The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (123 page)

McKinley intended this to be his political masterstroke, silencing warmongers in both Washington and Madrid with a sudden display of Presidential decisiveness. At first the move seemed bound to succeed. Congress reacted with such shocked surprise—probably assuming the President was in possession of secret evidence of Spain’s hostile intentions—that on 8 March the “Fifty Million Bill” became law without a single dissenting vote.
⁵⁸
McKinley was authorized to spend the money as he saw fit. Spaniards and Cubans boggled at the wealth of a treasury which could produce such a huge appropriation in extra defense funds with no effect upon its credit. It was announced that the bulk of the appropriation would be given to the Navy Department for a crash program of naval expansion. Construction of three 12,500-ton battleships was to begin immediately, supplemented by sixteen destroyers, fourteen torpedo-boats, and four monitors. In addition, the department could assemble a large auxiliary fleet of ships purchased abroad.
⁵⁹

Roosevelt was not as overjoyed as he might have been by the President’s apparent conversion to the doctrine of preparedness. Nine months before, at the Naval War College, he had warned against the futility of any such last-minute attempt at naval expansion. The
Maine
Court of Inquiry was due to publish its formal report any day now; if it corroborated his own suspicion of sabotage, “I believe it will be very hard to hold the country.”
⁶⁰
What use would McKinley’s construction program be then? His only hope of improving the present strength of the Navy lay in the auxiliary-fleet program.

The ink on the Fifty Million Bill was scarcely dry before Roosevelt and Long began to review all available war vessels on the international market. News that Spain was already bargaining for ships inspired even the Secretary to a sense of urgency, although he
continued to hope illogically that the buildup would have some deterrent effect.
⁶¹

Roosevelt was given especial responsibility for purchasing merchant-men suitable for quick conversion into cruisers.
⁶²
Among the many dealers who flocked to his office was one Charles R. Flint, who assessed him as “a young man at the very peak of his truly tremendous physical and mental energy.” The Assistant Secretary was obviously in a tearing hurry. Flint started to tell him about the Brazilian ship
Nictheroy
, but Roosevelt knew all about her:

“We eventually did have a formal contract,” Flint noted, “… dictated by Mr. Roosevelt. It was one of the most concise and at the same time one of the cleverest contracts I have ever seen. He made it a condition that the vessel should be delivered under her own steam at a specific point and within a specific period. In one sentence he thus covered all that might have been set forth in pages and pages of specifications. For the vessel
had
to be in first-class condition to make the time scheduled in the contract! Mr. Roosevelt always had that faculty of looking through details to the result to be obtained.”
⁶³

E
VERY NOW AND AGAIN
President McKinley would indulge in a little banter with his Assistant Attending Surgeon, Leonard Wood. “Have you and Theodore declared war yet?”

“No, Mr. President, but we think you should.”
⁶⁴

McKinley always shook his head when the handsome officer asked to be returned to active duty in the Army. Wood worked off his growing restlessness with more and more violent exercise with Roosevelt. The pair were now inseparable, and Roosevelt began to include Wood in his regular appeals to General Tillinghast. “I have
a man here who rendered most gallant service with the regular Army against the Apaches, whom I should very much like to bring in with me if I could raise a regiment.”
⁶⁵

M
ID
-M
ARCH CAME
and went. Forsythia, magnolia, hyacinths, and tulips sweetened Washington’s warming air.
⁶⁶
Still the Court of Inquiry delayed its
Maine
report. In an atmosphere of mounting political tension, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont prepared to deliver a speech on Cuba, which he had just visited.

Proctor, despite his friendly assistance in behalf of Dewey the previous fall, was by no means as “ardent for the war” as Roosevelt supposed. He was a careful, rather colorless politician, respected on all sides as a former Cabinet officer, a friend of big business, and an intimate of President McKinley. When he rose in the Senate on 17 March, the nation listened.
⁶⁷

Speaking coldly and dispassionately, Proctor confessed that he had gone to Cuba an isolationist, and returned with views inclining toward armed intervention. For the next several hours he cataloged the horrors he had seen, most notably the barbaric indignities of
reconcentrado
camps, where four hundred thousand peasants were living like pigs and dying like flies. After discussing Spain’s promises of “autonomy” with certain eminent Cubans, he was convinced that the authorities would never yield power, and that the
insurrectos
would never cease to fight for it. “To me,” he concluded, “the strongest appeal is not the barbarity practiced by Weyler, nor the loss of the
Maine …
but the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”
⁶⁸

The effect of this toneless speech, after months of fiery oratory for and against war, was so great as to convert large numbers of conservative Senators to the cause of
Cuba Libre
. Even more significantly, Wall Street’s hitherto solid resistance to war now began to crumble, while business groups across the country expressed profound concern. Political observers predicted that if McKinley did
not intervene upon receipt of the
Maine
report—whatever it said
—Cuba Libre
would become the campaign cry of the Democrats in the fall. “And who can doubt,” asked the
Chicago Times-Herald
, “that by that sign … they will sweep the country?”
⁶⁹

Three days later, on 20 March, the President was confidentially informed that the Court of Inquiry would soon make a “unanimous report that the
Maine
was blown up by a submarine mine.”
⁷⁰
Some inkling of this message must have reached Roosevelt, who vented his wrath in a positively Elizabethan outburst to Brooks Adams. “The blood of the Cubans, the blood of women and children who have perished by the hundred thousand in hideous misery, lies at our door; and the blood of the murdered men of the
Maine
calls not for indemnity but for the full measure of atonement which can only come by driving the Spaniard from the New World.”
⁷¹

Events moved rapidly to a climax. On 24 March the Navy ordered squadron commanders to paint their white warships battlegray.
⁷²
On 25 March the American Minister in Madrid was warned that Spain’s presence in Cuba was now considered “unbearable” by the Administration, and that unless an immediate diplomatic settlement was reached “the President … will lay the whole question before Congress.”
⁷³
And on 26 March, Roosevelt publicly confronted Senator Hanna, one of the last holdouts for peace, at a Gridiron Club after-dinner speech which had the whole capital agog. “We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba,” he insisted, and smacked his fist into his palm. Then, wheeling and staring directly at Hanna, he said that “the interests of the business world and of financiers might be paramount in the Senate,” but they were not so with the American people. Anyone who wanted to stand in the way of popular opinion “was welcome to try the experiment.” Hanna’s porcine neck turned purple, and his knuckles tightened on the arms of his chair, as applause filled the room. “Now, Senator,” said his neighbor dryly, “may we please have war?”
⁷⁴

On 28 March the
Maine
report was finally made public. Although the court made no accusation of Spanish or Cuban guilt (there being absolutely no incriminating evidence), it confirmed that the explosion of the ship’s forward magazines had been touched off
by an external device, and absolved the U.S. Navy of any “fault or negligence” in the disaster.
⁷⁵
Within hours a new ominous chant was drowning out calls of
Cuba Libre:

A
LMOST UNNOTICED
, in the general uproar, was a historic memo from Theodore Roosevelt to John D. Long. He wished to draw the Secretary’s attention to the “flying machine” of his friend Professor S. P. Langley, having watched it briefly flutter over the Potomac River.
⁷⁶
“The machine has worked,” Roosevelt wrote. “It seems to me worth while for this Government to try whether it will not work on a large enough scale to be of use in the event of war.” He recommended that a board of four scientifically trained officers be appointed to examine the strategic and economic aspects of producing flying machines “on a large scale.” After some prodding, Secretary Long agreed, and named Charles H. Davis chairman of the board. By the time Davis reported on the “revolutionary” potential of air warfare, the Assistant Secretary had moved on to other things. It would be a long time before Roosevelt was recognized as the earliest official proponent of U.S. Naval Aviation.
⁷⁷