Theodore Rex (65 page)

Roosevelt took one last daylong row with Edith, down to the salt marsh at the end of Lloyd’s Neck. They ate their lunch there and watched the white sails of coasters passing up and down the Sound. Then he pulled home, exulting in the opposition of the wind and tide. “Next Monday I go back to Washington,” he wrote his sister Corinne on 23 September, “and for the thirteen months following there will be mighty little letup to the strain.”

He was confident of nomination to another term in his own right, but not at all sure of election. “
I suppose few Presidents can form the slightest idea of whether their policies have met with approval or not—certainly I cannot.… As far as I can see these policies have been right, and I hope that time will justify them. If it does not, why, I must abide the fall of the dice, and that is all there is about it.”

THE PRESIDENT’S FIRST
visitor when he returned to his desk on 29 September 1903 was Secretary of the Navy William Henry Moody. With the expected retirement of Elihu Root, the forty-nine-year-old Moody was seen as the new “strong man” of the Administration, remarkable for ambition, breeding, and intelligence. As a young Massachusetts lawyer, Moody had caught the favorable attention of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Later, as a member of the House of Representatives, he had also impressed—and sometimes infuriated—Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Although Moody had not been willing, in those days, to “whoop to war” with Spain, he now felt as grandly as the President about America’s future as a world power. Her principal engine of advancement must be an ever-expanding navy, in whose wake freedom would spread like foam.

Since joining the Cabinet sixteen months before, Moody had been much at Roosevelt’s elbow—on his ill-fated tour of New England, as an adviser during the coal strike and the Venezuelan crisis, a fellow passenger on the presidential train to California. The two men looked like brothers: stocky, hard-chested, ruddy, with big strong heads and ragged mustaches. They shared Harvard manners, blunt speech, and a constant heartiness. But whereas Roosevelt’s warmth was genuine, there was a core of coldness in Moody, a Puritanism none could thaw. He was the only bachelor member of the Cabinet, walking home alone every night with a slight, rheumatic limp.

Emerging from the White House, he made an official statement of policy on the canal situation. He said that Roosevelt would refrain from action “as long as there was the least possible hope” of a change of mind by the Colombian Congress. The President, Moody stressed, “takes the ground that
this is a most important question, and the final decision is a decision for centuries.”

HAVING THUS TRIED
to dispel rumors that he wished to use force against Colombia, Roosevelt braced himself for a showdown with Samuel Gompers and other executives of the American Federation of Labor. He scheduled their visit for an unusually late hour—after dinner—and made a thorough study of the Government Printing Office case, which was sure to be an item on the agenda. His instinct was to give Gompers “
a good jolt.” Labor must be made to understand that it was subject to the same Square Deal as capital, in the Rooseveltian scheme of things.

William A. Miller was the GPO foreman whose dismissal he had overridden as an unjust reprisal for increasing the productivity of the bindery division. Now the bookbinders were trying to get Miller out on morals charges, saying that he kept three wives. Roosevelt, embarrassed, could argue only that the foreman’s morals, or lack thereof, constituted “a new case,” subject to routine review.

This apparent sanction of both the open shop and open marriage was bringing in some of the most hostile mail he had ever received. Unions in more than a dozen states had pledged opposition to his candidacy in 1904. Plainly, he risked losing his most hard-won constituency if he failed to satisfy the AFL delegates. He drafted a “reply” to what he guessed they were going to say, asked Moody, Garfield, and Cortelyou to check it, then had it typed pending release. This document was in his dinner-jacket pocket when Gompers came to the White House at 9:15, accompanied by four aides.

One of them was John Mitchell, shockingly changed from the handsome union executive of one year before. Mitchell’s eyes were hollow from drink, his body had thickened, and a hernia stiffened his gait. For all the fame he had won in the great strike, his miners were still unrecognized and overworked, their 10 percent raise already eroded by inflation.

Roosevelt sized Gompers up as “a sleek article,” and found that he could handle him with ease. The AFL leader was plainly anxious to avoid a confrontation in threatening economic times. Not until toward the end of a general review of labor matters did Gompers drop the name
Miller
, enabling Roosevelt to produce his statement.

“
I thank you and your committee for your courtesy,” the President read aloud, “and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you.” They had to hear him out.

Miller’s habits at home were irrelevant to his freedom, as a federal employee, to take an antiunion stance on principle. Reinstating him was a matter of executive privilege. “And as to this my decision is final.”

The delegation trooped out, looking grim under the lights of the porte cochere. Secretary Loeb distributed copies of Roosevelt’s statement to reporters. Gompers, aware that he had been scooped by a master of press relations, refused any comment. “It would not be respectful,” he said, and strode down the dark driveway.

Editorial opinion the next morning almost unanimously supported the President.
Radical unions remained resentful, but Gompers bowed to the popular mood, and saw to it that anti-Roosevelt resolutions were defeated at the AFL convention. The open shop became official government policy. “It seems to me that this was the greatest act of your administration,” gushed Ray Stannard Baker. Baker did not realize that the President was already working on something that better deserved that superlative.

“
YOU MAY HAVE
noticed that I have not said a word in public about the canal,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna on 5 October. “I shall have to allude to it in my Message.” He had decided to call a special session of Congress in November, ostensibly to secure bicameral approval of the Cuban-reciprocity treaty, but also to have legislative support at hand, in case emergency action was needed in Panama.

There was no doubt now that the province would soon—must—secede from the Colombian federation. Bogotá’s rejection of the canal treaty, and Washington’s apparent acceptance of that rejection, amounted to dual deathblows to the
Istmusenos
. Not only had they lost their long-dreamed waterway, spilling wealth on both sides forever, but their railroad, too, would become redundant, once the Nicaragua Canal opened for business.
With no paved highways, no bridges, little industry, and less commerce, they might just as well revert to jungle living.

The President could not help feeling sympathetic. Here was a little ridge of country, about as wide as southern Vermont, a half-drowned hogback of mostly impenetrable rain forest, walled off from the rest of Colombia by mountains. Geographically, it belonged to Central America. Its only surface communications with the southern continent were by sea or mule train. Letters took fifteen days to get to Bogotá, if they got there at all; about the only reliable deliveries were those carrying tax money out of the Isthmus.

Panama’s political status as a
provincia
of Colombia was equally tenuous. It had spontaneously joined the New Granadian Federation in 1821, and seceded with its disintegration in 1830. Bogotá had reasserted control twelve years later, and from then on Panama had alternated stormily between semi-autonomy and subjugation. Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846. None had been perpetrated with any American help. On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogotá’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.

In doing so, it had argued that it sought only to protect the railroad’s neutral right-of-way, which civil war might compromise. Now an infinitely greater right—that of all trading nations to enjoy the benefits of a Panama Canal—had been denied by the “corruptionists” of just one government. “
This does not mean that we must necessarily go to Nicaragua,” Roosevelt wrote. “I feel we are certainly justified in morals, and therefore justified in law, under the treaty of 1846, in interfering summarily and saying that the canal is to be built and that they must not stop it.”

The
therefore
was characteristic, an example of the Rooseveltian rationality that so often amused Root and Knox.
It did not amuse Hanna. The Senator’s only suggestion was that the Compagnie Nouvelle should be paid to continue its halfhearted excavations in Panama, while Congress thought up some new way of settling with Colombia.

This advice contrasted with the roarings of Albert Shaw in
Review of Reviews
, the nation’s most influential journal of opinion. Bogotá’s “blackmailing adventurers” had insulted the United States by demanding a ten-million-dollar “bribe,” Shaw wrote. Washington should “look with favor” upon separatists in Panama, with a view toward supporting their revolution.

Roosevelt tried to calm the editor down, informing him that “as yet, the people of the United States are not willing to take the ground of building the canal by force.” But the theme of blackmail, like King Charles’s head, could not be kept out of his draft Message to Congress: