Theodore Rex (63 page)

CANNON’S RUMPLED APPEARANCE
, his scraggy white beard, perpetual half-chewed cigar, and folksy profanities were all part of a calculated image to disguise one of the most disciplined forces in government. Close inspection revealed his clothes to be of fine quality (a daily fresh pink in his lapel suggested the private dandy), while the beard was kept short and the cigar, when puffed, gave off mellow evidence of Havana leaf. As for the profanities, they were carefully mild. Cannon was actually more at home quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, which he studied every day along with the
Congressional Record
. His wire-puppet jerkiness was caused by an unusually fast reflex system, mental and physical. Not even Roosevelt was quicker to react to the occasional signals of intent or flexibility that politicians flash in conversation.
And back of the quickness was an instant obstinacy whenever any tenet of orthodox Republicanism was threatened. The thin grin would vanish, the blue stare freeze, the long bony forefinger tap with suppressed fury. He was, in the President’s not unaffectionate opinion, “
a hard, narrow old Boeotian.”

After a two-hour lunch, officially described as “social,” Cannon left Sagamore Hill smiling, hinting that he might consider some currency reform in a future session. But when he stopped off in New York, en route to his home in Illinois, he showed no inclination to reassure Wall Street further on that score. “
I could not get him to visit a single banker,” Congressman Lucius Littauer wrote Roosevelt. “His constant reiteration was that a time of financial panic was not one in which to discuss the necessity of financial legislation.”

No sooner had Cannon left town on 23 July than a serious collapse in share values began on Wall Street. Banks canceled credit, and syndicates unloaded their reserve investments of high-grade securities. U.S. Steel common dropped by more than 50 percent. Frantic for more funds, the syndicates put up their newer, underwritten offerings, and got almost nothing for them. J. P. Morgan’s United States Shipbuilding Company went bankrupt, as did the hundred-million-dollar Consolidated Lake Superior. Four major brokers went out of business.

Like ripples round a dropped stone, waves of desperation ringed outward, but shallowly, failing to shake the calm depths of general investment. Cannon had gotten—perhaps even brought on—the “rich man’s panic” he wanted. Secretary Shaw wrote to reassure Roosevelt, as did James Clarkson: “The country is prosperous every place else except Wall Street, and perhaps the Street is all the better for this experience.”

So while stockbrokers raged, blaming the Administration’s antitrust policies—“This is a market on which John D. Rockefeller could not borrow on Standard Oil”—Roosevelt kept cool in white flannels. He had discovered a new sport, cricket, and spent many hours with a British professional, learning the difference between topspins, long-hops, and silly mid-ons.

A THOUSAND MILES SOUTH
, the white Democrats of Mississippi prepared to cast their primary votes for Governor and Senator. James K. Vardaman’s vicious rhetoric had somehow turned the contest into one between “Rooseveltism” and racism. On 9 August, the President decided to issue his long-delayed “utterance,” in the form of a public letter to Winfield T. Durbin of Indiana.

“
My dear Governor Durbin,” he wrote, “permit me to thank you as an American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching.” (Durbin had not only dispelled rioters with troops, but proclaimed the right of a black murderer to a fair trial.) “All thoughtful men,” Roosevelt continued, “must
feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims—on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime but on the color of the criminal.”

In a minority of cases—fewer than one in four—lynch victims were guilty of rape, “a crime horrible beyond description.” Yet rape’s very bestiality required that society respond to it in a civilized fashion. Roosevelt was at his most impassioned when he commented on the sadistic quality of lynchings:

Rollo Ogden congratulated him after the letter was published. “One of your happiest inspirations in the public service.” Other liberal-minded editors praised the strength, if not the promptness, of the President’s statement. They did not see how delaying it had improved Mississippi’s political situation, where Vardaman and Hernando Money both won decisively.

Roosevelt concluded that for the time being he had done all he could, rhetorically and practically, to help the American Negro. He would not risk his political future by seeming to endorse, in Vardaman’s phrase, “the black wave of ignorance, superstition, and immorality with which the South is perpetually threatened.”

BY NOW, THE
State Department was seriously concerned over Arthur Beaupré’s silence. The Minister to Colombia was notorious for the frequency and verbosity of his cables. Three wordless weeks had given the impression he had been garroted. On 12 August, however, a thousand dollars’ worth of prose suddenly came over the wire. Beaupré summarized no fewer than nine amendments that had been attached to the Panama Canal Treaty in committee. The Colombian Senate now proposed at least five million dollars more in cash, plus huge kickbacks from the Compagnie Nouvelle and the Panama Railroad. The United States would be granted “tenancy” only in the canal zone, and would have to endure Colombian standards of law enforcement and sanitation. Beaupré begged John Hay, who was back in New Hampshire, “for an emphatic statement … or instructions” before the amendments were adopted by the Colombian Senate.

Hay was enraged.
He had sent at least two sets of instructions over the past month, making plain that the United States would accept no amendments whatever. Evidently, Beaupré had not received them. Colombia’s cable service, Hay noticed, malfunctioned with curious regularity whenever the text of the treaty was undergoing serious scrutiny.

Now there arrived at Sagamore Hill a letter written by a longtime American resident of Bogotá. It described antitreaty sentiment in the capital as increasingly raucous and bitter. Politicians, merchants, planters, and common citizens were complaining that the United States wanted them to make a sacrifice “of untold millions belonging, by right, to their children.” One agitator was quoted as excoriating the “dirty American pigs” already wallowing in Panama mud.

Neither Roosevelt nor Hay had any public comment or prediction. “
I am totally in the dark as to what the outcome in the Isthmus will be,” the President told Senator Morgan.

The first indication that he was losing patience came on Friday, 14 August, when Shelby M. Cullom, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, emerged from a lunchtime conference at Sagamore Hill. Speaking with obvious authority, Cullom told reporters that no matter what happened in Bogotá, the Administration remained committed to a Panama Canal.

Whatever “action” Cullom was referring to—or anticipating—he could not have more clearly signaled Senate support for any executive powers Roosevelt might avail himself of in the near future.

That weekend, an extraordinary naval panoply spread across Long Island Sound. Twenty-two white warships could be seen lying in parallel rows off the entrance to Oyster Bay, a spectacle, in the eyes of one observer, “almost overwhelmingly suggestive of America’s newly-born sea power.” Monday dawned bright and mirror-calm. The sun picked out thousands of white-clad
sailors stationing themselves in geometric shapes on decks and in rigging. Oyster Bay bristled with pleasure boats come to witness the President’s review of the fleet.

Roosevelt came down from Sagamore Hill after breakfast and boarded the USS
Mayflower
. Nine and a half hours later, he returned home, eyes bloodshot from the glare of white metal and water, buffeted by the roar of continuous twenty-one-gun salutes—sixty-three thousand rounds in all. Hanging smoke thickened the dusk as he walked through the woods. An urgent cable from Beaupré awaited him.

ROOSEVELT WAS STILL
digesting this news—“We may have to give a lesson to those jack rabbits”—when a note arrived from John Hay. The Secretary, who had never been a Panama enthusiast, reminded him that he could now revert to “the simple and easy Nicaraguan solution,” rather than press ahead with “the far more difficult and multifurcate scheme” articulated by Senator Cullom.

Before replying, Roosevelt studied the text of a startlingly aggressive memorandum by John Bassett Moore, the reigning American authority on international law. It had been forwarded to him by Francis B. Loomis, who was fast becoming his preferred contact at the State Department.

Professor Moore’s memorandum argued that Panama was the only place in the Americas to build a canal “for the world.” The question of Colombian sovereignty was therefore a global rather than a regional one. All nations had a right to benefit from the opening of this great “gate of intercourse” between East and West. One nation could not delay, or demand an exorbitant fee for, that constructive advance. Moore recalled that in 1846, Colombia—then known as New Granada—had guaranteed the United States free transit across the Isthmus
“upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may hereafter be constructed.”
This “sort of supportive partnership” (Washington promising in return to protect both Colombian integrity and neutrality of the transit zone) must have been contracted in order to bring about, ultimately, a canal. Otherwise, as President Polk had pointed out, the United States had no direct interest in preserving the Colombian federation.

For almost six decades, successive administrations had honored the Treaty of New Granada, saving Colombia many times from outside attack and internal revolt. The Panama Railroad, designed and built by Americans, had operated continuously, to the profit of both countries. “Colombia has again and again claimed,” Moore wrote, “that it was our duty to protect the route … thus construing the treaty more broadly than we have done and less
favorably to her own sovereignty.” This claim in effect “approached the point of making us responsible on the Isthmus.”