Theodore Rex (26 page)

His good cheer may have been helped by an awareness that the Fifty-seventh Congress was dying, while his Administration was becoming stronger and more Rooseveltian.
The appointments of Shaw as Treasury Secretary and Clay Payne as Postmaster General had been political rather than ideological. Long’s retirement (which he had accepted “with regret” but alacrity) gave him the opportunity to hire Representative William Henry Moody of Massachusetts, a forty-eight-year-old expansionist and “
big navy man,” who could be relied on to keep the flag flying over the Philippines.

SPRING CAME TO
the capital in an efflorescence of azaleas, dogwood, and magnolia, affecting even the dyspeptic Adams with a sense of rising sap and “restless maternity.” Newlywed couples strolled the Mall—Washington now outranked Niagara as a sexual shrine—holding hands and asking directions in a rich variety of accents. The air grew daily warmer. Mockingbirds began to sing on the White House grounds. Roosevelt and his wife took to sitting on the South Portico, talking of the things that had linked them since childhood: flowers, poetry, the tales of Uncle Remus. They breathed the scents of the garden, and watched the moon whitening the Washington Monument.

An especial closeness linked them this season, because Edith felt maternal pangs stirring within her. The President boasted to complete strangers that he expected “a most important event in his household,” come October.

ELIHU ROOT RETURNED
from Cuba to find a virulent pamphlet making the rounds, entitled “Secretary Root’s Record: Marked Severities in Philippine
Warfare.” Published by the Anti-Imperialist League, it was more spiteful than accurate, and Roosevelt decided that the time had come for a counteroffensive. He summoned Henry Cabot Lodge and asked him to defend Root on the floor of the Senate.

When Lodge rose to do so on 5 May, every seat in the chamber was taken. He began by admitting “with deep regret” that a number of American soldiers had tortured and killed Filipino guerrillas. No effort would be spared to bring the guilty to judgment. “But why,” he asked rhetorically, “did these things happen?”

He began to read an official catalog of horrors that soon had his audience wincing. Some American prisoners of war had had their eyes slashed, their ears cut off, and their bowels hacked out. Others had been slow-roasted, dismembered with axes, buried alive, and stoned to death. Drowning men had been used for target practice. Medics had been knifed in the back as they tended the wounded. Lodge could not bring himself to report publicly, as he did in private, that some captives had been castrated and gagged with their own testicles. “Perhaps,” he drawled in his dry voice, “the action of the American soldier is not altogether without provocation.”

Over the next few days, a barrage of pro-Administration statements, interviews, and editorials appeared in the Republican press. Reasonable voices were heard suggesting that the Army should be allowed to complete its current investigations, notably that of General Smith, before Elihu Root was held to further account. Groaningly, the big Philippines civil-government bill began to move toward passage. It promised a legislative assembly, an independent judiciary, and an expanding array of civil rights. Senate Republicans closed ranks behind it.

Only George F. Hoar of Massachusetts—stately, white-haired, Ciceronian—joined the Democratic opposition in calling for a declaration of total independence for the Filipinos. His eloquence was such that Roosevelt interrupted a Sunday walk to pluck at his toga. “I sympathize with—I sympathize with you,” the President said, stuttering in his earnestness. “I agree with you entirely, but how can I make any declaration just now? You respect Governor Taft? Don’t you?”

Hoar evaded the question, but, like Senator Hanna, could not help being beguiled by the questioner. “
Everybody that knows President Roosevelt knows his sincerity,” he wrote the veteran anti-imperialist Carl Schurz.

ROOSEVELT’S DESIRE TO
hold on to the Philippines, for strategic and idealistic reasons, did not affect his corresponding urge to let go of Cuba, the independence of which he and the Rough Riders had fought for in 1898. What better time to do so than now—and who more fitting to represent him at the
transition ceremony than his old comrade, the military governor of the island, Brigadier General Leonard Wood?

A few seconds before noon on 20 May 1902, Wood clicked to attention in Havana’s Palacio del Gobernador, before an audience of local dignitaries. “Sirs,” he read, “under the direction of the President of the United States I now transfer to you as the duly elected representatives of the people of Cuba the government and control of the island—”

On the roof of the palace, Lieutenant Frank McCoy prepared for flagstaff duty. The Stars and Stripes hung above him, its folds barely heaving. Below, in the Plaza de Armas, a dense crowd sweated with anticipation. Thousands more Cubans jammed the adjoining streets and every balcony, turret, and tree with a view. Even the harbor swarmed. Boats heavy with spectators jostled at anchor, under a shimmer of bunting.

“
—and I hereby declare the occupation of Cuba by the United States and by the military government of the island to be ended.” Wood saluted President Tomás Estrada Palma and handed over the documents of transfer.

From far across town, the Cayabas cannons boomed. Lieutenant McCoy remained at attention. He had to count forty-five concatenations, one for every state of the Union, before he hauled down a flag that he would have preferred to keep flying. Both he and General Wood felt they were abandoning a “saved” people to perdition.

By any standards, Wood’s two-and-a-half-year governorship had been a spectacular success.
A trained surgeon, he had transformed Cuba from one of the world’s most pestilential countries into one of its healthiest. He had achieved the “miracle” of eliminating
Stegomyia fasciata
. As a result, Cuba was free of yellow fever for the first time in almost two centuries. The miracle had not happened gently. Doors barred against Wood’s sanitation teams had been smashed open,
hidalgos
forced to pick up their own litter, and public defecators horsewhipped at the scene of the crime. Buildings in Havana and Santiago de Cuba had been purged with disinfectant so strong that “even insects came out of the ground to die.” But, thanks to this draconian treatment, Havana was now a more sanitary city than Washington, D.C.

The cannons continued to thud as the crowd grew restless. Cubans had mixed feelings about what was happening. The old “Cuba-Libre” coalition—intellectuals, radicals, and peasants—welcomed the departure of the
yanquis
. Yet what Wood called the island’s “better class”—businessmen, teachers, merchants, plantation owners—regretted the hasty withdrawal of funds and social services. Wood, after all, had built three thousand new schools. He had paved Havana’s dirt streets, and transformed its parks from dangerous jungles into safe gardens. He had catacombed the city with new sewer systems, water mains, and conduits for power and communications. He had even protected the Cuban economy from exploitation by American entrepreneurs.

What protection, the “better class” wanted to know, could President Palma guarantee? Who would teach in the new schools, and out of what textbooks? Who would buy the sugar sacks already crowding every warehouse?

The forty-fifth cannon blast sounded. Lieutenant McCoy stepped to the flagstaff and undid the halyards. Old Glory seemed reluctant to descend. It sank a few feet, then the cords snagged, and it briefly rose.

There were groans and catcalls in the plaza. McCoy pulled till the cloth tumbled about him. To thunderous cheers, General José Miguel Gomez, hero of the war against Spain, appeared on the roof to hoist the colors of
Cuba Libre
. But the cords snagged again, and Gomez asked for a lighter flag. It fluttered aloft amid screams, tears, and ragged blasts of artillery.

“IT FLUTTERED ALOFT AMID SCREAMS, TEARS, AND
RAGGED BLASTS OF ARTILLERY.”
Independent Cuba raises her flag, 20 May 1902
(photo credit 6.1)

As soon as protocol permitted, General Wood bade President Estrada Palma farewell. He drove down to the harbor, escorted by troopers of the Seventh Cavalry, and boarded the USS
Brooklyn
. The white cruiser weighed anchor at four o’clock. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes watched it steam north past the wreck of the
Maine
, upon which some grateful islander had tossed a chain of flowers.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT’S TOTAL
lack of inhibition—some said, of decorum—was much discussed at Washington dinner tables in the spring of 1902.
Whether exercising, working, or pricking the bubbles of solemnity around him, he seemed unconcerned by his growing reputation as “the strangest creature the White House ever held.”

On 28 May, he was seen hanging from a cable over the Potomac, presumably in some effort to toughen his wrists. Owen Wister caught him walking behind John Hay on tiptoe, bowing like an obsequious Oriental. This might or might not have been connected with the fact that Roosevelt was currently studying
jujitsu
.
White House groundsmen, unaware that he was a published ornithologist, were puzzled by his habit of standing under trees, motionless, for long periods of time. Hikers in Rock Creek Park learned to take cover when he galloped by, revolver in hand; he had a habit of “popping” shortsightedly at twigs and stumps with live ammunition.