Theodore Rex (75 page)

HANNA DID NOT
leave his bed the next morning, Sunday, nor on Monday, the first of February.
The jingling cavalrymen rode down the avenue again, below his windows, escorting Elihu Root to the station. Taft was sworn in. An order went out for an extra large Cabinet chair to be built for the new Secretary.

Day followed upon icy day. It had been the whitest winter in decades; Washington lay locked under a glaze of hard snow. Children skated on the streets. Alice Roosevelt and her friend Marguerite Cassini went bobsledding together and competed for the attentions of Congressman Nicholas Longworth, rich, youngish, and sexily balding.

Something about Alice’s laugh, when she asked if “Nick” had ever proposed,
made Marguerite say, “Yes, he has.” The two girls began to see less of each other.

Roosevelt took a new course of
jujitsu
, lunched with Buffalo Bill, and sent a long tirade against the demoralization of scientific historiography to his latest intellectual “playmate,” Sir George Otto Trevelyan. He heard with relief that Mrs. Cox, the black postmaster of Indianola, Mississippi, had decided not to seek another term. In her place, he quietly appointed a white man.

The newspapers reported that Elihu Root had made a powerful speech to an audience of New York Republicans, warning them that Theodore Roosevelt was “not safe”:

When Root used the adjective
conservative
, conservatives listened. Private word came that Wall Street opposition was at last diminishing. “It has become almost flat for me to express to you my realization of all you have done for me,” the President wrote Root.

Late on the evening of 4 February, George Cortelyou came in with a shock bulletin. Senator Hanna had been diagnosed with typhoid fever. Roosevelt was at the Arlington Hotel well before nine the next morning. Doctors barred entry to the sickroom, but he stayed ten minutes with Mrs. Hanna. The afternoon papers noted his pilgrimage, as did Hanna, who scrawled a trembly note:

The Senator lay comatose for several days, then surprised Mrs. Hanna by reaching for her hand. “Old lady,” he said, “you and I are on the home stretch.”

HALF A WORLD AWAY
, the Far East exploded into war. For months, State Department officials had known that Japan would not long tolerate Russia’s expansionism in Manchuria and her designs on Korea. However, even John Hay was surprised by the ferocity and speed of the first attack, on 8 February. Dispatches confirmed that Admiral Heihachiro Togo had virtually annihilated the Russian Oriental fleet in a single swoop on Port Arthur. On the ninth, reports of further naval attacks followed like claps of thunder. In under twelve hours, Russia’s two biggest battleships were sunk, another seriously damaged, and four cruisers disabled or destroyed. Japan was now the superior power in the Yellow Sea.
Minister Kogoro Takahira could hardly conceal his elation as he delivered the Mikado’s proclamation of war to Hay. On 11 February, Roosevelt announced that the United States would remain neutral.

Count Cassini, the Russian Ambassador, was not consoled by Hay’s expressions of sympathy. He knew that the President personally favored Japan. Marguerite and Alice became even more estranged.

UNCONSCIOUS, MARK HANNA
drifted toward death. He had never paid much attention to the world at large. Panama was merely a crossroads of American commerce, the oceans but highways for American ships.
The cosmopolitan curiosity of a Theodore Roosevelt (currently reading a study of Indo-European ethnicity, in Italian) was beyond him. All he had learned in life was that industry created wealth, and wealth subsidized good government.
He had not done badly in either field; he had made seven million dollars, and a President of the United States.

Hanna’s horizon contracted. He knew nothing of the vigilants in the lobby below, the constantly shrilling telephone booth, the letter from Roosevelt: “
May you soon be with us again, old fellow, as strong in body and as vigorous in your leadership as ever.”

Inert on the pillow, he looked as formidable as ever, porcine features firm, skin tanned from oxygen treatment. But in the small hours of Monday the fifteenth his heart began to fail. Doctors worked all morning to stimulate life. They blew ether up his nose, poured champagne and whiskey and nitroglycerine down his throat, and pumped brandy into his abdomen in eight-ounce shots. Washington’s political activity slowed to a halt. Congressmen quit their desks and joined the crowd in the Arlington lobby. At 3:00
P.M.
, when Roosevelt walked over again from the White House, Hanna’s pulse rate was scarcely perceptible. It fluttered for three and a half more hours, then stopped.

Governors, generals, Cabinet officers, and senators pressed sobbing out of the lobby into the freezing night. Even Nelson Aldrich cried, his face contorted with sorrow.

ON 23 FEBRUARY
, after nine weeks of debate, the Panama Canal Treaty came up for ratification.
By now, most of the world agreed with John Hay that Roosevelt had followed a “perfectly regular course” in recognizing Panama.
The little republic had just constituted herself into a tripartite democracy, and elected Manuel Amador as its first President. Encouraged by these developments, and by a positive legal argument by Elihu Root published in that morning’s newspapers, the Senate voted in favor of the treaty, 66 to 14.

Roosevelt and his successors were given power “in perpetuity” over the Canal Zone, ten miles wide, dividing Panama into two provinces and extending three miles out to sea each way. The power, though not technically absolute, was what “the United States would possess and exercise
if it were the sovereign of the territory …
to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.”

It was dread of such provisions that had caused old Amador to totter in Bunau-Varilla’s arms. The original Hay-Herrán Treaty had called for a ninety-nine-year renewable lease and a much narrower Canal Zone.
But Bunau-Varilla had been so anxious to achieve ratification that Panamanians already felt he had mortgaged their future. Instead of becoming a hero of the people he had helped liberate, he incurred their lasting resentment.

Bunau-Varilla triumphantly resigned as Panamanian Minister, stating that he would accept no salary for his services. It was enough that the Great Idea could now be realized, “
for the honor of Panama and for the glory of France and of the United States.”

Few Americans imagined, as Secretary Shaw prepared to disburse ten million dollars as down payment on the Zone (J. P. Morgan & Co., agents), that Amador could be anything but pleased.

AN ENORMOUS MAP
in the White House enabled Roosevelt to keep pace with the Russo-Japanese War. He pinned it with little flags to show the movement of forces (“Japan is playing our game”), browsed weekly bulletins from the
Office of Naval Intelligence, and wondered if he might not have to mediate a peace settlement one day. At present, the belligerents simply wanted to destroy each other. Japan, flush with naval success, was ready for a land battle. Russia would soon strike back. The world waited.

Cecil Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Embassy in St. Petersburg, wrote to say that Russia was obsessed with expanding eastward as well as westward. “There has been nothing like it since Tamurlane. The whole of Asia and half Europe!” He foresaw problems with Muslims one day, but who could ultimately resist a Bear so big, so blindly driven?

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 new nations come to power … the attitude of we who speak English should be one of ready recognition of the rights of the newcomers, of desire to avoid giving them just offense, and at the same time of preparedness in body and in mind to hold our own if our interests are menaced.”

ON MONDAY, 14 MARCH
, both Wall Street and the White House opened nervously for business. The Supreme Court was expected during the course of the day to announce its decision in
U.S. v. Northern Securities
. Guesses were that the decision would be “
very drastic,” perhaps worse for railroad interests than last year’s lower-court ruling.