Colonel Roosevelt (30 page)

AROUND THIS TIME
Roosevelt became disapprovingly aware of a new, legalistic peace-advocacy group.
It styled itself “The American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes,” and its honorary president was none other than William Howard Taft.

The word
judicial
in the society’s title reflected the influence of Elihu Root, who, as secretary of state in 1908, had been frustrated by the failure of the Second Hague Peace Conference to establish a strong world tribunal. Taft would have been happy to do without strength, in the sense of punitive power, altogether: his preference was for a peace movement that put its faith in arbitration. Optimistic and sentimental, he believed that all human beings were the same at heart. “
If we do not have arbitration,” he told the society in his inaugural address, “we shall have war.”

Roosevelt scoffed at such naïveté. He had stood in the way of too many charging lions to believe for one minute that aggression was not a fact of nature. He detected no common peaceableness among human beings, let alone between nations vying for power. Men were either weak or they were strong. Only the strong could enforce “righteousness”—
a word that the dictionary was vague about, but which to him had concrete meaning.

A case in point presented itself early in March, when revolutionary unrest in Mexico threatened the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz. Forces headed by Francisco Madero, Pascual Orozco, and Pancho Villa prepared to attack Ciudad Juárez. Taft, worrying about the security of American interests, stationed twenty thousand troops on the border. He assured Díaz that this mobilization was for exercise purposes only, and was “not intended as an act hostile to the friendly Mexican government.”

Roosevelt smelled civil war, and a consequent need for
el Coloseo del
Norte
to restore order. The vague urge that had stirred him at the Cheyenne rodeo returned and clarified itself. “
I most earnestly hope,” he wrote the President, “that we will not have to intervene.… But if by any remote chance … there should be a serious war, a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers, then I would wish immediately to apply for permission to raise a division of cavalry, such as the regiment I commanded in Cuba.” He was certain that, given a free hand, he could whip up “as formidable a body of horse riflemen … as has ever been seen.”

“O
PTIMISTIC AND SENTIMENTAL, HE BELIEVED THAT ALL HUMAN BEINGS WERE THE SAME
.”
William Howard Taft as President of the United States
.
(photo credit i6.2)

Anyone less passionate, pressing such a dream upon Taft, would have heard the President’s slow rumble of amusement, his great sedentary body (unimaginable in military uniform!) quivering like blancmange. But Roosevelt was already mentally recruiting ten or twelve thousand rough riders. “
My brigade commanders would be Howze and Boughton of the regular army, and Cecil Lyon of Texas. My nine colonels would include …” As he drummed out name after name, his dream shifted from the prospect that beguiled to a retrospect that filled him with bloodthirsty pride. “I ask, Sir, that [you] remember that in the war with Spain our regiment was raised, armed, equipped, mounted, dismounted, drilled, kept two weeks on transports, and put through two vigorous fights in which it lost almost a quarter of the men engaged, and over one third of the officers, a loss greater than that suffered by any but two of the twenty-four regular regiments in that same army corps; and all this within sixty days.”

Coincidentally, Roosevelt happened at that moment to be heading to El Paso, just across the river from Ciudad Juárez. It was as if fate was speeding him toward the epicenter of the Mexican revolution, via the very country where he hoped to find most of his recruits.

But for the moment, his mission was peaceful. He was on the southwestern leg of a fifteen-state lecture tour. Edith was traveling with him. She wanted to see two of their sons—Archie in Mesa, Arizona, where he was registered at a health-building school, and Ted, establishing himself as a businessman in San Francisco. Cool and equable,
Edith saw no prospect of her husband being ordered back into the saddle for any war.

Neither did Taft. The President politely acknowledged Roosevelt’s eligibility for a command, but informed him that the administration would make no move into Mexico without the consent of Congress.

ROOSEVELT ROLLED ON
through deserts and mountains stippled with spring flowers. It was, he assured Taft, “the last speaking tour I shall ever make.” The campaign of 1910 had enabled him to visit much of the Midwest, Deep South, and Atlantic seaboard—exactly half the forty-six states. Now he wanted to chant a swansong across the borderland and up the Pacific Coast into the Northwest. He spoke and gripped flesh with all his old energy, but as Ray Stannard Baker had noted, he seemed to have lost his political touch. Taft was convulsed to hear that the Colonel’s response, to a Texan complaining that Mexican
insurrectos
had carried off his son, had been an absentminded “Fine, fine, splendid!”

In further evidence that he was no longer front-page news, he found himself, for the first time since 1898, without a press car hitched to his train. Only local correspondents reported his appearances, and few of their stories were
syndicated nationwide. Even such a story as his dedication, in Arizona on 18 March, of Roosevelt Dam—the monumental apotheosis of his reclamation policy as President—rated no higher than page sixteen of
The New York Times
.

He pressed the obligatory button, and three cascades spilled out into the Salt River Valley. The reservoir was still only half full, but it had already submerged the dam’s construction town (also named after him) and collected enough water to irrigate the Phoenix area through two years of drought. Nothing he had accomplished, he said, matched this project for grandeur—except the Panama Canal.

“M
ONUMENTAL APOTHEOSIS OF HIS RECLAMATION POLICY
.”
Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Arizona
.
(photo credit i6.3)

PRIDE IN THE LATTER
achievement overcame him five days later at the University of California at Berkeley. The canal was much on local minds, for San Francisco had just been chosen as host city for a grand “Panama-Pacific” international exposition, once the western and eastern oceans were joined. That
consummation no longer seemed remote: after a record one and a half million tons dug in February, the immense earthwork was more than two-thirds complete.

Speaking in the university’s Greek amphitheater, Roosevelt said, “
The Panama Canal I naturally take an interest in, because I started it.”

He had come to Berkeley to deliver a series of lectures on morality in politics, but today was Charter Day, and the sunshine was sweet. His audience was enormous, spreading out onto the surrounding slopes, pointillistic in places with academic silk.

“If I had acted strictly according to precedent,” he continued, “I should have turned the whole matter over to Congress; in which case, Congress would be ably debating it at this moment, and the canal would be fifty years in the future.”

Roosevelt was referring to the controversy, early in his presidency, over whether to cut an isthmian waterway across Nicaragua or Panama. He began to talk about another controversy, concerning his role in the Panamanian Revolution of 1903. Why he raised this vexed subject, half-forgotten over the years, was a mystery. He could have been rambling, were he not reading from his own script.

The revolution, he joked, had “fortunately” occurred when Congress was in recess, enabling him to act with executive freedom. “Accordingly I took a trip to the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me. But while the debate goes on, the canal does too; and they are welcome to debate me as long as they wish, provided that we can go on with the canal.”

What his script said was not what all note-takers in the amphitheater recorded. A staff stenographer entered the words
I took a trip to the Isthmus
into the official text of Roosevelt’s remarks, for publication in the next issue of the University of California
Chronicle
. Scattered reporters, however, alternately heard, or thought they heard,
I took the Isthmus, I took Panama, I took the Canal Zone
. The last phrase was what
The New York Times
chose to quote under the headline
ROOSEVELT BOASTS OF CANAL
, along with a free transcription of the boast itself. Accurate or not, the transcription became canon:

Actually, lawmakers had long ceased to question Roosevelt’s opportunism in 1903. What “debate” there was these days concerned the canal’s strategic
and commercial potential. Naval and military authorities wanted to fortify it, while American shippers lobbied for preferential tolls, or none, since its construction costs were borne by the United States. But now the syntagma
I took
(what, exactly, had he taken—a trip, a zone, a country, a historic opportunity?) echoed south of the border, and revived Colombia’s anger at having been
cheated of its expectations in 1903.

Philander Chase Knox, his not very supportive attorney general at the time, was now Taft’s secretary of state, and remained unconvinced that Roosevelt had been fair in denying Colombia any compensation for the loss of its precious province. Knox
agreed with Senator Root that the United States was pledged from the start to be “passive” in any domestic revolution in Colombia, albeit “active” in maintaining transit across the Isthmus. He also agreed, to an extent, with the Colonel’s current language, but not for reasons Roosevelt would consider supportive: “The fact is we
practically
took Panama. We did not take it from Colombia, we took it from the Panaman[ian]s, and this is the only sense in which that statement is true.”