Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

There was nothing much he could do right now about the Caribbean theater, except wait for an opportunity to invoke the Monroe Doctrine there, once and for all. President Cleveland had attempted to do so definitively against Britain in 1895—also in a matter regarding Venezuela—but Lord Salisbury’s government had backed down too soon for any American show of force. Roosevelt held that only “power, and the willingness and readiness to use it” would make Germany understand the Monroe Doctrine fully. If he could send such a forceful message, it would “round out” Cleveland’s policy nicely.

Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, loomed clear in his imagination—clearer, perhaps, than if they had actually met. (Roosevelt was too good-natured to be a perceptive judge of people in the flesh.)

These requests, written in English, were passed to Philander Knox, who translated them into language convoluted enough for Congressmen to understand.

All that Knox called for was an information exchange between government and industry, for the common good. Wall Street raised no objections, but corporate representatives congregated in Washington to make sure that the bill did not get stronger in committee. The House of Morgan sent an adroit lobbyist, William C. Beer, to monitor Roosevelt’s dealings with Capitol Hill.

His fifth nominee represented this same philosophy of merit. Objection to Dr. Crum could be based only on race, and “such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”

Appointed by President Harrison and reappointed by McKinley, Mrs. Minnie Cox was by all accounts a worthy citizen. She administered her office efficiently and even charitably, paying overdue box fees herself rather than embarrass white customers short of funds.

Speaking with his usual easy rapidity, he affirmed the President’s goodwill toward all law-abiding Southerners. But the principle at stake in Indianola was that for which the Union Army had fought: an unconscionable minority must not be allowed to subvert the sovereignty of the state.

Sounds like the filibuster!

Senator McLaurin rose to defend the right of a community to rid itself of personae non gratae. Mrs. Cox must submit to the will of her neighbors; that was the way of the South. Why, he himself had known persons who were asked to leave town in twenty-four hours. “I have no doubt the Senator has,” Spooner said. Goaded by chuckles, McLaurin launched into a rambling correlation of race domination and rape. White Southerners would never forsake their own moral standards. “It will take a hundred thousand bayonets to restrain them if the virtue of their women is assaulted.” Spooner affected polite puzzlement. “Mrs. Cox had not made any improper advances to any woman in Indianola, had she?”

This is beautiful!

I am getting to be a somewhat aged man. I pray God that my life may be spared until an intelligent and righteous sentiment, north and south, pervading both the great parties, will lash anybody into obedience to the right of the majority to rule.

There is a homely old adage which runs, Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.

This generated such loud applause as to suggest that the audience took his “adage” as aggressive, rather than cautionary. Actually, Roosevelt was trying to say that soft-spoken (even secret) diplomacy should be the priority of a civilization, as long as hardness—of moral resolve, of military might—lay back of it. Otherwise, inevitably, soft speech would sound like scared speech.

THE “ESSENTIAL DEMOCRACY” of Yellowstone—its lesson that government can both serve and conserve, and that future generations had as much right to natural resources as contemporaries—remained on Roosevelt’s mind as he journeyed through America’s heartland. No longer was he the patrician politician addressing high affairs of state in Eastern cities.

Candle in hand, looking at the back of the father’s swarthy neck, he reflected that “his ancestors and mine had doubtless fought in the Netherlands in the days of Alva and Parma, just about the time this mission was built and before a Dutch or English colonist had set foot on American soil.”

The President was disappointed to find that Muir had no ear for bird music. He was Wordsworthian rather than Keatsian, revering only “rocks and stones and trees.” Garrulous, erudite, and wall-eyed, he talked a pure form of preservation that Roosevelt was not used to hearing. Muir had no patience with the utilitarian “greatest good for the greatest number” policy of Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot, the President’s very good friend. Conservation favored business at the expense of nature, and property rather than beauty. “The ‘greatest number’ is too often found to be number one.”

Town gossip had it that twenty-one months of “strenuous Teddy” had enfeebled him—that he was being kept on only as a venerable symbol, Washington’s last link with the administration of President Lincoln. There was some truth to both rumors, although Hay was still capable of inspired diplomacy. And his relationship with Roosevelt was genuinely affectionate, rooted in a mutual memory of Theodore Senior introducing them nearly thirty-three years before—reedy boy and young

diplomat shaking hands to the roar of the Hudson Valley thunderstorm.

Roosevelt wanted to contribute one hundred dollars. “Would it do any good for me to say a word in behalf of the Jews?” he asked Hay and Root before receiving the delegation. “Or would it do harm?” He knew the answer in advance. They objected even to his sending money, on grounds of diplomatic propriety. “I suppose,” Roosevelt conceded, “it would be very much like the Tsar spreading his horror of our lynching Negroes.”

Boom!

The Delaware affair came as a particular shock to Roosevelt, because the national lynch rate had been dropping since he had taken office. If, now, four thousand hitherto peaceful whites living on Union soil were capable of such barbarity, what price Judge Jones’s manumission of a few peons in the South?

Only Alice, still the family “orphan” at nineteen, yearned for more. Haunted by the ghost of her namesake, hurt by his denial of that ghost, contemptuous of his guilt, she fought the maddening smile as best she could, with her own income, with cigarettes and flashy clothes. She begged him to let her buy a red automobile like Marguerite Cassini’s.

Evidently Russia did, after all, worry about her inflexible world image. Hated by China, threatened by Japan and Japan’s ally Britain, she did not need to add the United States to her list of enemies.

In a severe blow to his popular image, the National Association of Letter Carriers endorsed William Randolph Hearst for President as “a true friend of the plain people.” Union after union berated Roosevelt for the low pay increase awarded the anthracite miners, and for his more recent, precedent-setting enforcement of an open shop in the Government Printing Office.

CANNON’S RUMPLED APPEARANCE, his scraggy white beard, perpetual half-chewed cigar, and folksy profanities were all part of a calculated image to disguise one of the most disciplined forces in government. Close inspection revealed his clothes to be of fine quality (a daily fresh pink in his lapel suggested the private dandy), while the beard was kept short and the cigar, when puffed, gave off mellow evidence of Havana leaf. As for the profanities, they were carefully mild. Cannon was actually more at home quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, which he studied every day along with the Congressional Record. His wire-puppet jerkiness was caused by an unusually fast reflex system, mental and physical. Not even Roosevelt was quicker to react to the occasional signals of intent or flexibility that politicians flash in conversation. And back of the quickness was an instant obstinacy whenever any tenet of orthodox Republicanism was threatened. The thin grin would vanish,

“The country is prosperous every place else except Wall Street, and perhaps the Street is all the better for this experience.”

Hay was pleased that the President wanted to wait “a reasonable time” before deciding what to do next. He warned him against an outright seizure of Panama, which Moore’s memorandum seemed to justify. “The fact that our position, in that case, would be legal and just, might not greatly impress the jack-rabbit mind. I do not believe that we could faire valoir our rights in that way without war—which would, of course, be brief and inexpensive.”

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846. None had been perpetrated with any American help. On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogotá’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.

By the time Roosevelt tired of jotting, he had listed 114 author names. “Of course I have forgotten a great many.” His catalog did not strike him as impressive. “About as interesting,” he concluded, “as Homer’s Catalogue of the Ships.”

Roosevelt enjoyed their company, yet remained temperamentally unable to understand the workings of minds more concerned with reason than power.

“I hope I may never live to see the day when the interests of my country are placed above its honor,” he said, and walked out of the White House.

When the procession clattered and jingled back downtown, the carriage rode much lower on its springs. Inside sat an enormously corpulent man of forty-six, his jowls tanned and his mustache bleached by years of Pacific sun. He smiled with enchanting sweetness, waving a cushioned palm, his pale blue eyes squeezed between chuckling rolls of fat. He was the retiring Governor of the Philippines, and now the successor to Elihu Root as Secretary of War: William Howard (“Big Bill”) Taft.

“Who do you suppose,” Miss Carew pursued, when the heavings subsided, “will be the Republican candidate for President this year?” “PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT!” Taft boomed, puffing out his cheeks. “And who in 1908?” “Oh,” he said, smiling, “that is too far ahead.” “But I had read somewhere that perhaps you would be.” Taft began to talk about golf.

Roosevelt, replying, looked instead to a victorious Japan as the “great new force” in the Far East. Should Korea and China proceed to develop themselves along Japanese lines, “there will result a real shifting of the center of equilibrium as far as the white races are concerned.” He was philosophical about this.

If a nation shows that it knows how to act with decency in industrial and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, then it need fear no interference from the United States. Brutal wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of a civilized society, may finally require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the United States cannot ignore this duty; but it remains true that our interests, and those of our southern neighbors, are in reality identical.

As a youth, Mr. Perdicaris had thought little of his American citizenship, and bartered it away to avoid taxation during the Civil War.

“Thank Heaven,” he said to himself, “it is that flag, and that people—aye, and that President, behind those frigates, thousands of miles away, who have had me dug out from amongst these kabyles! That flag and no other!”

Roosevelt had foreseen the judge’s candidacy for years. He knew Parker from gubernatorial days, and feared him precisely because he was colorless. “The neutral-tinted individual,” he wrote George Otto Trevelyan, “is very apt to win against the man of pronounced views and active life.”

Neither party had anything specific to say about trust control, labor policy, or tariff reform. Both candidates agreed that the Panama Canal would be of vast benefit to mankind. Parker said nothing about lynchings—still occurring at a rate of one every four days—and Roosevelt, having courageously raised the subject in 1903, was content to let it rest.

This new pattern of flags pleased the President more than it did John Hay, who saw nothing but blood and snow for the rest of the winter, and, trampled underfoot, his cherished Open Door policy for China. “War grows more frightful to me as I grow older,” he confessed. Roosevelt, younger and less sentimental, saw the possibility of a favorable balance of power developing in the East. He was prepared to let the Island Empire colonize Korea—but not Manchuria.

“On the fourth of March next I shall have served three and a half years, and this three and a half years constitutes my first term. The wise custom which limits the President to two terms regards the substance and not the form. Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

Hay’s attitude was frustratingly ambivalent: while aware of the ruin Russia’s defeat would visit upon his Open Door policy, he nevertheless worked for Theodore Roosevelt, and the President’s proclamation of neutrality compelled him to be discreet.

Close observers noticed a strange, heavy gold ring on his left third finger. It contained a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair. John Hay had given it to him with a request that he wear it when he was sworn in: “You are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln.”

The effect of the gift was to imbue the President, at least temporarily, with a Lincolnesque devotion to the Constitution as “a document which put human rights above property rights.”

Afterward, Roosevelt joked to Henry Cabot Lodge, “Did you see Bacon turn pale when he heard me swear to uphold the Constitution?” Senator Augustus Bacon of Georgia, a strict constructionist, overheard this remark, as intended. “On the contrary, Mr. President, I never felt so relieved in my life.”

His natural ebullience tended toward explosiveness unless periodically checked. He might joke about having Big Bill around to “sit on the lid,” but politically speaking Root had packed more weight. Taft wanted to love and be loved. Consequently, he was easy to push, easy to hurt.

WHAT NONE OF THE diplomats appreciated, as they

obeyed their instructions, was Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong obsession with balance. He loved the poised spin of the big globe in his office, the rhythm of neither-nor sentences, the give-and-take of boxing, the ebb and flow of political power play.

The Tsarina’s problem with peace was a double loss of face for Russia, if her husband was seen as suing for peace out of weakness. Not only would Japan look like an external victor, but Russia’s peace party, dominated by the formidable Count Sergei Witte, would gain great power within the Empire. And there was always the imponderable of revolutionary discontent, seething among intellectuals and the peasantry.

Although he confessed to Cecil Spring Rice that he loathed the Tsarist form of government, he felt a deep sympathy for ordinary Russians and their culture, so much more congenial to him than that of Nippon. If this culture was to survive Tsu Shima, and not regress into some dark age of the Russian soul, Nicholas II must be coaxed at once into the peace process.

own policy is perfectly simple, though I have not the slightest idea whether I can get my own country to follow it. I wish to see the United States treat the Japanese in a spirit of all possible courtesy, and with generosity and justice.… If we show that we regard the Japanese as an inferior and alien race, and try to treat them as we have treated the Chinese; and if at the same time we fail to keep our navy at the highest point of efficiency and size—then we shall invite disaster.

Taft wanted a statesman’s assurance that Hawaii and the Philippines would not be menaced in future years. Katsura wanted Korea.