Theodore Rex (27 page)

Petitioners visiting the Executive Office learned to keep talking, because the President usually had an open book on his desk, and was quite capable of snatching it up when the conversation flagged. One day, the French Ambassador, Jules Cambon, found Roosevelt supine on the sofa, kicking his heels in the air. Cambon invited him to attend the dedication of an American monument to Comte de Rochambeau, whereupon Roosevelt, still kicking, yelled, “All right! Alice and I will go! Alice and I are toughs!”

On another occasion he appeared in George Cortelyou’s antechamber and jumped clean over a chair.
He encouraged his big horse, Bleistein, to similar arts of levitation at the Chevy Chase Club. Photographs of them airborne together soon appeared in the
Washington Times
. Roosevelt was delighted—
“Best pictures I’ve ever had taken!”—and passed out autographed copies to his Cabinet.

“THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL LACK OF INHIBITION …
WAS MUCH DISCUSSED AT WASHINGTON DINNER TABLES.”
Graduation ceremony at United States Naval Academy, 1902
(photo credit 7.1)

Hay, who as Secretary of State stood next in line to succeed Roosevelt, pretended to be annoyed at Bleistein’s easy clearance of the rails. “Nothing ever happens,” he complained.

ROOSEVELT MIGHT HAVE
said the same about the Fifty-seventh Congress. Only one of the requests in his First Annual Message had been enacted: the establishment of
a permanent Census Bureau.
Senators Aldrich and Allison were maddeningly vague about what remained on the calendar. The President despaired of being able to affect them with any sense of social urgency. Friends took the brunt of his impatience. “Get action; do things; be sane,” he snapped at a former Rough Rider. “Don’t fritter away your time.… Be somebody; get action.”

Behind the harsh ejaculations lay anger at his failure to “get action” himself—in particular the Philippines civil-government bill, which he needed to show that the Administration’s colonial policy in the Far East was as enlightened as it had been in the Caribbean. It galled him that Senator Hoar was still calling for Philippine independence, in tones of majestic condemnation:

Hoar was addressing himself to Republican imperialists generally, but the words
you
and
your
sounded uncomfortably specific, as far as Roosevelt was concerned.

At Arlington National Cemetery, on Memorial Day, the President came to the defense of his Philippines policy. “Oh my comrades,” he cried at grizzled ranks of Civil War veterans, “the men in the uniform of the United States who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons.” They were fighting to impose “orderly freedom” upon a fragmented nation, according to rules of “just severity” sanctioned by Abraham Lincoln. On Mindanao as at Gettysburg, “military power is used to secure peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power.”

Roosevelt reminded his audience that legislation to that effect was now before Congress. There was scattered applause. “We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands … how to make good use of their freedom.”

The year’s first hot sun beat down on bald heads and bright medals. A breeze came off the Potomac, stirring hundreds of flags up the hill, and swaying the oaks over Roosevelt’s head. Invisible choirs of seventeen-year cicadas buzzed in counterpoint to his voice. Perhaps Filipinos would govern themselves the next time locusts sang at Arlington. Perhaps not. “When that day will come,” Roosevelt shouted, “it is not in human wisdom to foretell.”

For the time being, America’s global interests mandated a continuing presence in Manila. “The shadow of our destiny …”

He had been working on his speech for weeks, in an attempt to make it the first great oration of his Presidency. But another shadow darkened his face, and he improvised a sudden, disastrous apologia for the recent military scandals:

Had he spat upon the porch of the Custis-Lee Mansion, he could not have more effectively unified Democratic opposition to the Philippines bill. The ugly word
lynchings
, which he had so far avoided using in public, sounded deliberately provocative. “I do not think the South will care much for Mr. Roosevelt after this,” said an outraged Dixie Senator. “He is dead so far as my section is concerned.”

Sure enough, when the bill came up for vote on 3 June, the Senate divided along party lines. The Republican majority prevailed (Senator Hoar alone dissenting), but Roosevelt took no credit for the vote. Neither could he console himself with Northern reaction to his outburst: even the New York newspapers called it “indiscreet,” “unfortunate,” and “in extremely bad taste.”
Bruised and rueful, he hoped for passage of his Cuban reciprocity bill, as a sign that Congress was not totally hostile toward him.

ANOTHER MEASURE, HOWEVER
, had precedence in the legislative logjam.
On Wednesday, 4 June, Senator Morgan called for the reading of House Resolution 3110, “To provide for the construction of a canal connecting the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” Despite January’s Canal Commission turnaround on Panama, Morgan was confident that the Nicaragua route would prevail. His own Committee on Interoceanic Canals had reported in favor of it, seven to four. Parliamentary rules required a reading of Senator Spooner’s half-forgotten amendment to the resolution:

Morgan laid down his copy of the amendment with an
old man’s tremor, and made his final, weary plea for the Nicaragua route.
He had no new technological arguments to present. Instead, he spent half an hour condemning Panama as a cesspool of racial and political squalor. He expressed Alabaman disgust for its “low grade” population. Panamanians were not only unclean, but unstable: they lived—always had lived—in “a chronic state of insurrection and violence” against the authority of Bogotá.

Senator Hanna sat listening, the stillest man in the room. Morgan pointed
out that the Treaty of New Granada (1846) actually obligated the United States to hold Colombia together, in exchange for railroad rights across the Isthmus. A commitment was a commitment.

Storming on, the withered little Senator waxed prophetic. Should Washington show the least inclination to ignore the treaty, “There is no doubt that Panama would eagerly seek protection under the folds of the flag of the United States.” And should an American President be so rash as to extend that flag, “It would poison the minds of the people against us in every Spanish-American republic in the Western Hemisphere.”

As soon as Morgan sat down, Hanna was on his feet. “Mr. President, I desire to give notice that I will address the Senate tomorrow at two o’clock on the pending bill.”

WHEN SENATORS RECONVENED
on 5 June, they were surprised to find the chamber festooned with maps and diagrams. One twenty-foot projection, hanging from the visitors’ gallery, showed red and black dots splotching Central America. The dots represented volcanoes, active and extinct. Those in red were lined up mainly with Nicaragua. Panama was dot-free.

Hanna entered to a whirring of press telephones. Latecomers hurried to their seats as he sorted a mass of books and papers. He began to speak in his customary lackluster style. “Mr. President, the question of transportation is one of the important items of the day.”

The chamber settled down to being informed rather than entertained. Not for Hanna the old-fashioned eloquence of Senator Hoar. He deemed it irrelevant to a new, statistical century. Of his eighty-eight listeners, forty-one were for Nicaragua, thirty-five for Panama, and twelve undecided. Data, not dramatics, would get him the ten further votes he needed. “I was once,” he admitted, “in favor of the Nicaragua Canal.” But after two years of reflection, “I have been forced by stubborn facts and conditions to change my mind.”

For the next one and a half hours, Hanna funneled his “stubborn facts” like wheat into the Senate granary. Every dry grain had its kernel of persuasion. “The Panama route is forty-nine miles long, as against one hundred eighty-three miles of the Nicaragua.… Trade winds blow every day in the year from sixteen to twenty knots across the Nicaragua route.… The annual cost of operating the Nicaragua Canal is one million, three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or, say one million, three hundred—”

“
Oh, do make him sit down,” came a woman’s voice from the gallery. It was a cry of concern more than boredom: Hanna’s arthritis was visibly tormenting him. He said that he would conclude his speech the next day.