Theodore Rex (24 page)

In the meantime, he basked in popular praise.
Previous Presidents had sued the trusts with various success, but none had done so voluntarily, and with such virile force. He had acted, on grounds few lawyers considered valid, at the height of the greatest merger movement in history.

For these reasons, his old friend Owen Wister placed the
Northern Securities
suit “at the top of all Roosevelt’s great and courageous strokes in the domain of domestic statesmanship.” Whether fated for good or ill, it had excited public optimism at the very moment that public pessimism saw no end to the tyranny of wealth. “I think that to make up his mind to take this first step, to declare this war, on the captains of industry, was a stroke of genius; and I more than think—I know—that it marked the turn of a rising tide.”

“
CHAOS! EVERYWHERE!”
Henry Watterson exulted on 13 March 1902. The veteran Democratic pundit was visiting Washington to scout out future opportunities for his party. “For the first time these thirty years,” he reported, “it is the Republicans who are at sea.”

Rival hands were tugging at the wheel of the ship of state. One pair belonged to President Roosevelt, who was responsible for last month’s violent tack to port; the other to Senator Hanna, who wanted to resume the course set by President McKinley. “
Both compass and rudder are still intact,” wrote Watterson, enjoying his metaphor. “But there are two pilots aboard, and rocks ahead.”

On the very day these remarks were published in
The Washington Post
, the
Washington Times
printed a front-page, foot-high photograph of Hanna, captioned
THE MAN OF THE HOUR.
Since the caption was very large, and the copyright date
1901
very small, readers were persuaded that the Senator was his old self again. Massive, placid, benign, he loomed from the page, dwarfing the masthead. Gone—or at least refined by studio lighting—was his former porcine flabbiness. Here was Statesmanship, glowing on the fine brow and in the magnificent eyes; here was Solidity and Sound Money.

Hanna’s presidential stock had been rising on Wall Street since the
Northern Securities
suit. Bankers and industrialists took his candidacy in 1904 for granted. So did Old Guard politicians in Washington.
They estimated that he already had enough delegates to be nominated on the first ballot. His mail was thick with appeals for him to declare, and not all were typed on corporate stationery. “While we admire the presidint Theodore Roosevelt,” one correspondent scrawled, “there are such things as being to strenuous, what we wan is a man of the people.”

Hanna dismissed the campaign talk as “amusing,” but did not discourage it. His backers, led by Senator Nathan B. Scott and other probusiness members of the Republican National Committee, were serious. Laugh as he might—“that smile would grease a wagon,” a henchman said—he had to be impressed when five hundred members of the Society of Ohio rose in his honor, waving starched napkins and hailing him as “the next President of the United States.”

Deep in his soul, Hanna did not want the job. He was sixty-four and ailing. Every ascent of the Capitol steps in the March wind worsened his bursitis and packed more calcium around his knees. Grief for McKinley still tormented him, as did remorse over their occasional quarrels. He was prone to periods of melancholy, lasting weeks at a time; during these fits, he could not recognize his own son in the street. As for ambition, he had only to watch Roosevelt lustily working the crowd at White House receptions to realize that his senatorial seat suited him much better than the Presidency.

That chair, which he filled so amply it seemed a polished, creaking part of him, emanated prestige rather than power. Hanna had been in the Senate only five years, and was thus junior to more than half of his colleagues. Senator Spooner made more brilliant speeches in a week than Hanna had in his whole career. He could never hope to match the parliamentary skills of an Aldrich or an Allison. Henry Cabot Lodge’s orations sounded like Greek to him, and indeed some phrases were.

Yet Hanna’s web of influence stretched in so many directions—to the grass roots of party politics, to labor unions and trade associations and countless loyal offices in the civil service—that the Senate leaders granted him extraordinary privileges. They could hardly slight a man whom four out of five voters (according to a recent poll) believed to be “the greatest living American.”
It was understood that “Uncle Mark” called upon nobody, except the President of the United States. He received callers in the Capitol’s vice-presidential suite. When he rose to speak on one of the issues he had made his own—shipping subsidies, labor relations, immigration reform—the Senate always filled, and he was listened to with a hush that sounded louder than applause.

Such eminence, plus a fat portfolio and a box of honor in Cleveland’s Hanna Theater, were all that he asked from life. But he must soon campaign for re-election. Clearly, presidential rumors would be to his advantage in rallying the Ohio Republican Party; he should not deny them too vehemently. His disclaimer, when it came, was mild: “I am not in any sense a candidate, and trust my friends will discourage any movement looking toward that end.”

The newspapers published this statement in small print, while they headlined a more immediate threat to Roosevelt’s authority.

AFTER THREE MONTHS
, Nelson A. Miles still bore on his cheek the angry red of reprimand. He wanted revenge on the President and the Secretary of War. Thanks to continued access to War Department materials, he thought he now had a lethal weapon: secret reports of atrocities perpetrated by American forces against the
insurrectos
in the Philippines. Here was an issue which could embarrass Roosevelt and Root, rally all anti-imperialists, and make a political hero of himself. Miles took care, however, not to raise the issue in such a way as to risk further charges of insubordination. As a preliminary move, he granted an interview to Henry Watterson.

The Commanding General, Watterson reported, had been refused permission to visit the Philippines, where he wanted to conduct an inquiry into the insurrection, now more than three years old. Watterson did not state what, exactly, Miles supposed the inquiry might reveal. But he implied that dark truths were being suppressed, to Roosevelt’s likely political cost. “As events are lining up in Congress, the paramount issue, the issue of issues, in 1904 will be the Philippines.”

The White House remained silent as amplifications of the story spread nationwide on 17 March. Then a furious denunciation of Miles appeared in the
Boston Herald
. Nobody familiar with Rooseveltian invective could doubt who was the “very highest possible authority” cited:

Not content with this, Roosevelt dictated an open letter to Miles, full of recriminations. “I do not like the clear implication … that brutalities have been committed by our troops in the Philippines.” He admitted that there had been “sporadic cases” of violence against prisoners. But these were inevitable in war, as the general must surely remember from the days when he was tracking Geronimo. “In the Wounded Knee fight the troops under your command killed squaws and children as well as unarmed Indians.”

The letter was deemed too confrontational to send, let alone publish, so he unbosomed himself in a series of memoranda to Elihu Root. He wanted the record to show that Miles had once approached him in an “utterly fatuous” attempt to run against William McKinley. “To my mind his actions can bear only the construction that his desire is purely to gratify his selfish ambition, his vanity, or his spite.”

The memos were classified
Confidential, Private
, and
Personal
. Root filed them, knowing such strictures, in Roosevelt’s parlance, usually meant “Hold for Publication.”
He had hardly done so, indeed, before Congress asked for documents relating to Miles’s insinuations, and the President sanctioned their release.

Root wrote separately to Henry Cabot Lodge, whose Senate Committee on the Philippines was considering a transition from military to civil government in the archipelago. He acknowledged forty-four cases of documented cruelty, of which thirty-nine had already resulted in convictions under the military justice system. Aside from these isolated lapses, “the war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army … with self-restraint, and with humanity, never surpassed, if ever equaled, in any conflict.”

Root’s words masked embarrassment, for he knew that Miles had gotten hold of a secret report that indicated otherwise. It came from the military governor of Tayabas, Major Cornelius Gardener, and described how the
barrios
of that once-peaceful province had been brutalized by American soldiers. Gardener spoke of “deep hatred toward us,” and, more disturbingly, of reciprocal prejudice against the Filipinos: “Almost without exception, soldiers, and also many officers, refer to the natives in their presence as ‘niggers’, and the natives are beginning to understand what ‘nigger’ means.”

So damning was the Gardener Report that Governor William Howard Taft had suppressed it for seven weeks, on the hopeful ground that it might be “biassed.”
Root was guilty of delay himself, having sent his copy back to Manila, by slow sea mail, for “verification.” He had done so, however, for sensibly strategic reasons. The insurrection was in fact almost over, and a final surrender by holdout guerrillas was expected within weeks. The honor of American arms, of Republican foreign policy, demanded a clean, decisive victory.

GENERAL MILES MOVED
adroitly during the next few weeks. He made no attempt to leak the Gardener Report, beyond letting Democrats in Congress know it existed. They began to press for its publication. Meanwhile, he set about sabotaging another aspect of Administration policy. Tall and dignified in his coruscating uniform, he dominated the Senate Committee on Military Affairs hearings on the Army Bill.

This measure, the most profound review of American military organization in more than a century, was the fruit of several years’ hard labor by Elihu Root.
It sought to make line and staff officers interchangeable, to promote by merit rather than seniority, and to create a general staff answerable to the Secretary of War. More to the point, it also sought to abolish the system whereby Root administered, and Miles commanded, the Army on a coequal basis.
Root wanted a vertical structure that sent power down from himself to a Chief of Staff. The office of Commanding General would therefore be abolished. Root counted on the approval of the American people, in view of their “ingrained tendency … to insist upon civilian control of the military arm.”