by Clay Risen
Taylor’s comments were bloody stuff, but the crowds loved it. On November 8, Roosevelt won the governor’s mansion by 661,707 votes to 643,921 for his Democratic opponent, Augustus Van Wyck. Theodore Bacon, on the Independent ticket, won just 2,103 votes.14
• • •
On December 15, 1898, about six weeks after Roosevelt’s victory in New York, President McKinley was in Atlanta. The Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the Spanish-American War, had been signed five days earlier. It ceded Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States outright; Spain also gave up the Philippines, in exchange for $20 million. Cuba was to receive its independence, but not yet—it would remain an American protectorate for three more years (and unofficially for many years after that). On top of all that, the United States had formally annexed the Hawaiian islands on July 7, while the Fifth Corps still laid siege to Santiago. There were complications: Tensions were growing between American and Filipino forces, and in a few months they would erupt into a full-scale conflict—the Philippine-American War—that lasted nearly four more years and resulted in the deaths of more than 16,000 Filipino fighters, 5,000 Americans, and tens of thousands of civilians. But as 1898 came to a close, it was a good time for some presidential stock-taking.
This sort of foreign engagement was precisely what McKinley had come into office promising to avoid. Yet that day in Atlanta, he embraced it. He praised his country’s recent victory as the dawn of a new era of enlightened American leadership. “We have so borne ourselves in the conflict and in our intercourse with the powers of the world as to escape complaint or complication and give universal confidence of our high purpose and unselfish sacrifices for struggling people,” he told the audience at the city’s auditorium.
America, despite having taken on a globe-spanning set of territories, was not following in Europe’s imperial, colonial path. This had been, McKinley went on, a different kind of war. “At Bunker Hill liberty was at stake; at Gettysburg the Union was the issue; before Manila and Santiago our armies fought, not for gain or revenge, but for human rights,” he said. Yes, he admitted, the resulting gain in territory was the same no matter the motive. But what was the alternative? “If we had blinded ourselves to the conditions so near our shores, and turned a deaf ear to our suffering neighbors, the issue of territorial expansion in the Antilles and the East Indies would not have been raised. But could we have justified such a course?”
“No!” shouted the crowd.
“Is there anyone who would now declare another to have been the better course?”
“No!”
The means, it seemed, justified the ends. America had no choice but to take on an empire, for the sake of the world. “With less humanity and less courage on our part, the Spanish flag, instead of the Stars and Stripes, would still be floating at Cavite, and Ponce, and at Santiago, and a ‘chance in the race of life’ would be wanting to millions of human beings who today call this nation noble, and who, I trust, will live to call it blessed,” McKinley said. “Thus far we have done our supreme duty.” American idealism and American empire were, in McKinley’s speech, forged into one overarching national vision.
He went on. The war and its consequences were not just a victory for American military might and American values, McKinley thundered. It was a victory for American unity. “This government has proven itself invincible in the recent war, and out of it has come a nation which will remain indivisible forever more,” he said, comments no doubt pleasing to his Georgia audience. “No worthier contributions have been made than by the Southern people.” With the country victorious and united, there was no choice, he concluded, except to embrace its new role, and new territories:
Shall we now, when the victory won in war is written in the treaty of peace and the civilized world applauds and waits in expectation, turn timidly away from the duties imposed upon the country by its own great deeds, and when the mists fade and we see with clearer vision, may we not go forth rejoicing in a strength which has been employed solely for humanity and always been tempered with justice and mercy, confident of our ability to meet the exigencies which await, because confident that our course is one of duty and our cause that of right?15
McKinley’s confident imperialism ignored the messy reality: not only the imminent fighting in the Philippines, or the tense occupation of Cuba, but an unfolding scandal around the Army’s utter lack of preparedness, which would culminate in hearings by the Dodge Commission the following year. Still, the president’s picture of the war as a selfless intervention in the name of humanity and Cuban liberty was widely shared at the time. “The war between the United States and Spain was, in brief, a war for humanity,” wrote Alexander K. McClure and Charles Morris in their biography of McKinley, published in 1901. “America could no longer close her ears to the wails of the starving people who lay perishing, as may be said, on her very doorsteps. It was not for conquest or gain, nor was it revenge for the awful destruction of the Maine.” In 1902 Woodrow Wilson, then the president of Princeton University, declared it a war “not for the material aggrandizement of the United States, but for the assertion of the right of the government to succor those who seemed hopelessly oppressed.”16
Some historians would later depict the events of 1898 as an aberration, even a mistake—that America was not, at least for the time being, an imperial nation. And it’s true that after the war in the Philippines, America did not try to acquire more territory, save for the Panama Canal Zone in 1903. But McKinley’s speech in Atlanta makes clear that America was already, and permanently, set on a different path—one cloaked in idealistic rhetoric, one that would eschew the formal trappings of territorial conquest in favor of commercial power, political protectorates, and above all humanitarian intervention. In the coming years the United States solidified its control over the Caribbean, with repeated occupations and the opening of the Panama Canal. It extended its reach over the Pacific by building bases on far-flung islands. And it developed, under McKinley and his successor, Roosevelt, a rhetoric of American idealism and power that would change the world to a greater extent than guns and money ever could.
• • •
By the time he reached Albany, Theodore Roosevelt, who had turned forty less than two weeks before his campaign victory, had already led life enough for ten men—state assemblyman, bestselling author, rancher, police commissioner, and soldier; he had climbed European mountains and hunted javelina in the Texas brush. And he would go on to do much more—the vice presidency and presidency; a slew of progressive legislative achievements, including breaking up the trusts and mandating food and drug safety; the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War; and post-presidential adventures in Africa and the Amazon. But nothing matched the experience of leading the Rough Riders. He preferred, and often insisted, that he be called “Colonel” Roosevelt. “There are no four months of my life to which I look back with more pride and satisfaction,” he wrote in his memoirs.17
In 1899 Roosevelt attended the first regimental reunion, in Las Vegas, New Mexico. His duties in Washington prevented him from attending subsequent gatherings, but men from the regiment were frequent visitors at the Executive Mansion (which Roosevelt took to calling the “White House”); official guests, on official business, sometimes found themselves waiting for an hour outside Roosevelt’s office while he socialized with a few of his old comrades. He also campaigned for the Medal of Honor for himself, though the War Department declined to award it to him, a slight he would always ascribe to Secretary of War Alger and his allies. (He finally received the medal in 2001, eighty-two years after his death.)18
Three months after taking office as New York’s governor, Roosevelt traveled to the all-male Hamilton Club in Chicago, where he gave a speech entitled “The Strenuous Life.” Among the thousands of addresses, books, essays, and letters Roosevelt wrote during his life, nothing comes closer than this speech to defining his worldview, and explaining the impact that he had on American life at that cr
itical moment, as the country moved into a dominant position on the world stage. If McKinley’s address in Atlanta painted a picture of American imperial power as a peace-bringing, world-uniting force, Roosevelt’s Chicago speech depicted a world of violent competition, one in which men and nations must be aggressively virile to survive.
The speech brings together so much of what Roosevelt had been thinking and saying for years, and yet it is hard to imagine it without his recent, searing experience in Cuba. In the early 1890s, Roosevelt wrote and spoke endlessly and vacuously about self-sacrifice, national honor, and a whole litany of aggressively virile themes that he saw as the American patrimony but that he feared his generation was at risk of squandering. But it was only after his time in Cuba that these themes congealed into a coherent philosophy, backed by the confident sense of moral superiority that came with having risked his own life for his beliefs.19
The strenuous life, Roosevelt told his audience, was “the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife”—and that applied as much to the individual as the nation. “If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world,” he said. America’s newfound power meant that it would inevitably be drawn into foreign affairs; its long-standing values obligated it to play an active, even aggressive role in shaping them:
We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill. Last year we could not help being brought face to face with the problem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and; once in, whether failure or success should crown our banners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the responsibilities that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines.20
The speech is aggressive—Roosevelt attacked those who demanded peace in early 1898 or withdrawal from America’s newfound possessions after the war as “weaklings,” “sinister,” “puerile,” charges that he felt confident in making because he, unlike them, had been in battle. The speech is racist, calling for the conquest of “savage” peoples by civilized nations. But the speech also captured the spirit of a country that was suddenly feeling emboldened, united, ready to take on the world. “The Strenuous Life” was immediately hailed as a new definition of American values; it was reprinted in newspapers and magazines, and helped cement Roosevelt’s position not just as a major American politician, but as an intellectual father of its new imperialism.
Roosevelt’s vision, backed by his personal experience and sacrifice in battle, provided a model for the country, and at its best inspired generations of leaders to go beyond personal and national self-interest in the name of the common good. It also bequeathed a narrow, chauvinistic idea about what that common good meant—a set of values defined by the powerful, to be imposed on the powerless. And there is an obvious danger in Roosevelt’s logic: If America’s intentions are always good, and if America has an obligation to use its power to shape the world in its image, then soon every crisis, everywhere in the world, presents a challenge for American power. It is the sort of rhetoric that would later drive the country into Europe, the Pacific, Vietnam, Iraq, and dozens of other conflicts, at times to the benefit of humanity, but often at great cost. The inability to foresee those outcomes derives from a noble, blinkered view of American power—one that Roosevelt forged in his experience with the Rough Riders.
Looking back, it is possible to see the Spanish-American War for what it was: a half-baked, poorly executed, unnecessary conflict that pushed an immature military power onto the world stage—or, alternately, as a ham-handed land grab with a sugarcoating of idealism. But this was much less obvious at the time. The speed and élan with which the Americans won the field in Cuba—and above all the image of Roosevelt and his Rough Riders charging the hills outside Santiago—shocked and impressed the world. No one expected Spain to win the war, but no one expected the United States, with its puny Regular Army and hordes of half-trained volunteers, to achieve victory so quickly. “This war must in any event effect a profound change in the whole attitude and policy of the United States,” wrote the London Times. “In the future America will play a part in the general affairs of the world such as she has never played before. When the American people realize this, and they realize novel situations with remarkable promptitude, they will not do things by halves.”21
America was not just feeling empowered; it had found a new way of talking about power, one that drew on the country’s best ideas of itself and used them to paper over its worst instincts. Standing on the podium in Atlanta, McKinley had nothing to say about the commercial and strategic interests behind the war, or the atavistic jingoism that motivated so many of its most adamant supporters. All of that was secondary to his embrace of a crusader ideal, intent on reshaping the world for the better—which is to say, in America’s image and, not incidentally, to America’s benefit. It was a 180-degree reversal of John Quincy Adams’s admonition, uttered on Independence Day 1821, that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” that it remains “the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all” but “the champion and vindicator only of her own.” The majority of Americans had long opposed foreign intervention, and for that reason had opposed the maintenance of a standing army to execute one. But if that intervention could be packaged within the rhetoric of humanitarianism, then, it seemed, the public would get on board.
The war achieved something else as well. It set in motion a resolution between America’s two competing traditions of militarism: the Jacksonian, which relied on the will of the people to rise up in times of need, and the Hamiltonian, which emphasized preparedness and a centralized, standing army. In this respect the story of the Rough Riders was absolutely central. They offered a bridge between the two, a way for the wary to become comfortable with the idea of a large, permanent federal military. They were something entirely different from the old stereotypes about military men: They were volunteers, but serving in the United States Army, not a state militia. They replaced the old image of carpetbagging, corrupt, dirty soldiers with a new ideal of an all-American force, drawn from all regions and classes, united behind a set of values, not glory or a paycheck. Time and again, it was the Rough Rider ideal of defending American values, not American interests, that drove thousands of men and women to enlist in the fight against Germany in World War I, to join the Marines landing at Da Nang in 1965, to volunteer to invade Iraq in 2003.
More immediately, the Rough Riders became an inspiration for the Army reforms that followed the war, and which laid down the basic outline of the twentieth-century American military. In August 1899 McKinley fired Alger as his secretary of war, replacing him with a close associate of Roosevelt’s, the New York corporate lawyer Elihu Root (among other things, Root had helped Roosevelt avoid disaster during his gubernatorial run when it emerged that the candidate was not, technically, a resident of New York). With Congress—which in 1901 had already approved an increase in the size of the Regular Army, to almost 100,000, from 28,000 before the war—and public opinion behind him, Root rebuilt the Army, top to bottom. He replaced the position of commanding general with a general staff; he created the Army War College; and, most notably, he reorganized the state militia system into the National Guard, in which the states, in exchange for federal funds, agreed to let the federal government nationalize their units when it saw fit.22
Crucial to Root’s plan was the public’s willingness not just to go to war as a country, but to prepare for war in times of peace and to volunteer when the need arose. This form of “voluntaristic militarism” was very different from the massive conscript armies of nineteenth-century Europe, or the minuteman militias of eighteenth-century America. The goal, for Root, was a core standing army that could expand rapidly in wartime, without having to rely on untrained volunteers or poorly prepared militiamen; in other words, a combination of professional sol
diers and permanent, trained citizens—the Jacksonian and Hamiltonian traditions in one. It is hard to imagine that Root did not have his friend Roosevelt’s regiment in mind when he crafted these reforms.23
The story of the Rough Riders also pointed the way toward a new order at home. On September 18 the Reverend W. S. Crowe of the Church of the Eternal Hope, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, rose to the lectern to give a sermon on “some lessons of the war.” After expounding on the now common themes of sectional reconciliation, liberty for Cuba, and a newfound purpose for American power, he alighted on the Rough Riders. “The experience of that picturesque and somewhat romantic band,” he said,
has put down a great deal of silly and mischievous comment on the strife between classes and masses in America. The wealth and culture of the East, the universities, the old and proud families, social exclusiveness, Newport and Bar Harbor, were liberally represented in that band of heroes, side by side with the frontiersmen. They ate and slept and fought and suffered and died together. The survivors have gone to their homes with a marvelous increased regard for manhood, whether it grew on the battle plains or in the drawing room. The entire country has witnessed a practical demonstration of manhood’s equality. The wind is all taken out of the sails of the anarchist orator. . . . When the Arizona boys mingle with their old neighbors and cronies, and fill their old haunts with talk of the war, the Far West will conclude that what has been hated as the aristocratic East is quite worthy of confidence.24
If the 1890s were a decade of psychic crisis, in which a post-frontier America felt itself divided and frittering away its resources and willpower, especially among the young, then the Rough Riders showed a way out. At a time when regional, political, racial, and class differences threatened to rip the country apart, the regiment was able to unite Westerners and Easterners, ranch hands and star tennis players; the combination of so many different forms of contemporary manhood, deployed in the name of the national interest and national ideals, gave an entire generation of Americans a new sense of purpose. This was not an overnight change; anti-imperialist and isolationist crosscurrents continued to shape foreign policy as well. But as the twentieth century progressed, and as America asserted itself more confidently abroad, the Rough Rider ideal helped drive it forward.