico, Arizona, and Oklahoma territories. Any additional applicants needed to have exceptional skills, Roosevelt said. He picked up a letter at random from the pile, to demonstrate. It was, to his surprise, from the grandson of the man who led the mounted riflemen at the Battle of King’s Mountain during the Revolutionary War. Changing tack, Roosevelt decided to make an exception. “If anyone should have the chance, it is surely he. I will keep that.”3

  When not considering applicants, Roosevelt was arranging for equipment for the regiment—there was no guarantee that the Army would send it to them otherwise. “I have been rushing about all day making the lives of the Quartermaster General and the Chief of the Bureau of Ordnance a burden to them,” he wrote to Wood, who had already left for San Antonio. He arranged with a supply depot in St. Louis to send uniforms and clothing to Wood by May 9; he contacted a supplier in Philadelphia to send flags and guidons. “I feel nearly crazy at my inability to hurry these ordnance stores and equipments faster; but all I can do I am doing.”4

  Though Roosevelt insisted Wood was in charge, the public and the media knew who the star was. Reporters couldn’t wait until the actual fighting to look for heroes, and Roosevelt—acclaimed writer, noted outdoorsman, rising politician, a man who seemed to be risking it all to serve his country—was an obvious choice. The fact that he would be leading a band of cowboys into battle made the story of Roosevelt and his regiment irresistible. Almost immediately, the search was on for a nickname. “The First United States Volunteer Cavalry” was a mouthful, after all, and nicknames were something of a fixation for the turn-of-the-century press. Alliteration was important; so was a sense of familiarity, words that would render something as militaristically bureaucratic as a “volunteer cavalry regiment” into something tough but familiar. Reporters tried out “Teddy’s Terrors”; for a while it stuck. But people soon settled on the nickname of one of Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring troupes: the Rough Riders, which itself was a slang term for cowboys. It was a nickname Roosevelt detested, at first. “Please do not call us Rough Riders,” he begged a journalist. “The name evokes a hippodrome.” But no one listened, and Roosevelt was press-savvy enough not to fight too hard. Later, he adopted the nickname as the title for his memoir of the war.5

  The Rough Riders were the stuff of romantic, nostalgic speculation. Unlike Regular Army units, made up of career soldiers, or militias, whose ranks were homogenous collections of small-town residents, the volunteer regiment drew from wide swaths of Americans from the country’s semi-settled West. The golden age of the lawless frontier was already in the past, but the public, especially in the East, wanted to believe it survived, and reporters and their readers imbued this new unit with all their fantasies about the Wild West. “The biggest job will be to keep the cowboys in order,” predicted the Scranton Tribune on April 28. In the entire regiment, predicted the New York Tribune, “There will not be a man who is not capable of riding anything with horsehair and four legs on it, from a cross country Corinthian hunter to a bucking bronco, and in addition to this every one will be able to hit a tent peg three times out of five with a Colt .45 from the back of a horse going at a full run.” Decades later, the historian Richard Hofstadter would describe the 1890s as equally obsessed with Walt Whitman and Rudyard Kipling, the democrat and the militarist; in the Rough Riders, Americans found both in equal measure.6

  • • •

  The public adored the Rough Riders for their nostalgic appeal; the War Department wanted them because they filled a gaping hole. The American Army that Wood and Roosevelt joined was barely an army at all, and in the spring of 1898, with war declared, the department was forced to build one almost from scratch. Perhaps because of the terrible scope of the Civil War and the cruel ferocity of the Indian Wars, and because of the immense American military complex of the twentieth century, it is easy to imagine that the United States has always had a large, well-ordered Army and Navy. In fact, for much of the first 125 years of American independence, the country not only lacked a sizable fighting force, but it actively rejected the idea of maintaining one.

  The history of the American military in the nineteenth century is largely defined by the tension between a voluntaristic, “Jacksonian” or “Jeffersonian” view, one that feared standing armies and relied on the inherent toughness of the American citizen, and a “Hamiltonian” view that promoted a standing army as a bulwark against enemies and a tool to project power abroad. The Jacksonians, inspired by the frontier fighting ethos of Andrew Jackson, believed that in times of crisis, private citizens would come together to fight, and that the rugged individualism bred into them by American society would make up for their lack of martial training. The Hamiltonians—inspired by the centralized-government visions of Alexander Hamilton, and of which Theodore Roosevelt was a leading voice—believed that the sort of military unpreparedness advocated by the Jacksonians made war more likely, and that especially in an industrializing age, with machine guns and motorized vehicles making wars shorter and bloodier, there wasn’t time to raise and train an army every time war clouds gathered.7

  For much of the nineteenth century, it wasn’t even a contest—the Jacksonians prevailed. Standing armies, they believed, necessitated large, powerful, intrusive governments; and besides, America was isolated from the great-power conflicts that justified Europe’s enormous armies. As a result, the American military complex of the nineteenth century was provisional, even haphazard, kept small by congressional decree and popular opposition. When wars did happen, the War Department would rush to recruit men to fill empty regiments, units that existed only on paper; when the fighting was done, they were mustered out, and the Army shrank. On the eve of the Civil War, there were just 16,367 men in the federal army. When it ended, there were over one million. Within a few years, the Department of War shrank the Army back toward its antebellum size, to just 50,000 soldiers.8

  At first, the post–Civil War Army had a lot to do: deploy along the Southwestern border as a show of force against imperial French forces that had occupied Mexico, enforce Reconstruction in the postwar South, and fight countless small campaigns against Indians across the West. But within a decade the French were out of Mexico, Reconstruction was cut short, and federal forces began to gain the upper hand against Native Americans in the West. By the second half of the 1870s, the Army had lost much of its reason for being, and critics began calling for further cuts. Occasionally, the Army was deployed against striking workers, but after soldiers shot and killed five strikers in three different protests across the Midwest in the 1870s, active-duty troops were rarely used domestically. That left them with nothing to do but sit in one of hundreds of small outposts scattered across the
West, or in cushy bureaucratic posts in Washington. In 1896 Johnson Hagood, a West Point–educated officer, said that serving in the military was “like a well trained fire department with no fires, and the firemen sitting out in front of the fire house playing checkers.”9

  It wasn’t just that the Army, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, was smaller than it had been thirty years earlier; it had largely forgotten how to fight a war at all. During the Civil War, the military had operated on a vast organizational scale, with regiments of up to 800 men forming the building blocks of an integrated hierarchy of brigades (2,600 men), divisions (8,000 men), corps (26,000 men), and armies (80,000 men). Most regiments were composed of infantry, but they fought alongside cavalry regiments and artillery detachments in tightly choreographed combined operations. With the end of the war and the shrinking of the military, most regiments went back to being paper organizations, and those that remained (usually at half strength) were spread out across the frontier, fighting the Indian Wars or simply staffing far-flung outposts. Combined-arms tactics, the basics of an army’s fighting doctrine, in which infantry worked with cavalry and artillery, became something taught at West Point and then quickly forgotten. And any semblance of cooperation between the Navy and the Army—at the time, two independent cabinet-level departments (the Marines being a small, specialized unit within the Navy)—faded, leaving the two arms of the American military machine to fight each other for the ever-smaller slices of funding distributed by Congress each year. By the time of the Spanish-American War, there were officers with decades of experience who had never participated in exercises or operations involving units larger than a regiment—and even rarely at that size.

  The declining importance of the Army coincided with declining support from politicians and the public. For many Americans in the post–Civil War era, the sight of a man in uniform was a reminder of the horrors of combat, and a ready instrument that might lead some reckless politician to start another. Conservatives and business leaders believed that a large army was a requisite step toward a large government. Southerners hated the federal army because it was the instrument that had won the Civil War, and even more because it had enforced the terms of Southern capitulation—Reconstruction and civil rights for formerly enslaved people. In the event of a war, all of these constituencies held fast to their belief that the Jacksonian ideal of Americans as a ready-made fighting force, honed by rough living and motivated to fight for more than just a paycheck. They organized as local and state militias, civilians committed to fighting if called on, but nothing more. This was a virtue: Such volunteers, said one congressman, “are no mere hirelings, no mercenaries; they fight for the defense of home and country, for principle and glory, for liberty and the rights of man . . . they do not menace our liberties or the stability of our free institutions.”10

  In the 1870s, Congress limited the size of the Army to about 26,000 enlisted men and 2,000 officers, and steadily reduced its budget to just $40 million, barely enough to maintain the web of isolated coastal and Western outposts where most of the Army’s men whiled away their careers. From time to time, congressmen would call for the abolition of the Army entirely. Between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Spanish-American War, the number of Americans doubled, but the size of the American Army shrank, as did the average soldier’s pay. Only after war was declared against Spain did Congress authorize an increase in the size of the Regular Army—not counting volunteers—to 61,000, with a 20 percent wartime pay increase. But even then, the money that came with it was allocated mostly for coastal defense, and the additional troops were limited to a two-year period. In 1898, America had an army, but it could not fight a war.11

  • • •

  At first, President McKinley’s plan for executing the Spanish-American War left the Army almost completely out of the picture. Perhaps because the only real thinking about a potential war with Spain had been undertaken by the staff at the Naval War College, the initial strategy relied almost entirely on America’s Atlantic and Pacific-based naval squadrons. Even before he officially declared war, President McKinley ordered a blockade around Cuba and Puerto Rico, while Theodore Roosevelt, in one of his last official acts as the assistant secretary of the navy, ordered Commodore Dewey, whose Asiatic Squadron sat ready at Hong Kong, to steam immediately for Manila, the capital of Spain’s vast colony in the Philippine Islands and home to its Pacific fleet. Dewey was to neutralize the Spanish fleet in the Pacific, so that it couldn’t attack the American west coast, while the blockade of Cuba and the Philippines did the bloodless work of compelling the strapped, starving Spanish colonial government to sue for peace on the island. The Army would be sent to man the coastal defenses, and to be ready to occupy Cuba and Puerto Rico should Spain agree to leave altogether.

  Dewey arrived at the Philippines on April 30, entered Manila Bay, and at 5:41 the next morning attacked the Spanish ships lying at anchor around the harbor. Within hours eight of Spain’s thirteen ships had been sunk, and seventy-seven of its sailors killed; the Americans lost not a single ship, and suffered only one fatality, when an overheated sailor died of a heart attack. Dewey’s victory sealed the fate of Spain in the Pacific, and gave a boost of confidence to an American war machine still gearing up. Whatever doubts America might have had about its ability to fight a war against Spain were dashed that morning in Manila Bay. Dewey became an overnight war hero of nearly unprecedented proportions: Without asking his permission—let alone his political leanings—both parties began talking about making him their candidate for president in 1900.12

  Dewey’s overnight success in the Philippines also changed the expectations that the American public and its leaders had for the war. Above all, it put pressure on the Atlantic Squadron to achieve something similar in Cuba and Puerto Rico—and on the Army to achieve its own spectacular military victory. Tens of thousands of volunteers were already coursing into militia armories and federal recruiting centers, and from there to one of the many staging camps being prepared around the Southeast—even though, at the time, no one knew what to do with them. And so, with the American public excited about the war and bloodthirsty for more victories like Dewey’s in Manila, an immediate invasion of Cuba was fast becoming a fait accompli without a raison d’être.

  The job of planning an invasion of Cuba fell to Russell Alger, William McKinley’s gray-goateed secretary of war. Like many men in the president’s cabinet, including McKinley himself, Alger had served with distinction in the Civil War—he enlisted as a private, in 1861, and in June 1865 was made a brevet (i.e., honorary) major general, even though he had already left the Army. He went on to make millions in timber and served as governor of Michigan from 1885 to 1887. Alger clearly had a head for business and politics; beyond his youthful experience, it was unclear whether he knew anything about war.

  It was a question that didn’t seem to concern McKinley—or Alger, for that matter. When war broke out, he, like the president, imagined that “a million men will spring to arms overnight,” just like they did in 1861, forgetting the death and destruction that came from throwing regiments of half-trained farm boys against each other at Antietam and Shiloh. Against all evidence, Alger guaranteed the president that the Army could put 40,000 men in Cuba within ten days of declaring war.13

  This was going to be a problem. It was true that modern armies could mobilize and move with lightning speed; in 1870, at the outset of the Franco-Prussian War, it took the Kingdom of Prussia and the North German Confederation less than three weeks to move nearly half a million men to the French border. But America was not Prussia. Not only was the entire Regular Army short of Russell’s promised deployment by 14,000 men—assuming every single soldier was put on a boat to Cuba—but there was no mechanism for organizing and training additional troops. The Army lacked a general staff to plan the war, and it lacked the infrastructure to move thousands of men across the sea to land on a hostile shore. And no soldier under fifty years old had participated in a
large, set-piece battle, with combined arms—coordinated cavalry, infantry, and artillery—against a similarly armed and prepared enemy. Alger was, simply, delusional.

  But his delusion was instructive. Like many veterans of the Civil War, Alger had faith in the Jacksonian ideal of citizen-soldiers; he believed that pluck and patriotism would make up for a lack of planning and preparedness. In one sense, he was quickly proved right: Most Americans may not have countenanced a standing army, but countless men relished the chance to volunteer when the war with Spain began. The enthusiasm Roosevelt encountered around the Rough Riders was also a general phenomenon. McKinley, in his declaration of war, had called for 125,000 men; within weeks more than 100,000 had volunteered, a number that eventually rose to over a million. Boys just short of manhood begged their fathers to sign papers allowing them to join the fight; Civil War veterans pulled out their old uniforms and marched to their local recruiting stations.

  In New York, Theodore Miller could hardly concentrate on his legal studies with all the parades and patriotism he encountered in the Manhattan streets. “Have been working pretty hard these two weeks in preparation for my exams but the war business has pushed everything else out of my head so I am terribly afraid I will flunk,” he wrote to his sister, Mina Edison, in New Jersey. “I have the whole year’s work hanging on a few hours.”14

  The nation’s capital was similarly alive with activity, preparing for battle. McKinley had a war room installed on the second floor of the Executive Mansion, with maps of Cuba and the Philippines, and telegraph lines snaking across the carpet. Would-be officers flocked to the city, trying to buy favor with politicians who might win them a commission in their home state guard. Red, white, and blue bunting hung from every second-story railing. “The days of ’61 have indeed come again in Washington,” noted the New York Sun. William Allen White, who wielded outsize influence in national affairs as the editor of the Emporia, Kansas, Gazette, noticed the same fervor in the small towns on the plains. “In April, everywhere over this good, fair land, flags were flying,” he wrote. “Trains carrying soldiers were hurrying . . . to the Southland, and . . . little children on fences greeted the soldiers with flapping scarfs.”15