Theodore Rex (121 page)

ON 7 FEBRUARY
, the Great White Fleet, dispatched toward unknown possibilities by an allegedly deranged (William James preferred the term
dynamogenic)
Commander-in-Chief, entered the Strait of Magellan. Since leaving Hampton Roads, it had become a diplomatic phenomenon, attracting worldwide press attention and spreading as much goodwill as foam along the Brazilian and Argentine coastlines. Even Punta Arenas, Chile, a windswept wood-and-iron outpost near the extreme tip of the continent, welcomed Admiral Evans and his sailors with elaborate hospitality and specially hiked prices.

For twenty-two hours, the Chilean destroyer
Chacabuco
led Evans’s flagship
Connecticut
through the misty Strait—a surreal
Doppelgänger
of the waterway being carved across Panama—while fifteen other coal-heavy ships wallowed behind at four-hundred-yard intervals. No more than three men-of-war
had ever performed this maneuver in convoy, and the going was hazardous even for single units. But the fleet steamed steadily through. It veered off course only once, when a sudden turbulence proclaimed the conflicting levels of two oceans. By the time the last vessel emerged into open sea, the first was already steaming toward Valparaiso, and the Pacific theater had received its largest-ever infusion of battleships.

ROOSEVELT HAD
still not announced his intention to send the fleet around the world—its official destination remained San Francisco. But Japan was aware that another war scare in the United States could quickly alter the fleet’s course; Admiral Dewey’s “ninety-day lag” no longer applied. This knowledge, combined with mounting diplomatic pressure from Elihu Root, now forced the conclusion of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” on which Tokyo had been politely stalling for nearly a year.

Throughout 1907, the influx of Japanese coolies into the United States had continued to pour unabated, making a mockery of the new immigration law. Root had tired of pointing out that the flow had to be restricted at its source, as per Tokyo’s verbal promise. Instead, he had taken advantage of the publicity attending the dispatch of the Great White Fleet to warn Ambassador Aoki that unless there was “a very speedy change in the course of immigration,” the Sixtieth Congress was certain to pass an exclusion act, greatly to the detriment of Japanese-American relations.

By 29 February, as the fleet headed north from Callao, Peru, the Gentlemen’s Agreement was finally implemented. Coolies were no longer permitted to immigrate to Hawaii, passport restrictions were tightened, and illegal agencies were being prosecuted by Japanese authorities. And at last, the monthly “Yellow Peril” index compiled by the State Department began to decline.

Roosevelt celebrated by confirming that the Great White Fleet, now en route to the Golden Gate, would proceed around the world after a couple of months’ rest and refitting. Its itinerary would include Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan (about two weeks before the presidential election), China, Ceylon, the Suez Canal, Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Gibraltar. Its due date for return to Hampton Roads was 22 February 1909, ten days before he was to leave the White House.

PULVERIZING AS THE
President’s Special Message had been to the boomlet for Governor Hughes, and however revealing of Roosevelt’s own changing ideology, it merely increased the opposition of congressional conservatives against him. Joseph Cannon in the House and Nelson Aldrich in the Senate vied with each other to deny him the reforms he had begged with such eloquence. However, a small band of progressive Republicans and a larger one
of moderate Democrats (who had applauded repeatedly during the reading of the Message) helped him win at least three new laws: a re-enacted Federal Employers’ Liability Act, the Workman’s Compensation Act for federal employees, and the Child Labor Act for the District of Columbia.

He also won, on 10 March, a nonlegislative victory with fruits that tasted distinctly sour. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs concluded its thirteen-month investigation of the Brownsville affair and found, by nine votes to four, that Roosevelt had justifiably dismissed without honor the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry. Three thousand pages of testimony, and the congruent opinions of virtually all Army authorities from the Commander-in-Chief on down, were enough to convince five Democrats and four Republicans that the men were guilty.
The dissenting members were all Republican, but they were themselves divided, in a way that paradoxically compromised the majority vote. Two found the testimony to be contradictory and untrustworthy, reflecting irreconcilable antipathies between soldiers and townspeople. Senators Foraker and Morgan G. Bulkeley insisted that “the weight of the testimony” showed the soldiers to be innocent.

So did the weight of the only hard evidence in the case: thirty-three spent Army-issue cartridges found at the scene of the crime. Ballistics experts had testified that, while the shells had definitely been fired by Springfield rifles belonging to the Twenty-fifth, the actual firing had occurred during target practice at Fort Niobrara in Nebraska, long before the battalion was ordered to Texas. The mystery of the translocation of the shells to Brownsville was simply explained. Army budget officers frowned on waste of rechargeable ordnance, so 1,500 shells had been recovered from the range, sent south, and stored in an open box on the porch of a barracks hut at Fort Brown, available for any soldier—or passing civilian—to help himself.

Such technical information, however, could not explain away the “wooden, stolid look” that Inspector General Garlington had seen on the faces he interviewed. It was a look so evocative of Negro complicity that the War Department had briskly dispensed with the formality of allowing every soldier his day in court.

Roosevelt’s other major legislative request, unsatisfied through the first weeks of spring, was for four new battleships. The House followed the recommendation of its Committee on Naval Affairs and appropriated funds for only two. Unappeased by an extra appropriation to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt put his hopes in the Senate. Debate there began on 24 April, none too favorably. Senators seemed more inclined to question the legality of his battle-fleet cruise order than to double the battleship quota of the House bill. But they also had to take into account his still phenomenal popularity, and the hold the Great White Fleet had taken of the public imagination. Three days later, Roosevelt won a modified victory: two battleships plus a guarantee that two more would be funded before he left office.

Sounding rather like a small boy, he claimed not to have expected four all at once, but had asked for them only because he wanted to be sure of getting two.

ROOSEVELT’S ENDORSEMENT
of the recommendations of the Inland Waterways Commission was not unallied with his own profound enjoyment of anything rocky, slimy, hardscrabble, and dangerous. In Washington, he had become a confirmed river rat, frequently cruising down the Potomac or up the Anacostia in the
Sylph
, and hiking, wading, and climbing for miles along the wild banks of Rock Creek. Invitations to accompany him on what he was pleased to call “walks” usually bore the cautionary superscript,
Put on your worst clothes
. This gave notice that, sooner or later, he and his companions would end up in water, irrespective of whether it was freezing, mud-choked, or dangerously turbulent.

“
But, Mr. President,” Jules Jusserand was reduced to saying, “I have no worst clothes left.”

Roosevelt was so much at home in the creek that he often walked straight across it, absorbed in conversation, not seeming to notice the water around his hips, even when he was jostling ice floes. He was impervious to cold, and when necessary would start swimming, while his companions succumbed to cramps. “To succeed in such cases,” one of his former Rough Riders advised Jusserand, “you must have a good layer of fat under your skin.”

The little Ambassador was not well padded, but he was as tough as an Alpine
montagnard
and had become Roosevelt’s favorite exercise partner. He even accompanied the President on an excursion across a Potomac water pipe, so high and slimy that they were forced eventually to admit defeat. Roosevelt, who wanted to follow the pipe to its destination on a midriver island, hailed a passing rowboat and asked to be ferried there. As the boat pushed out into the current, Roosevelt put his arm around Jusserand’s neck, struck an attitude, and intoned: “
Washington and Rochambeau crossing the Delaware.”

Shortly after the battleship vote, in warm May weather, the President led Jusserand, Assistant Secretary of State Robert Bacon, and three other hikers on a strenuous, cliff-hanging expedition along the Virginia side of the Potomac, near Chain Bridge. When all were pouring with perspiration, Roosevelt suggested a swim and stripped naked. His party followed suit, but Jusserand absentmindedly kept on his black kid climbing gloves. “Eh, Mr. Ambassador,” Roosevelt called from the water’s edge, “have you not forgotten something?”

Jusserand shouted back, “
We might meet ladies.”

The river was still cold, and when the swimmers returned to shore they were obliged to step wet into their clothes, and pull their socks on over mud-plastered
feet. A further rock-climb was prescribed to restore body heat. Jusserand admired the President’s bearlike ascent of a cliff so precipitous that it defeated everyone else except the athletic Bacon. When, finally, they trooped back to their waiting carriages, the Assistant Secretary’s trouser leg was slit from hip to ankle.

“PUT ON YOUR WORST CLOTHES.”
Roosevelt (invisible) leads a Rock Creek Park expedition
(photo credit 30.1)