The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  The reality of the soldiering life hit the volunteers soon enough. “During the early weeks of May,” White went on, “many pert young militiamen came up from the inland towns who fancied they were soldiers because they could get across a level piece of ground without stepping on their own feet. But after the first four or five hours of hard work, the proud lines of the guardsmen began to sag and then to cave in.” Thousands of would-be soldiers quickly dropped out, or were cut. By the end of June, 127,798 men had applied for enlistment, but only 29,521 had been accepted—meaning that 77 percent were deemed unfit to serve, an astounding rate for a country that prided itself on being able to muster citizen-soldiers in a time of need. The result was chaos: an undernourished, insular military was suddenly overrun with men who seemed more interested in playing soldier than being one.16

  There was a further complication. The United States actually had many armies, each independent of the other: a single federal force, made up of career officers and enlisted men, and dozens of state militias and territorial defense forces. The militias, the forerunners of today’s National Guard, were comprised of part-time, volunteer soldiers and officers, and existed at varying levels of preparedness and seriousness. State militias were supposed to provide the bulk of an American army, should the need arise. But by the 1880s most militias had devolved into social and professional clubs. In several states, they existed in name only; in 1898, only a quarter of the country’s militiamen had any training whatsoever. What mattered to the members, and their communities, was the idea behind the militias: locally organized bands of citizens who saw in their own martial aspirations, however casual or pedestrian, a reflection of the Minutemen, the Green Mountain Boys, the Volunteers of ’48, the Spirit of ’61.

  Though hundreds of thousands of men tried to join the fight against Spain, most wanted to do it within the familiar confines of their state militia, alongside and under the command of their neighbors. Joining a federal army, especially if it meant serving under an unfamiliar, West Point–trained officer, was simply unacceptable. In the spring of 1898, the state militias and their allies in Washington (many congressmen were active militia members as well) defeated a bill by Representative John A. T. Hull of Iowa to bolster the size of the federal army at the expense of state militias. Eventually, Congress and the War Department reached a compromise with the states: The militias would gather the volunteers, who would be sworn in as federal troops, but then be allowed to serve within state-designated regiments (the 71st New York Infantry, for example), with their own commanders.17

  It was an imperfect solution to one problem; actually planning the campaign was another. McKinley had made a fundamental mistake: He had gone to war without a clear sense of what he was willing to do to achieve victory. He had declared war as a “neutral” force, to bring an end to the fighting without favoring Spain or the rebels. But realistically, that could only happen if Spain was forced off the island—and in any case, Congress was intent on achieving Cuban independence. If the blockade failed to bring Spain to the negotiating table, how quickly would McKinley be willing to invade? How many casualties was he prepared to accept? Would an invasion force merely support the Cuban rebels, or operate on its own? And when would it embark—immediately, before the rainy season brought misery and disease to the island, or much later in the year, when the climate was more amenable, but by which time the Spanish may have greatly reinforced their position?

  McKinley lacked the answers, and the staff to come up with them. While the Department of the Navy, starting in the 1880s, had built an intellectual infrastructure to address these sorts of questions—by the time war broke out with Spain, the Naval War College had churned out scores of war plans dealing with every imaginable contingency—the Army had nothing of the kind. Instead, McKinley had to make do with his war room in the Executive Mansion and a small circle of logistically minded officers in the War Department next door. Those men—and lucky for McKinley they were smart, diligent men, like Henry Corbin, the adjutant general, the army’s chief administrative officer—could not make up for the organizational chaos that spread out below them. The War Department did not even know, beyond a general sense, what Cuba looked like. Of course planners had access to maps, the same as the public—but as to the disposition of Spanish troops and rebel forces, or even street plans of smaller cities, they were at a loss, “no better informed than if their objective point had been the planet Mars,” wrote the journalist Stephen Bonsal.18

  • • •

  During the first few weeks after Dewey’s victory, a modest plan for Cuba emerged: With the blockade keeping out Spanish reinforcements, the Army would land a small force, maybe 5,000 men, in the center of Cuba, most likely on the southern coast of Las Tunas province, to bring supplies to the rebels and give the Spanish a taste of what might come if they refused to negotiate. Meanwhile, the blockade would do the real work, strangling the Spanish into submission. To command the landing force, the president chose General William Rufus Shafter.19

  Long of body and short of legs, with blue eyes and an enormous waist, Shafter cut a much different figure from men like Nelson Miles, the commanding general of the army, or Leonard Wood, though all three had made their reputations as Indian fighters. He was born in Michigan, the son of a surveyor; he was a good student, but also a bully. He enlisted at the outbreak of the Civil War and was wounded in action at the Battle of Seven Pines, for which he received the Medal of Honor; later, he was put in charge of a “colored” (i.e., segregated) regiment. He was roundly disliked, but his men respected him because, unlike most white officers, Shafter did not treat black troops any worse than he did white troops—even if, in both cases, he treated them quite poorly.20

  By the end of the war Shafter had developed a reputation as an effective regimental commander; afterward he was shipped to Texas to man the border against the French and, later, to police the Indian tribes the Army was in the process of subduing. Like Miles and Henry Lawton, rising-star officers he got to know in those years, he was an aggressive fighter who punished his troops with long marches through hot deserts, on several occasions pursuing bands of Native Americans into Mexico—he gained his nickname, Pecos Bill, for a long campaign he led near the Pecos River, in southeast New Mexico.21 Later, he led expeditions to map the Southwest, an endeavor that paid off well for the military and for the Shafter family bank account—along his trips he kept track of potential mining spots, and when he returned to a city afterward he would invest in mining companies he had tipped off to the locations.22

  Despite a career of solid achievements and adventures, time did not treat Shafter well. While life near the border seemed to harden men like Wood and Lawton, to chisel away at their bodies until they were made of oak, it softened Shafter, and greatly enlarged him—already a big man, by 1898 he weighed 300 pounds. He suffered from varicose veins and gout, for which he wore medical stockings. It didn’t help that after living for so long in the Southwest, he transferred to a sedentary post in California. “Shafter couldn’t walk two miles an hour, he was just beastly obese,” wrote one reporter. Almost every criticism, from his fellow officers, foreign observers, or journalists, begins with and is seeded throughout with ad hominem attacks on his girth: “Gross beyond belief, over 25 stone in weight, and he had not glimpsed his feet for years,” wrote Arthur Lee, a British Army attaché who was allowed to follow Shafter’s army into Cuba. Such ugly criticism might have gone unspoken had Shafter not been such a questionable choice to lead the invasion of Cuba—whatever he had achieved in the Indian Wars, he seemed singularly unprepared to lead tens of thousands of men in the invasion of a tropical island.23

  • • •

  While McKinley and Alger continued to cast about for a plan for Cuba, Roosevelt and Wood organized their regiment. Roosevelt, long an advocate for military preparedness, was stunned by what he found once he entered the ranks that spring. A few days before the declaration of war against Spain, he had visited a “top line general,” expecti
ng to find him working without sleep to catch up. Instead, he was holding a fashion show: Enlisted men paraded in front of him, demonstrating different variants of an updated uniform design. He motioned for Roosevelt to approach, and asked what he thought about the breast pocket placement. While Roosevelt stood there, stunned, an aide to the general recommended he get a uniform with black top boots, “explaining that they were very effective on hotel piazzas and in parlors.” Roosevelt left, disgusted, and never purchased a dress uniform.24

  Another officer tried to sell Roosevelt on the primacy of black powder over smokeless powder, despite the fact that virtually every modern army in the world, including Spain’s, used smokeless powder. The officer noted, “with paternal indulgence,” that no one knew what smokeless powder would do, and that the smoke would in fact conceal them from the enemy. The accuracy, or insanity, of the officer’s arguments aside, Roosevelt knew that having smokeless powder, which was standard among the Regular Army regiments, would be vital in getting the Rough Riders considered as functionally equal to them—and therefore more likely to be sent to Cuba.25

  Yet another time, a “very wealthy and influential man” called on Roosevelt to protest the Army’s choice of Tampa as its embarkation point for sailing to Cuba, and to ask for it to be moved to another city in Florida. He made no point of concealing his motive: His railroad was under contract to haul soldiers and equipment for the Army, and he had investments elsewhere in the state—it was only fair, then, that he should get a cut of the money sloshing around. Such experiences made Roosevelt even more convinced of the importance of his new regiment—not just as a vehicle for his own glory, but as a model for the rest of the country. In the face of an inadequate, unprepared army and an energetic but hapless population, the Rough Riders stood out as an ideal for a newly empowered nation as it found its war footing, a bridge between the Jacksonian volunteerism of the nineteenth century and the Hamiltonian, if not Prussian, professional army that the country would need in order to compete on the world stage. They offered a country grappling with the implications and requirements of its new global power a vision for what that power might look like—spurs and all.26

  Roosevelt and Wood knew that whatever chance they had of being sent to Cuba depended on being ready to fight alongside, and at the level of, fully trained soldiers in the federal army. With perhaps only a few weeks to prepare, they had to get creative, and select men who already had the skills needed to fight—even if they didn’t know it. In early May Roosevelt learned that his regiment’s size, the standard 800 enlistees and officers, had been expanded by about 200 slots above the allotments for Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, positions he could now fill with his own recruits. He moved immediately. He wrote a letter to Fred Herrig, the Alsatian immigrant whom he had gotten to know as a guide and tracker in the Dakotas, insisting that he drop everything and head to San Antonio (he did). Even before he learned of the additional spots, Roosevelt had written to his friend William Austin Wadsworth, asking if he could raise 100 men from New York’s best clubs and New England’s best colleges, assuming, not unreasonably, that these men would come with strong résumés as athletes and outdoorsmen. He also wrote to four current and former police officers he had known in New York, and asked them to join (all did; one died in combat).27

  His most important letter went to Guy Murchie, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, asking him to raise a contingent from Harvard, Roosevelt’s alma mater. Murchie had graduated from Harvard in 1892, and Harvard Law School after that, but remained on campus as a part-time football coach. He was a well-known figure around Cambridge, and he knew which students and recent graduates to tap for war. Roosevelt told him to gather a dozen men and head to Washington to be enlisted. Murchie did even better: Thanks to him forty-one men, about 5 percent of the entire regiment, were either students at or graduates of Harvard.28

  J. Ogden Wells, one of Murchie’s recruits, recalled the secrecy with which the Harvard men prepared to leave Cambridge. Murchie insisted no one could know about his recruiting drive, for fear that he would be deluged with the same scale of requests that had encumbered Roosevelt in Washington. They left Boston at midnight on May 2, with no one to see them off, and arrived in Washington the following afternoon. “Signs of the approaching war were to be seen on every hand,” Wells wrote in his diary. “Officers in bright uniforms were to be seen constantly, while artillery now and then tumbled through the peaceful streets.” The next morning they called on Roosevelt. He gave them a long speech and swore them in “for two years unless sooner discharged.” Then their new lieutenant colonel told them to find their way west, and report to Colonel Wood, already in San Antonio, by May 9.29

  Roosevelt also continued to consider individual applicants, and while he rejected almost everyone, a few got through. One who made it was a young Princeton graduate named James Robb Church, who had been trained as a doctor but had left medicine to work as a merchant mariner and miner in Alaska. During one of his adventures he had encountered Leonard Wood, and when the war was declared he wrote him for an introduction to Roosevelt. Wood told him to come along, and to head to Roosevelt’s house on N Street, in Washington, to get a commission.

  When Church arrived, he gave a servant his card, and waited. Eventually Roosevelt appeared. He looked at the card, then at Church, then back at the card.

  “Do I know you?” Roosevelt asked.

  Church rose from his seat and explained that Wood had already agreed to make him an assistant surgeon in the regiment. Roosevelt looked at him skeptically. Church handed him Wood’s telegram.

  Roosevelt lit up. “Well that makes it perfectly all right,” he declared. “I am very glad that you are to go with us.”

  Like so many men before and after him, Church was astounded by Roosevelt’s willingness to take him on at his friend’s word. It was part of what made Roosevelt a great leader: his ability to identify people whose judgment he could rely on, then use that judgment to make quick decisions. “With a careful reading of a telegram and an inspection of me, he made his decision at once,” Church told an interviewer years later.30

  Roosevelt had other encounters with would-be Rough Riders. As he was leaving the Navy Department one day, a boy, not seventeen years old, accosted him on the building’s front steps. His name was Jesse Langdon, and he had hoboed his way from Minnesota for a chance to join the unit. He had met Roosevelt as a boy, in fact; his father, a veterinarian in the Dakotas, had taken care of some of Roosevelt’s sick cattle during his ranching phase. Roosevelt, impressed by the boy’s pluck, looked young Langdon up and down, as he had Church, and asked if he could ride a horse.

  “I can ride anything with hair,” Langdon replied.

  Roosevelt chuckled, and told him that if he could make it on his own to San Antonio, then he would make sure he was mustered into the Rough Riders, even if he was obviously too young by Army standards.31

  If Roosevelt worried about the other two volunteer cavalry regiments being assembled, he never let on. Neither received anywhere close to the public attention basted upon the Rough Riders, and neither was anywhere close to their state of readiness. They seemed more like some of the state militias—interested in martial demonstrations more as an end in themselves than as practice for war. “There was another cavalry organization whose commander was at the War Department about this time, and we had been eyeing him with as much alertness as a rival,” Roosevelt later wrote. “One day I asked him what his plans were about arming and drilling his troops, who were of precisely the type of our own men. He answered that he expected ‘to give each of the boys two revolvers and a lariat, and then just turn them loose.’ I reported the conversation to Wood, with the remark that we might feel ourselves safe from rivalry in that quarter; and safe we were.”32

  Roosevelt’s success in standing up his regiment made him proud, but also worried. Things were moving fast. He wrote to Wood, pleading with him not to leave without him. At other times, he seemed to write off the possibility of seeing
combat completely. “We’re all fake heroes,” he wrote to his sister Anna on May 8. “We sha’n’t see any fighting to speak of.” But he plugged away, swearing in new troops, shuffling papers, and dreaming of Cuba.33

  Finally, on May 12, his desk duties squared away, Roosevelt was ready to go to San Antonio. Before he left, he ordered a uniform from Brooks Brothers—at the time, officers had to pay for their own clothing, and Brooks Brothers was famous for supplying uniforms and other matériel to the Union Army during the Civil War. Determined not to let his poor eyesight limit his readiness for combat, he bought a dozen pairs of pince-nez, and had pockets for them sewn into his clothing, even his hat. He made an appointment at a photography studio and had several portraits of himself taken; in his pose and demeanor he was every bit the military man he had longed to be. And then Roosevelt was off. He and his valet, Edward Marshall, an African American veteran of the segregated 10th Cavalry Regiment, left Washington on a 10 p.m. train.34

  CHAPTER 5

  “THIS UNTAILOR-MADE ROUGHNESS”

  On the afternoon of May 5, a reporter for the Daily Light, one of San Antonio’s two newspapers, took a streetcar a few miles north from the center of town to Fort Sam Houston. There he found a tall, thin man with a thick brush mustache and sandy hair standing amid a herd of horses. He “looked every inch a soldier and the man who could lead a regiment to victory, but he did not look like a Westerner very much,” the reporter wrote. The man was not, in fact, a Westerner, at least by birth. Leonard Wood—Colonel Wood, now, of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment—had arrived the day before, alone, and stayed at the Menger Hotel downtown. It was the last night he would spend in a proper bed for at least five months.1