Theodore Roosevelt (4 page)

He was no administrator … he had a very easy loving nature … which made him shrink from all that was rough in life.… His intimacy with Henry James and Henry Adams—charming men but exceedingly undesirable companions for any man not of strong nature—and the tone of satirical cynicism which they admired and which he affected in writing them, marked that phase of his character which so impaired his usefulness as a public man.

On Henry James, who visited Henry Adams in Washington at this time, TR was harsh indeed. What he considered the latter's snobbish little tales about Yankees in Europe made him ashamed that James was an American. “Thus it is for the undersized man of letters, who flees his country because he, with his delicate effeminate sensitiveness, finds the conditions of life on this side of the water crude and raw, in other words, because he finds that he cannot play a man's part among men.”

James in his correspondence gave as good as he got. He called TR “a dangerous and ominous jingo” and “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise.”

But at least some of the quality of those evenings of friendship is amusingly reflected in TR's later humorous inviting of himself to dinner at Mrs. (Nanny) Lodge's:

Then we could discuss the Hittite empire, the Pithecanthropus, and Magyar love songs and the exact relations of the Atli of the Volsunga Saga to the Etzel of the Nibelungenlied, and both to Attila—with interludes by Cabot about the rate bill.

Three

In 1895 TR accepted the post of president of New York City's Board of Police Commissioners, which he would hold for two years, and his family was able to move into the large country house that he had built in Oyster Bay for his first wife and which was to be the home he would always love. He had to have a residence in the city as well, for the job was very taxing—at least he soon made it so—and he gained an immediate public reputation for his lone checking on police beats at night, catching unwary officers asleep or in bars and curtly ordering them to their stations.

The job was made more difficult by the fact that there were three other commissioners who by no means always agreed with the policy of the president. But the greatest trouble that he had was caused by his decision to enforce the Sunday Excise Law, which forbade the sale of liquor on the Sabbath. The law had been supported by Tammany, which “protected” the saloons from police interference on Sunday in return for extracted coin. As the poorer elements of the city, notably the German and Irish neighborhoods, relied for a principal amusement on saloon drinking on their one day off, there was a general outcry against TR, rendered more bitter by the general knowledge that the rich could quaff all Sunday in their private clubs. But Roosevelt stuck to his guns, and in the end, despite the unpopularity gained in the city, his tough stand on enforcing a law with whose enactment he had had nothing to do, and with whose aim he had no particular sympathy, won him respect in the state.

In the fall of 1896 TR campaigned hard for William McKinley. The preceding decade had been marked by violent labor disturbances that had put much of the public in an anti-labor mood: the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago, the riots in the Homestead plant of the Carnegie Steel Company, the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, and the Pullman strike. TR inveighed against agitators in his campaign speeches in a manner that must have satisfied the most conservative of his party. He said of the more radical advocates of the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, that they “have not the power to rival the deeds of Marat, Barrère, and Robespierre but that they are strikingly like the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.”

How was he to be rewarded on McKinley's election? Senator Thomas Platt, the so-called easy boss of New York State politics and the undisputed master of the Republican machine there, had had some trouble with Roosevelt over his opposition to favoritism in the police department and opined that “he would probably do less damage to the organization as Assistant Secretary of the Navy than in any other office that could be named.” But the president-elect was concerned with Roosevelt's reputation for hyperactivity. “I hope he has no preconceived plans that he would wish to drive through the moment he got in,” he said. Lodge now intervened successfully, and McKinley was persuaded. Roosevelt became the assistant secretary under John Long, an easygoing gentleman with periods of ill health who was delighted to let his more forceful inferior handle most of the job.

It was the perfect one for TR. He had been a devoted student of the navy ever since his exhaustive work on the War of 1812, and he had hailed Admiral Mahan's
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783,
as the most important military document of the era. He flew to work to increase the number of our warships and make the existing ones more efficient, and his eyes must have gleamed as he saw in our deteriorating relations with Spain over Cuba the coming opportunity to prove our superiority at sea in both oceans by sinking the whole Spanish fleet.

As the crisis sharpened, and in one of Long's extended absences from Washington, TR took upon himself the responsibility of cabling Commodore George Dewey, the commander of the American Asiatic Squadron based in Japan: “Order the squadron … to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of war with Spain your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast.”

TR justified such action in one of his letters saying: “He [Long] has wanted me to act entirely independently while he was away, and to decide all things myself, even where I had written him that I was going to decide them in a way that I doubted whether he would altogether like.” The returning secretary, however, in this case was indignant at his junior's usurpation of authority, but war did come, and TR's instructions facilitated Dewey's dramatic victory in Manila Bay.

TR had already told the president that in the event of war, he would resign his post and join the fighting forces, and no one could dissuade him from the resolution. Others may have doubted the culpability of Spain in the blowing up of the battleship
Maine,
visiting Havana on a peaceful mission, which triggered the American declaration of war; some doubt it even to this day, but no such reservations were harbored in the mind of the assistant secretary of the navy, who welcomed hostilities and wrote: “The
Maine
was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards.”

With the outbreak of war Congress authorized the formation of three regiments of volunteer cavalry to be raised among men in the Rockies and Great Plains who knew how to ride and shoot. The secretary of war offered TR a colonelcy and the command of one of these regiments, but he deemed his military qualifications inadequate. They consisted of three years in the National Guard in which he obtained a captaincy, and “not to speak of,” as he put it, his having acted as “sheriff in the cow country.” Of course, he could ride and shoot, but he thought it better to accept the rank of lieutenant colonel and serve under his friend, Colonel Leonard Wood, an army surgeon, but one who had a combat record and had been awarded the Medal of Honor in the campaign against the Apaches.

TR's new regiment, the First United States Cavalry, soon to be christened by the public as the “Rough Riders,” was made up largely of men from New Mexico, Arizona, and Indian Territory, but it also included a goodly number of “dudes,” socialite friends of TR from New York and Boston, passionate volunteers who had been adept at such sports as polo, fox hunting, and yachting. TR, however, was familiar with both sorts, and he knew how to unite them in a common goal and a common enthusiasm. Their training camp was in San Antonio, Texas.

TR was in primary charge of the field training while Colonel Wood took care of the difficult problems of requisition and supply. Edmund Morris has described the extent of Roosevelt's formidable task:

It would have taxed the powers of a Genghis Khan to place a thousand individualistic riders, accustomed to the freedom of polo, hunting, and the open range, upon a thousand half-broken horses, and then get them to advance, wheel, fan out, and divide in formation. Roosevelt's high-pitched orders led to bucking, biting, striking, and kicking. His first success was rewarded by an anonymous salute of six-shooter fire, causing a stampede into the San Antonio River.

And after all that, when the regiment arrived in Cuba, sailing from Tampa, Florida, for the attack on Santiago, it was to discover that they had no use for their horses, as the campaign was to be on foot! The Rough Riders, as one wag put it, had been converted into “Wood's Weary Walkers.” Roosevelt, however, kept two horses, as he would have to move quickly from one position to another in leading and directing an advance. But his steed on San Juan Hill, if it made him more visible to his men, also made him more visible to the enemy, and he would cajole terrified men to follow him on the famous charge with the rasping cry: “Are you afraid to stand up when I am on horseback?”

None of the rough training in San Antonio was wasted in toughening and disciplining the men, and the regiment that landed in Cuba was forged into a cohesive and warlike unit that would help to win the war in a couple of months.

Those months, however, were not to be easy ones. On their initial march through the jungle toward Santiago they encountered the enemy, drawn up on a ridge, at Las Guasimas. In the scrimmage that followed and lasted for two hours they found it hard to spot their foe, who was using smokeless powder while they had to make do with black powder whose smoke revealed their position. The Rough Riders had sixteen dead and fifty-two wounded, but they routed the enemy in the end and were able to continue their advance. TR distinguished himself by driving back the foremost flanks of the enemy and exposing the troops holding the ridge to the crossfire of the entire line of Rough Riders.

A reporter, Edward Marshall, observing TR in this action, wrote the following:

Perhaps a dozen of Roosevelt's men had passed into the thicket before he did. Then he stepped across the wire himself, and from that instant became the most magnificent soldier I have ever seen. It was as if that barbed wire strand had formed a dividing line in his life, and that when he stepped across it, he left behind in the bridle path all those unadmirable and conspicuous traits which have so often caused him to be justly criticized in civic life and found on the other side of it, in that Cuban thicket, the coolness and calm judgment and towering heroism which made him perhaps the most admired and best loved of all Americans in Cuba.

Edmund Morris is perhaps a bit hard on TR in assessing his reaction to the casualties at Las Guasimas, but as there is considerable evidence of a hard side in Roosevelt's nature I insert the following quotation to serve as a perhaps needed balance to the extreme praise in Marshall's opinion:

Compassion, never one of Theodore Roosevelt's outstanding characteristics, was notably absent from his written accounts of Las Guasimas and its aftermath—unless the perfunctory phrase “poor Capron and Ham Fish” can be counted to mean anything. His only recorded emotion as the Rough Riders buried seven of the dead the next morning, in a common grave darkened with the shadows of circling buzzards, was pride in its all-American variety: “Indian and cowboy, miner, packer and college athlete, the man of unknown ancestry from the lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the crest of the Stuyvesants and Fishes.” When Bucky O'Neill turned to him and asked: “Colonel, isn't it Whitman who says of the vultures that ‘they pluck the eyes of princes and tear the flesh of kings'?” Roosevelt answered coldly that he could not place the quotation.

The next objective of the invading Americans was San Juan Hill, crowned with a blockhouse that dominated the Camino Real leading to Santiago. Capture of the hill would mean possession of this main road over which the infantry and artillery could then proceed to the siege of Santiago. It was believed that the fall of Santiago would end the war, and so it proved.

Fever in the high command led to some last-minute promotions, and the elevation of Wood raised TR, to his great satisfaction—for now he deemed himself fully qualified—to the command of the Rough Riders. But the Rough Riders were not the only troops now waiting impatiently at the bottom of the hill for the order to charge and suffering from the withering and well-aimed fire of the defenders above them. There were also officers superior to TR, and he was frantic with the notion that the glory of leading the charge might be denied him. At last a message was received: “Move forward and support the Regulars in the assault on the hills in front.” This was not a total license, but it was all TR needed: “The instant I received the order I sprang on my horse, and then my ‘crowded hour' began.”

His men followed him up the hill, and victory was achieved. “All men who feel any power in battle,” he wrote, “know what it is like when the wolf rises in his heart.” And Richard Harding Davis, who watched the great charge, said of it: “No man who saw Roosevelt take that ride expected he would finish it alive.”

And America had a new hero, as John Morton Blum has put it: “Between the war with Spain and the war in Europe, the average American boy, discarding the log cabin and the split rail, adopted a new model of successful conduct—a model that his father, however he voted, cheered throatily, and his mother, however she worshipped, endorsed.”

Of course, there was another side, the other side of war. Roosevelt shot a Spaniard only ten yards away; he bowled over “like a jack rabbit.” And after the heights were taken he exulted to an old friend and fellow trooper, Robert Ferguson, “Look at all those damned Spanish dead!” Ferguson wrote to Edith Roosevelt: “No hunting trip so far has ever equalled it in Theodore's eyes. It makes up for the omissions of many past years … T was just reveling in victory and gore.”