by Clay Risen
There were limits to this newfound national unity. “America,” like the Rough Riders, was diverse only within the confines of masculine whiteness; while the country contained multitudes, the idea of what it meant to be American at the turn of the century did not extend to African Americans or, fully, to women, and only on the margins to a few token Native Americans and Latinos. Even Roosevelt, who was quick to praise the segregated regiments in the first few months after the Santiago campaign, wrote in his memoir that black soldiers were only effective when led by white officers. Black veterans and journalists cried foul, but no one listened. If the Rough Riders defined “America” as the country moved into the twentieth century—and they most certainly did for that most ardent advocate of Americanism, Theodore Roosevelt—it was an America with a decidedly pale hue.
Roosevelt left the presidency in 1909, and although he ran a strong race as a third-party candidate in 1912, he never returned to public office. He did not retreat from public life, though: Alongside well-publicized hunting trips to Africa and an expedition up the Amazon, he continued to write books and articles, many of them criticizing the 1912 victor, Woodrow Wilson. And he continued to advocate for a military system that relied heavily on Rough Rider–style voluntarism, long after the realities of industrial-era warfare had made standing armies a necessity. The experience of the Spanish-American War, and Roosevelt’s celebrated role within it, may have helped the country break from its allegiance to Jacksonian voluntarism, but the reforms and expansion they unleashed left Roosevelt behind. By the eve of World War I, he sounded as retrograde in his views on military affairs as the Civil War–era generals and politicians he had criticized in his youth. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, Roosevelt offered to raise Rough Rider–style units; Congress authorized up to four divisions, but Wilson rejected the plan. Roosevelt stayed home, though his son Quentin, a pilot, was shot down over German lines and died on July 14, 1918. Roosevelt died less than six months later, on January 6, 1919, of a pulmonary embolism at Sagamore Hill.25
• • •
Cuba finally achieved independence on May 20, 1902, after over three years of American control. For much of that time, Leonard Wood, who had started the war at the head of the Rough Riders, oversaw the entire American occupation as a military governor. He reformed the Cuban courts, rebuilt the railways, and got the economy back in working order. But in his reforms, he also greatly favored the interests of Spanish-born, urban peninsulares, as well as the members of the New York–based Junta who moved back to Cuba after the war, over the rebels and their provisional government. He wasn’t alone: Immediately after the end of hostilities, American public and political opinion turned against Cuban independence. Poisoned by stories about ragtag rebel soldiers, the American public resented the rebels’ alleged reliance on outside help, and repeated without question the racist stereotypes about lazy, untrustworthy Cubans found in the yellow press. The Cubans had soon sunk to the same level, in the American mind, as the Spanish. The journalist William Allen White, who had been a Cuba booster from his editorial perch in Kansas, wrote: “Both crowds are yellow-legged, garlic-eating, dagger-sticking, treacherous crowds. . . . It is folly to spill good Saxon blood for that kind of vermin.”26
In 1901 Congress passed a bill to again enlarge the Army, alongside other early steps in Elihu Root’s reforms. The bill included the Platt Amendment, after Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut, which placed severe limits on Cuban independence—among other things, the island’s government could not take on additional debt, and it had to allow the United States to intervene again whenever it saw fit. Only by accepting those limits could the Cubans take over control of their own island. But they could not, really, rule a country that had no effective defense against its enormous northern neighbor—and, indeed, the United States invaded again, in 1906. Less concerning than outright intervention, though, was the economic and political control that the American government and American companies exerted on Cuba, influences that eventually fed another rebellion over fifty years later, this time led by communists under Fidel Castro.
This pattern of “intervene first, ask questions later” became a template for American foreign policy in the twentieth century. The need for prudent decisions based on informed understanding of a foreign country too often took a backseat to ideological claims about overthrowing tyranny and delivering freedom for the oppressed. American planners, whether in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, or dozens of interventions through the subsequent century, ignored nuanced, and perhaps inconvenient, questions about a country’s politics, demographics, and culture. Many of the journalistic accounts of the Santiago campaign, and especially the occupation that followed, could with a few minor changes have appeared in the 1960s to describe America’s initial forays into South Vietnam, or in the early 2000s to describe the invasion of Iraq. In these cases and others, many Americans allowed appeals to “freedom” and “justice” to divert their attention from the difficult questions of how a country should be governed, by whom, and to what end. The Rough Riders set the template for how Americans would regard their military, and their militarism; the Spanish-American War set the template for how Americans would go out into the world in search of monsters to destroy.
• • •
The Rough Riders’ fame endured long after Roosevelt won the governor’s race and the rest of the regiment filtered back to their homes. Roosevelt’s account of the war, The Rough Riders, was an overnight bestseller when it appeared in the spring of 1899. Tom Hall, whom Roosevelt had drummed out of the regiment during the siege of Santiago, had a similar success with his book, The Fun and Fighting of the Rough Riders, to the chagrin of his former comrades. The Rough Riders figured prominently in many of the dozens of books written by correspondents from the campaign, including Davis, Marshall, Kennan, and Creelman. And they were common base material for early movies: Along with multiple attempts to retell the regiment’s story in Cuba (including several made by Thomas Edison), studios turned out a whole subgenre of films built around the notion of what the men might have done once they returned from the war—in 1939’s Rough Riders Round-Up, for example, Roy Rogers stars as a soldier from the regiment who, back from the war, joins the United States Border Patrol.27
The regiment enjoyed acclaim and success away from the studio lot. When Dade Goodrich, Dudley Dean, and Charlie Bull, all alumni Harvard football team, went back to visit Cambridge, that day’s practice was renamed “Rough Rider’s Day.”28 A year after Theodore Miller died in Cuba, his friends and family endowed a memorial arch in his name at Yale, which still stands between Battell Chapel and Durfee Hall, just off the New Haven Green. Some men parlayed their newfound fame into political or business careers. Goodrich went to work for B. F. Goodrich, his family firm and one of the world’s largest tire manufacturers, where he was chairman of the board for twenty-three years. John Greenway became a mining company executive, while Frank Knox became a newspaper publisher, first in Michigan and then in Chicago. In 1936 the Republican Alf Landon chose him as his running mate against Franklin Roosevelt; FDR crushed them, but four years later he asked Knox to be his secretary of the navy. Others, including Billy McGinty and Tom Isbell, parlayed their renown into careers as traveling showmen. They and thirty-four other Rough Riders joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, where they reenacted the charge up Kettle Hill—by now refashioned as the charge up San Juan Hill—hundreds of times, for tens of thousands of onlookers across the country.29
Bob Wrenn and Bill Larned, Theodore Miller’s tennis-playing idols, went back to the sport. Larned won seven U.S. Open championships. Both ended their lives in tragedy: Wrenn killed a man with his car in 1914, and he died, broken, eleven years later, at age fifty-two. Larned, who contracted rheumatism in Cuba, became depressed after retiring from tennis, and despite a successful business career, shot himself in his private quarters at New York’s Knickerbocker Club, in 1926. He was fifty-three.30
Richard Harding Davis, desp
ite a career that ran for almost another two decades, never found a subject quite as compelling as Theodore Roosevelt or the Rough Riders. He certainly looked for one—he covered the Second Boer War; he was with the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War; and he was in Greece, on the Salonika Front, during World War I. He continued to write for magazines, to write novels and plays as well, but his fame had plateaued. As his biographer Arthur Lubow argues, he was a man who caught the wrong wave; a modernist, even slightly avant-garde figure of the late Victorian era, by the 1910s he was a dinosaur, behind the times, someone who still believed that the ideal foreign correspondent was as much as participant as an observer. He died of a heart attack on April 11, 1916, just shy of his fifty-second birthday.31
The Rough Rider Reunion, held every other year in Las Vegas, New Mexico, also helped keep the regiment’s story alive. An out-of-the-way place for many, Las Vegas was convenient for several of the most ardent veterans, who lived in Santa Fe and other nearby towns. And as a cattle town set amid the arid foothills of the Rockies, it helped maintain the image of the Rough Riders as a frontier, cowboy outfit. Roosevelt made the trip that first year, as did about 100 men from the regiment—and about 10,000 onlookers. The men kept coming back, but every year there were fewer and fewer, until eventually the event was tucked into Las Vegas’s annual Cowboy Reunion, a tourist-centered celebration of another half-mythic artifact of America’s recent past.32
As the years progressed, the stories the Rough Riders told, and that people told about the Rough Riders, morphed and expanded, became intertwined and distorted. If a Rough Rider veteran lived in a town, it was a sure thing that every few years a reporter for the local paper would come by for a visit. And each time the stories the man told grew a little bigger, and a little less accurate, and yet the editors printed them verbatim because they came from Rough Riders. Then there were the impostors—the City Museum of Las Vegas, New Mexico, maintains an extensive collection of clips, letters, and the museum’s own investigations into men who falsely said they had fought alongside Roosevelt. Charles Howard, the owner of the racehorse Seabiscuit, claimed to have been a Rough Rider, as did a man named Warren McAlister, who boasted, long into the twentieth century, that he had boxed with Roosevelt in Cuba.33
• • •
In July 1970, Douglas Scott, a researcher from Columbia University, traveled to northern Westchester County, outside New York City, to interview Jesse Langdon. As a five-year-old boy Langdon had met Theodore Roosevelt in Medora, in the Dakotas; in 1898, when he was sixteen, he tramped to Washington to join the Rough Riders and, despite being underage, persuaded Roosevelt to enlist him. Seventy-two years later, he was one of the last three surviving Rough Riders, along with Frank Brito and George Hamner.34
Langdon had lived an eccentric’s varied life. He performed in a traveling Wild West show; he fought in the Philippines, where he lost his right lung to disease; and he worked as a veterinarian for almost twenty years before quitting to become a full-time inventor. He claimed to hold 189 patents, “mostly valves,” he told Scott, “because that’s where I made the most money.” For a while he lived in Brooklyn, where he and his wife, Marie Storey, put all their savings into the Langdon-Storey Foundation, which they created to promote something he called “taxless government.” Set up as a nonprofit, he never received a single donation. When his wife died, he moved to Lafayetteville, a hamlet in northern Westchester County, about ten miles east of the Hudson River.
Langdon’s responses to Scott’s questions were an equal mix of reliable fact, truth-tweaking, misremembering, and flat-out fabrication. He said Buckey O’Neill was killed on top of San Juan Heights, not the bottom, and that the regiment first charged San Juan Hill, not Kettle Hill. He claimed to have nearly died in a knife fight on the train to Tampa, eaten boa constrictor in Cuba, caught yellow fever in El Caney, boxed the British heavyweight champion in 1901, and made a fortune with his patents. Very little of what he said was even close to true.
It didn’t matter. By then the Rough Riders had long since ceased to be purely historical figures. They became myths, as much an American legend as Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. Langdon was among the last of a regiment that was famous as much for what it symbolized as for what it did—confident, idealistic American warriors, ready to take on the world.
Hamner and Brito both died in 1973. Langdon lived another two years, and died on June 29, 1975, less than two months after the fall of Saigon and the close of the Vietnam War. It was a fitting end to the Rough Riders. Conceived at the dawn of the American century, their last member survived to see the country’s first defeat.35
Governor Theodore Roosevelt riding in the New York victory parade, September 30, 1899.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 520.3, 560.3)
A bone pile comprised of the remains of Cuban civilians killed by the Spanish reconcentrado policy.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 520.3, 560.3)
Reconciliation between the North and South was an important, barely concealed subtext in the push for war with Spain. Here, two men dressed in Union and Confederate uniforms are united by a young girl dressed as Cuban liberty.
Library of Congress
The USS Maine.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Richard Harding Davis.
Library of Congress
Theodore Roosevelt, in his Rough Rider uniform, before departing for San Antonio.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 520.3, 560.3)
An unidentified Rough Rider relaxing outside the exhibition hall at Camp Wood, San Antonio.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and Colonel Leonard Wood in camp at San Antonio.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 520.3, 560.3)
A group of Rough Riders pose behind the regiment’s Colt machine guns.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 520.3, 560.3)
Theodore Miller.
Courtesy of Mitch Schmidtke
Officers and journalists gathered on the piazza of the Tampa Bay Hotel.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
From left to right: Major Alexander O. Brodie, Major George M. Dunn, Major General Joseph Wheeler, Chaplian Henry A. Brown, Colonel Leonard Wood, and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation: No. 520.3, 560.3)
Major General William R. Shafter overseeing the loading process at Port Tampa.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Hamilton Fish aboard the Yucatan.
Collection of the author
The landing at Daiquirí, Cuba.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
A pair of Rough Riders prepare dinner at Daiquirí.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College. (Citation No. 560.3)
A depiction of the Battle of Las Guasimas (misspelled as “La Quasina” in the caption) by Kurz & Allison.
Library of Congress
Observation balloon at El Poso, Cuba.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Soldiers lining up for the assault on San Juan Heights, July 1, 1898.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Captain Allyn Capron’s battery firing on El Caney, July 1, 1898.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
A cartoon, from the cover of Puck magazine, depicting Theodore Roosevelt leading the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill.
Library of Congress
Rough Riders cheering at the news that the Spanish had surrendered Santiago, July 17, 1898.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
A view of central Santiago soon after the Spanish surrender.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
Colonel Roosevelt shakes hands with the remaining Rough Riders at Camp Wikoff, Montauk, New York. The regiment’s gift to Roosevelt, Remington’s The Bronco Buster, sits on a table behind him.
Theodore Roosevelt Collection, Harvard College Library. (Citation No. 560.3)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Whenever I embark on a book project, I say a prayer of thanks for the network of archives, research centers, and libraries—both online and in real life—that make work like this possible. In particular, I must thank the staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia; the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University; the Columbia Center for Oral History; the Library of Congress; and the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library and the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, both in Santa Fe. I extend special thanks to Michael Rebman at the City of Las Vegas Museum, who patiently walked me through the museum’s extensive holdings on the Rough Riders, including its file on Rough Rider imposters. I would also like to thank Shane Bernard of the McIlhenny Company Archives in Avery Island, Louisiana, who shared with me material related to John McIlhenny.