The Crowded Hour

by Clay Risen

  CHAPTER 13

  “THEY LOOK JUST LIKE OTHER MEN”

  On August 4, the Rough Riders received orders to break camp and march to Santiago, and from there to board a ship for the United States. Three days later, just after noon, they left their dog tents standing and burned their clothing, their ponchos, everything but their packs and the clothes on their backs and walked a mile and a half to a railhead. Several dozen were too weak to go by foot and so rode in carts. Then they traveled the seven miles to the docks at Santiago, a fast twenty-minute ride, where they received two months pay and about two hours to explore the city. Most were too worn down to do much sightseeing, though a few had the energy to visit the Café Venus or buy shots of rum. That afternoon they filed on board the Miami, a converted civilian ship like the Yucatan, which had carried them down to Cuba. The Rough Riders had been in Cuba forty-five days. Of the 600 men who landed at Daiquirí, 23 had been killed in action, another 11 died of disease, and 104 were wounded. Scores more were stricken by malaria. “No other regiment in the Spanish-American War suffered as heavy a loss as the First United States Volunteer Cavalry,” Roosevelt wrote.1

  The regiment was leaving Cuba, but they were not leaving the war. Havana remained under blockade. General García, back in action, was moving inland with his columns, ready to invade the western part of Cuba and await the Americans’ return that fall. General Miles was off to capture Puerto Rico; he met little resistance, and had the island in hand within a few weeks. (Richard Harding Davis went with him; in Miles he found the anti-Shafter, and wrote long, praiseful pieces about the general’s conquest of the island.) Even with these rapid advances, the regiments that were heading north to the mainland might be needed yet—there was talk of attacking the Canary Islands, Spanish islands in the Atlantic, and even the Spanish mainland should Madrid refuse to capitulate. And so they were being sent to a holding camp, from which they could be put back in action should duty call.2

  The Miami left Santiago at 7:30 on the morning of August 8; General Wheeler joined them on the voyage, as did a squadron from the Third Cavalry Regiment. So did Cuba, the dog that the Rough Riders had brought along as a mascot; somehow he survived the landing at Daiquirí, the march to El Poso, and the siege. A small band was there to see them off, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Yankee Doodle,” with the now bustling port of Santiago behind them.3

  As the ship slipped away from the dock and down through the harbor, the men crowded the starboard decks to gaze at the half-sunken hulk of the Merrimac, not 200 feet away. As the Miami turned east out of the harbor, they could see the irregular line of blackened and shell-beaten Spanish warships to the west, grounded just short of the beach. They passed Siboney, where a few transports still lingered and men laid out on the beach, relaxing. The hospital still overflowed with malaria patients. A few minutes later they passed Daiquirí, and then Guantánamo Bay. Then the Miami slipped north around Cape Maisí, and on toward the Gulf Stream, and in less than an hour Cuba was a memory.

  The voyage north was as deceptively pacific as the trip down on the Yucatan had been. “The sea has been like a mill pond,” one trooper wrote. But the ship itself was a pesthouse. The Miami had been used to carry animals before the Army leased it, stripped out the stalls, and erected narrow bunks of unfinished wood—“a chicken coop with bunks,” Roosevelt wrote. There wasn’t enough room, and men had to sleep on the metal floors belowdecks, or out on the deck, or on the roof of the cabin. Lacking the ballast of several hundred cattle, the Miami rolled constantly, even in the calmest waters. Scores of men were already ill when they boarded; even more developed symptoms once they left Santiago.4

  Once again, the food was unappetizing, verging on nauseating—canned beef, hardtack, fatty bacon. The men sucked limes to ward off yellow fever, their great fear in such a confined place. The cooks and stewards aboard the Miami were even worse than those on the Yucatan. They charged a dollar for a loaf of bread, no exceptions. On August 11, Private George Walsh, a forty-three-year-old painter from San Francisco, died of dysentery, which Roosevelt blamed on the man’s overindulgence in rum. He was accorded only the briefest of funerals. “The engine was stilled, and the great ship rocked on the waves unshaken by the screw, while the war-worn troopers clustered around with bare heads, to listen to Chaplain Brown read the funeral service, and to the band of the Third Cavalry as it played the funeral dirge,” Roosevelt wrote. Walsh’s body was wrapped in a hammock, and draped in an American flag. Then two of his comrades tied his ankles to a pair of iron grates, and dropped him into the sea. The Miami sailed on.5

  As if the ship itself were not problem enough, the crew was drunk and mutinous, unhappy to be hauling several hundred malarial soldiers up the coast. Wheeler had ordered Roosevelt to oversee discipline on the ship, and Roosevelt ordered the crew to hand over their bottles. If they did, he said, he would return them when they got home—but if they did not, and he found them, he would toss them overboard. In all about seventy bottles and flasks came into his possession; Roosevelt found another twenty. That solved the drinking, but not the mutiny. “So I sent a detail of my men down to watch them and see that they did their work under the orders of the chief engineer,” Roosevelt wrote. “I could easily have drawn from the regiment sufficient skilled men to fill every position in the entire ship’s crew, from captain to stoker.”6

  As usual, Roosevelt was among the few to enjoy the hardship. “When we had become convinced that we would escape an epidemic of sickness the homeward voyage became very pleasant,” he wrote. Somehow, while all the other men were sick or on the verge of descent into illness, Roosevelt was the picture of health—twenty pounds lighter, but the better for it. Every morning before breakfast he walked out to the deck, bare-naked. He then had two of his favorite troopers, John Greenway and Dade Goodrich, haul up buckets of cold seawater and drench him with it. “Bully! Bully!” he shouted as he splashed the freezing water in his face.7

  And Roosevelt let loose, in his own way. He laid off drilling the troops, and allowed them to play cards. Mostly, he talked—and listened. For all of Roosevelt’s loquacity, he was also a fabulous listener, especially when the stories came from the sort of strenuous lives he admired, and so desired. During those long bull sessions he heard of “voyages around Cape Horn, yacht races for the America’s cup, experiences on foot-ball teams which are famous in the annals of college sport; more serious feats of desperate prowess in Indian fighting and in breaking up gangs of white outlaws; adventures in hunting big game, in breaking wild horses, in tending great herds of cattle, and in wandering winter and summer among the mountains and across the lonely plains.” This, almost as much as the war itself, was what Roosevelt had been looking for. When he was ranching in the Dakotas or on long hunting trips out West, he was always in a position of paying for the comradeship of the rugged men he brought with him as guides and ranch hands. Here, on the Miami, he felt he had finally earned their respect and their friendship.8

  • • •

  It was a summer of discontent for Secretary of War Alger. What should have been a great achievement for him was turning into a public relations disaster. First came the newspaper articles, from Davis and others, describing the horrendous conditions in the camps and hospitals around Santiago. Then came Roosevelt’s round robin and the other letters, which also appeared in the papers—“mischievous and wicked,” Alger called them in his memoirs. The timing could not have been worse. With America’s sympathy on the side of its soldiers, the country naturally turned against those who would do them harm. All the better if those malefactors turned out to be politicians located in Washington, D.C.9

  News had spread fast. Within days after the Battle of San Juan Heights, wounded men were coming back home. The first arrived on July 5 in Key West, where they were to be quarantined. A crowd had gathered to greet them. But rather than seeing triumphant flag-waving soldiers emerge from the ship, they saw hollow-cheeked, weather-beaten faces, the men practically crawling down
the gangplank. The crowd “received them in absolute silence as they limped by, clothed in the remnants of their ragged, blood-stained uniforms,” Leslie’s Weekly reported. From there the men dispersed—some back to Tampa to join the remnants of their regiments that had been left behind; others to Army hospitals strung along the Eastern Seaboard; still others back to their homes, to convalesce or die. As they did, they brought their own stories, and shared them with comrades, families, and local reporters around the country. Soon the patriotic joy over the victory at Santiago was tinged with horror, and then anger, at what the victors had been put through by their own Army to achieve it.10

  At the time, and later in his memoirs, Secretary Alger tried to downplay the Army’s mistakes. But each excuse only raised more questions about preparedness and priorities. The climate, he said, not the poor food or lack of supplies, was the problem. Yes, he admitted, Shafter had been sent off with too few hospitals, but it had been the right decision—space on the ships being limited. Yes, he said, the men suffered, but that’s what soldiers did, and what the newspapers didn’t understand. “The hardships of war were entirely new to them, and a large proportion of the reports in the daily press should have been read at the time with this understanding,” Alger wrote. “A wave of indignation, caused by a misapprehension, swept over the United States, and every act of the War Department was interpreted from this distorted point of view.” He even blamed the soldiers themselves, especially the volunteers: “The large amount of sickness among the volunteers was the result of their own inexperience and carelessness”—ignoring the high levels of disease among the regular troops as well.11

  In his rage, Alger turned on Roosevelt as his scapegoat. A mid-level officer in a volunteer regiment had somehow become one of the biggest heroes of the war, vying even with Admiral George Dewey, the victor at Manila Bay. That itself offended Alger’s great self-regard. Worse was Roosevelt’s immense satisfaction with the Rough Riders, and the way in which the newspapers and the public seemed to view the entire campaign through the experience of this one “cowboy” regiment. Alger was especially galled by his request that the regiment be sent to Puerto Rico, along with the regular troops being sent under General Miles. Alger replied:

  Your letter is received. The regular army, the volunteer army, and the Rough Riders have done well, but I suggest that, unless you want to spoil the effects and glory of your victory, you make no invidious comparisons.

  The Rough Riders are no better than other volunteers. They had an advantage in their arms, for which they ought to be very grateful.

  R. A. Alger

  Secretary of War

  Alger then released both Roosevelt’s request and his reply to the press.12

  Apparently, he hoped that Roosevelt’s arrogance would come through, alongside his own courage in putting the upstart colonel in his place. If that was his plan, it backfired. The New York Times called the secretary’s letter “just about the level of Algerian imagination . . . to suppose that the publication of it would injure the author’s prospects.” Alger was picking the wrong fight. Roosevelt was a war hero; Alger was a politician with a losing hand. True enough that Roosevelt was arrogant and presumptuous and proud—but he was also right, and the public was behind him. History renders its own verdict: Roosevelt went on to be one of the nation’s greatest presidents, while Alger was remembered, briefly, as a synonym for incompetence and corruption, before sinking beneath the waves of the past.13

  • • •

  The Miami steamed up the coast for Montauk, a village at the far eastern end of Long Island. This was the site of the holding camp, where the men would wait for drier, less malarial weather to reengage in Cuba. The Army had chosen Montauk for its climate—cool in the summer, with northeasterly breezes and relatively low humidity, good conditions for men recovering from a summer fighting Spanish soldiers and tropical maladies. The land, 4,000 acres on the northern coast of Long Island’s South Fork owned by the Long Island Rail Road, was both isolated at the end of the island and a quick trip by train to New York: It sat at the end of a rail line, the other end of which terminated at Long Island City, a short ferry ride across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.14

  Once again, the War Department’s incompetence nearly led to disaster. Because Alger was late in deciding what to do with the soldiers in Cuba, the department was late in getting started on construction at Montauk. And it failed to appreciate just how isolated Montauk was, and just how hard it would be to build a camp large enough to handle nearly 30,000 soldiers (coming from both Cuba and various stateside staging camps), many of them ill, within a few weeks. The terminal facilities were too small to handle all the ships and trains arriving, first with material for building the camp, and then thousands of men for filling it. Wealthy New Yorkers chipped in to help—Helen Gould, the daughter of the railroad tycoon Jay Gould, who gave $100,000 to the federal Treasury at the start of the war, donated timber and nails to build floors for tents, but did not send along hammers or saws (if she figured the Army would provide them, she didn’t know the Army). Then, on August 9, nearly all the carpenters went on strike. But the real trouble, quipped the Detroit Free Press, “was that the troops reached Montauk with embarrassing promptitude.” For the first week, those soldiers unlucky enough to be in the early waves to arrive slept in dog tents, or out in the open, on the sandy ground, and ate little beyond a few pieces of hardtack a day.15

  Still, by the time the Rough Riders neared, the camp was in some sense of order. From a small, sandy elevation just inland (which the regiments took to calling San Juan Hill), one could survey its entire expanse, dotted thickly with thousands of neatly ordered tents and interspersed with commissaries, mess tents, and hospitals. Out beyond, past a stretch of beach and shore grass along Fort Pond Bay, formed by a curve in Montauk’s northern shore, stretched the stillness of Long Island Sound in August. The grounds were not quite as nice close up—covered in sand and coal dust, they were more like a boomtown out West than a convalescent camp outside New York City. But anything was a welcome change from Cuba.

  The day the Miami left Santiago, Roosevelt had received a telegram with a single, cryptic word: “Peace.” Nine days later, as the Miami sailed around the tip of Long Island and into Fort Pond Bay, a gunboat approached with good news. The Americans and the Spanish had declared a cease-fire on August 12. Spain would cede control of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and some, if not all, of the Philippines. The details would be worked out in Paris that fall; for now, though, it looked like the regiment was back in the United States to stay.16

  More good news came on the morning of August 14, when, as the Miami approached shore, they got a closer look at their new digs: beaches, tall grass, cool breezes. “Why, it’s just like the plains!” shouted one Rough Rider. Best of all, the Army had brought up the troops left behind at Tampa, and all their horses (as well as their other two mascots, Josephine the mountain lion and Teddy the golden eagle). “Say, boys, just look at the stock on the prairies back there,” yelled another, up in the rigging. “Them’s our ponies a switchin’ of their tails sure enough, and we’ll all go mounted again.” A general cheer rose up, even from Roosevelt and Wheeler, who were sitting on the afterdeck.17

  All morning the Miami lay at anchor, about four miles out into Long Island Sound, so that medical officers could come aboard and inspect for disease. Onshore a crowd had gathered—reporters, soldiers, onlookers of all sorts—to greet the Rough Riders, and especially their colonel, by now the most famous man in America. Just before noon, the Miami, pulled by a tug, coursed up to a pier, and dropped a gangplank. There was a band to greet them, playing many of the same songs they had heard from a similar band that saw them off in Santiago. As soon as the crowd caught sight of Roosevelt, they cheered “Hurrah for Teddy and the Rough Riders!”18

  General Wheeler was the first to walk down onto American soil, and as he did a band struck up “The Battle Cry of Freedom”—ironically, a pro-Union, abolitionist anthem from the Ci
vil War. Beaming, the ex-Confederate did not seem to mind. He wore a Spanish sword by his side and a white helmet on his head, which he doffed as soon as his first foot touched solid ground. Then came Roosevelt, trotting down the ramp in a new uniform. “When ‘Teddy and his teeth’ came down the gangplank, the last ultimate climax of the possibility of cheering was reached,” wrote Edward Marshall, who after being shot at Las Guasimas and convalescing at Siboney had made his way north to New York, and now out to Montauk for the Rough Riders’ return. At the bottom of the gangplank Roosevelt was rushed by reporters, who were less interested in his recent exploits in Cuba than his designs on Albany. One reporter, to break the ice, asked about his health. “I am disgracefully healthy,” he told them. “I’m as strong as a moose. I’m way up. We had a fine trip and we’ve had a bully time all the way through.”19

  “Well colonel,” replied a reporter, “most of us hope to have the chance to vote for you this fall.”

  Roosevelt did not take the bait. “I’m glad to have the chance to talk to you gentlemen about this regiment,” he said, “but I want you all to bear witness that I have talked about nothing else.” He tried to press on through the scrum, but the reporters hemmed him in. He pulled back, and then let loose with one of the stemwinder statements he was becoming famous for:

  We have men from almost every state in the union—Maine, California, New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Louisiana, everywhere. It is a thoroughly American regiment. I think we have about every race and every religion of our people represented here, though 90 percent of the men are native born Americans. Of the last five promotions I recommended from the ranks to the grade of second lieutenant, one was a Jew, one a Catholic, two Protestant, and the religion of the other I know nothing about. We’ve got men from the east, west, Indians, half breeds, whites. We judge each man purely on his merits.20