Theodore Rex (28 page)

Polls in smoke-filled rooms that night indicated that the majority of senators favoring Nicaragua had already diminished. Cromwell and Philippe
Bunau-Varilla lobbied like men possessed, while Senator Morgan’s lieutenants tried to fight attrition with scandal. They whispered that French shareholders of the Compagnie Nouvelle would not see a dime of the forty-million-dollar transfer fee, and that President Roosevelt, Secretary Hay, and Senator Spooner were the likely beneficiaries, along with Hanna, Cromwell, and Bunau-Varilla. Even “Princess Alice” was rumored to be in on the deal.

HANNA RESUMED HIS
speech as soon as the Senate reopened for business on Friday, 6 June. Pointing to the splotched volcanic map, he said he wished to discuss “the burning question” of igneous activity in the Caribbean region. Just the previous month, Mont Pelée in Martinique had erupted, killing forty thousand people. Panama was “exempt” from this kind of danger. Not so Nicaragua, which lay along an almost continuously volcanic tract extending northwest from Costa Rica. Senator Morgan’s canal would cut straight across that tract—“probably the most violently eruptive of any in the Western Hemisphere.” Mount Momotombo, a hundred miles from the proposed route, had blown up only two months prior to Pelée. Had it done so with equal force, it would have precipitated “enough cinders and lava … to fill up the basin of Lake Managua.”

For another hour, Hanna cited alarming seismological, social, and navigational evidence against Nicaragua. Even as he spoke, Mont Pelée was erupting again. Reports of his speech in the evening newspapers jostled news of sky-darkening clouds and six-foot fluctuations of sea level.

AS LONG AS THE
canal debate lasted, the President kept his own counsel. Two senators visited him with learned arguments for Nicaragua, and he listened to them solemnly, scribbling on a notepad. Had they been able to look over his shoulder, they would have seen that he was merely doodling the names of his children, over and over again.

MEANWHILE, HIS CUBAN
reciprocity bill was being lobbied to death. The House of Representatives had authorized him to grant a 20 percent tariff reduction on all Cuban exports to the United States—with the exception of refined sugar, which could come in free. But this last, seemingly generous provision guaranteed opposition in the upper chamber. Senators beholden to the American refining industry—mainly Easterners, mainly Democrats—objected to foreign favoritism, while Senators from states that produced beet sugar—mainly Westerners, mainly Republicans—condemned the bill as antiprotectionist. “I wish,” Roosevelt sighed, “that Cuba grew steel and glass.”

Common sense suggested that he leave trade policy to such experts as Nelson Aldrich. But his always active conscience (“In this particular case of reciprocity a moral question is concerned”) plagued him. And morality aside, he believed that commercial sweets would reconcile Cubans to the sour taste of a United States garrison at Guantánamo.

On 13 June, Roosevelt took the bold step of sending Congress a “Special Message on Cuba.” He did so knowing that the Message could well fail, and advertise to the world that he had no power of presidential persuasion. It might even lead to a general tariff battle, a split party, and defeat for himself in 1904. His hope against hope was that the warring senators would be shamed into a compromise. “
Cuba is a young republic,” he wrote, “still weak, who owes to us her birth, whose future, whose very life, must depend on our attitude toward her.”

Some senators detected a note of self-identification in this appeal, and guffawed as it was read aloud. Meanwhile, sugar-heavy freighters wallowed in the island’s ports, symbols of prosperity held in check.

ANOTHER CAUSE DEAR
to Roosevelt’s heart—reclamation of the arid West—was preoccupying the House that same day. He did not want to have a second Special Message laughed at, so he wrote a passionate letter to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee:

Representative Joseph (“Not One Cent for Scenery”) Cannon was Congress’s leading anticonservationist. In Illinois, where he hailed from, well-watered corn thrust tall out of the nation’s richest soil. But the President spoke for a harsher, more remote West, where recent settlers struggled to fertilize
the desert. He had tasted enough alkali dust as a young rancher in the Badlands to understand the desperation of stockmen unable to breed, farmers unable to reap or sow.

For a quarter of a century, environmental pioneers had urged the construction of vast irrigation systems to collect and distribute Western floodwaters. John Wesley Powell and WJ McGee noted that the arid lands thus reclaimed—one third of the total area of the United States—could be sold to farmers and ranchers, and the profits recycled for further reclamation. But Congress had responded with unenforceable public land laws, allowing a “water monopoly” to grow up in the West. This combination levied extortionate rates where supply was meager, and dried out established communities in order to irrigate speculative tracts elsewhere.

Roosevelt expressed “keen personal pride” in the reclamation measure. It seemed to him properly to combine federal responsibility with private enterprise, in that water rights would be sold, deposit-free and interest-free, to small farmers, who would eventually repay the government out of the profits from their irrigated property. Although it was offered in the appropriate name of Francis G. Newlands (D., Nevada), the President felt that it had grown out of the irrigation proposals of his First Annual Message, and he protested vehemently when Newlands claimed authorship.

Cannon ignored Roosevelt’s letter, but a majority of the House, responding to strong White House pressure, voted in favor of the bill. The Senate followed suit. On 17 June 1902, Roosevelt delightedly signed the National Reclamation Act into law. It funded a six-hundred-man civil-engineering force within the National Geological Survey, and conjured up, like some glittering grail of future prosperity, a vision of dams and aqueducts bejeweling the country’s unwatered tracts. “
They must be built for permanence and safety,” the President urged, “for they are to last and spread prosperity for centuries.”

Reclamationists spoke almost drunkenly of supporting a new population of one hundred million, and creating such opportunities for American producers as to make the current economy seem like penury. Mark Hanna praised the act as Theodore Roosevelt’s first major legislative achievement, and said that its importance would grow with the years. “People have not paid much attention to this business.… It’s a damn big thing.”

DURING THE NEXT
two days, the Senator, grumbling “he was two thirds crazy, he was so tired,” launched a final blitz for Panama votes. Bunau-Varilla conducted a simultaneous propaganda campaign, sending every Senator a Nicaraguan postage stamp showing the live cone of Momotombo. “An official witness,” he typed beneath, “of the volcanic activity of the Isthmus of
Nicaragua.” Cromwell lobbied in his own secretive fashion. One by one, the ten votes Hanna needed slipped from the Nicaragua checklist. When it was clear that Panama would prevail, the slippage became an avalanche. The final tally, on 19 June, was 67 to 6 in favor of a Panama canal.

By a margin of 44 to 34, the Senate also approved the Spooner Amendment. Theodore Roosevelt, nine months President of the United States, was handed power to join the world’s largest oceans. Forty million dollars—the largest sum in real-estate history, dwarfing the Louisiana Purchase—was placed at his disposal, plus $130 million in construction funds. Exultant, he forecast that the Panama Canal would be “the great bit of work of my administration, and from the material and constructive standpoint one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see.”