Theodore Roosevelt (5 page)

Now came the big job of getting the boys home before half of them died of malaria. General Shafter called a conference of all brigade and division commanders to discuss the inexcusable delays of the government in arranging fast transportation for the victorious troops. A communication had to be addressed to the War Department, but the regulars naturally feared the injury to their careers involved in angering Secretary Russell Alger or President McKinley himself. It was Roosevelt, of course, who took the matter in hand and drafted a round-robin letter to be signed by all present and sent to the Associated Press:

We, the undersigned officers … are of the unanimous opinion that this Army should at once be taken out of the Island of Cuba and sent to some point on the Northern seacoast of the United States … that the army is disabled by malarial fever to the extent that its efficiency is destroyed, and that it is in a condition to be practically entirely destroyed by an epidemic of yellow fever which is sure to come in the near future.… This army must be moved at once or perish. As the army can be safely moved now, the persons responsible for preventing such a move will be responsible for the unnecessary loss of many thousands of lives.

The secretary of war was outraged; so was the president; there was talk of a court-martial for Roosevelt, but within three days Shafter's army was ordered to Montauk, Long Island. No one really cared to take on the hero of San Juan Hill.

But of course there had to be jokes. Finley Peter Dunne, “Mr. Dooley,” spoofing Roosevelt's published account of the war in a piece entitled “Alone in Cuba,” rephrased the boast of the author, now a candidate for the governorship of New York, that he had killed a Spaniard with his pistol: “I fired at th' man nearest to me an' I knew by th'expression iv his face that th' trusty bullet wint home. It passed through his frame, he fell, an' wan little home in far-off Catalonia was made happy be th' thought that their riprisintitive had been kilt be th' future governor of New York.” One is glad to learn that TR was amused by this and actually told Dunne so.

Roosevelt maintained a constant correspondence with Lodge, even from the front lines, and used the senator to bring his complaints on military incompetence to the attention of the government. He was not temperate in his language. “Not since the campaign of Crassus against the Parthians has there been so criminally incompetent a general as Shafter, and not since the expedition against Walcheron has there been grosser mismanagement than in this.”

He urged Lodge to see that he be awarded the Medal of Honor. “I don't ask this as a favor; I ask it as a right.… If I didn't earn it, then no commissioned officer ever can earn it.” But his complaints had been too harsh and too public; the army brass could never forgive, and he never received the coveted medal. Regular service officers have long memories, and the refusal of President Wilson, two decades later, to allow him to form a regiment to take to France, strongly supported by the army chiefs, may have contained an element of this old resentment.

On January 16, 2001, Congress did award the medal posthumously to TR.

Four

TR's wartime popularity almost required the New York Republicans to run him as candidate for the governorship, as they had no other candidate so likely to win. But Thomas Platt, the “easy boss,” would rather have lost the election than gain a chief executive who would loosen his iron grip on the party. Holding forth in his usual corner of the lobby of a Manhattan hotel, he met with Roosevelt to hash out the terms under which he and the ebullient colonel might agree to operate the state. The two men could not have been more different: Platt, dry, concentrated, essentially humorless, the quintessential machine politician, by no means indifferent to the welfare of his constituents but resolutely determined that he and his selected men, and only they, should be in well-compensated charge of such welfare; and Roosevelt, the all-curious, the man of so many interests that he was called a polygon. With his gift for portraiture TR described his partner-opponent: “He lived in hotels and had few extravagant tastes. Indeed, I could not find that he had any tastes at all, except on rare occasions for a dry theology wholly divorced from moral implications.” One of Roosevelt's most painful concessions to this tasteless hotel resident was withdrawing his support for his friend Joseph H. Choate, who was running against Platt for a Senate seat.

Platt and he came at last to an understanding under which, in return for the nomination, TR would consult with him on all political appointments, and Roosevelt was duly elected. Reformers were dismayed by such dealings, which they could not believe were not made at the cost of essential decencies, but TR perfectly understood that a failure to deal with the machine would mean a failure to make any social progress at all, and he adopted the course of compromise quite openly. He never made any secret of his regular breakfasts with Platt during his two-year term, and he described in his autobiography how, when it was necessary on important issues to go against Platt, it behooved him to conduct himself:

My aim was to make a fight only when I could so manage it that there could be no question in the minds of honest men that my prime purpose was not to attack Mr. Platt or anyone else, except as a necessary incident to securing clean and efficient government.

Later, as president, TR would speak of his shuddering “when I read Senator Platt's testimony today in which he said that he recognized it as a moral obligation to take care of the interests of the corporations that contributed to the campaigns.” And when the aging Platt was challenged for leadership of the New York political machine by the equally unscrupulous Governor Benjamin Odell, TR likened the former to old Akela, the leader of the wolf pack in Kipling's
Jungle Book,
who “has lost his teeth and his spring” but must still be harried to death in battle by his would-be successor. “I get fairly heartsick in the effort to avoid quarreling with them,” TR wrote, “and yet do my duty as a clean and decent man.”

What threatened to be a major embarrassment in TR's campaign for the governorship was the fact that he had given his residence on certain tax forms as the District of Columbia, but Elihu Root cleared this up, and all was well. TR's short governorship was characterized by his improvement of the organization of the canal system, the state's corrective institutions, and the factory inspector's office, but his real victory lay in inducing the legislature to pass an act taxing the franchises of public utilities. This was a significant step in what came to be his lifelong policy of restraining the too ample power of the great business corporations and resulted in a fight with Platt so vigorous that the easy boss, despite a certain curious respect and even fondness for his troublesome opponent, decided that the best way to get rid of him was once again to send him down to Washington. That Roosevelt was entirely aware of this is made clear by this letter to Lodge:

I have found out one reason why Senator Platt wants me nominated for the Vice-Presidency. He is, I am convinced, genuinely friendly, and indeed I think I may say, really fond of me, and is personally satisfied with the way I have conducted politics; but the big money men with whom he is in close touch and whose campaign contributions have certainly been no inconsiderable factor in his strength, have been pressing him very strongly to get me put in the Vice-Presidency so as to get me out of the state.

He regarded the proposed office as honorable but as one in which there was not much to do; he would be “planted” for four years. He would have much preferred the governor-generalship of the Philippines. But Lodge, who saw himself, and with every justification, as the guardian of his friend's career, insisted that the vice presidency was the right next step, and Roosevelt was nominated, elected, and rendered twenty-sixth president of the United States by the bullet of Leon Czolgosz on September 14, 1901.

William McKinley, in his first term and in his brief interrupted second, had been a conservative president, the choice and favorite of large industrial and financial interests, and his successor by no means shared this esteem. Indeed, the right wing of the Republicans had conspired to get rid of him, and now, as Mark Hanna wailed: “Look what we've got! That damned cowboy is president of the United States!” Certainly, they saw Roosevelt as a threat, but it is not clear that they saw him as a progressive, or what they would have termed a socialist, threat. It is more likely that they saw him, as in Hanna's eyes, as an irresponsible and unpredictable cowboy with a wild record of persecuting businesses for minor infractions of the law and a distressing tendency to call for taxes on corporations.

Just when in his career, then, did TR gain his reputation as a social reformer? None of his three closest friends and advisers, Lodge, Root, or William Howard Taft, were noted liberals.

Elihu Root, who until their breakup in 1912 was the most respected of the three by TR, though Lodge was always the most intimate, was a witty sardonic man who was never afraid to puncture any man's bubble, including Roosevelt's, with a lethally aimed barb. A brilliant Wall Street corporation lawyer and a stalwart of the Republican Party, he had first come to TR's close attention when he was retained to straighten out the near scandal aroused in the gubernatorial campaign by the discovery that Roosevelt had given his residence as the District of Columbia in a tax return. Edmund Morris has described Root's method of work so well that I quote it in full:

Root set to work on Roosevelt's affidavits and correspondence. Analysis of the latter showed that the candidate was more sinned against than sinning; he had received foolish advice from family lawyers and accountants, despite repeated pleas to them to protect his voting rights. But the cold evidence was embarrassing. Roosevelt had definitely declared himself the resident of another state during the required period of eligibility. Root decided to prepare a brief on varying interpretations of the word
resident,
mixing many “dry details” with sympathetic extracts from Roosevelt's letters, plus a lot of patriotic “ballyhoo” calculated both to obfuscate and inspire.

It is not hard to imagine what TR may have suffered from Root's sarcastic remarks as he explained this brief to his client, but he was always to take Root's cracks with commendable equanimity, realizing that his candor was an integral part of his sagacity. And Root's devotion to and admiration of Roosevelt was strong and constant. Even Edith, who did not like Root because he had once expressed satisfaction that her husband had damaged an arm on one of his overly athletic excursions around Washington, agreed that he was a valuable adviser, in that nothing deterred him from speaking his mind.

Root, as the counsel for giant business interests, was hardly a liberal cabinet member in either of the offices he held, War and State, but he was a sane and solid administrator, later an able senator, and he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Nor was Lodge anything like a radical, though his respect for an earlier and more ethical and gentlemanly generation of Boston merchants, including his own forebears, had engendered a certain lofty scorn for the cruder new rich of his day. And Taft, who seemed to have proved himself a staunch supporter of Roosevelt's Square Deal, was to veer to the right when he found himself at the helm.

Roosevelt, prior to his presidency, had shown no extraordinary concern either for labor or for the disadvantaged. He cared about them as all decent persons cared, but they were not among his primary concerns. A deeply moral man, he was first and foremost taken up in a lifelong and enthusiastic fight against lawbreakers; he was a policeman at heart, which was obviously why he had done so well as a commissioner in New York. And above all, he detested bullies: the foulmouthed gunmen he had seen terrifying customers in western bars, the backroom machine politicians who milked the urban poor, the Pennsylvania mining tycoons who exploited their ignorant immigrant laborers. Like a Byronic hero he wanted not so much to raise the poor as to lower the proud.

But such can be a fertile soil for the growth of a wider compassion, and this is what happened to him in the Washington years.

Five

“It's a dreadful thing to come into the presidency this way,” TR wrote, “but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it.” And morbid was something he never was. But soon, despite the care that the Roosevelts took to do nothing that would jar the national mourning, an air of busy exuberance began to emanate from the White House and steal across the country. Lincoln Steffens offered this glimpse of the forty-two-year-old president:

His offices were crowded with people, mostly reformers, all day long, and the President did his work among them with little privacy and much rejoicing. He strode triumphant around among us, talking and shaking hands, dictating and signing letters and laughing. Washington, and the whole country, was in mourning, and no doubt the President felt he should hold himself down; he didn't, he tried to, but his joy showed in every word and movement.

Edith Roosevelt, who busied herself removing the tasseled remnants of late-Victorian bad taste and restoring the White House interior to something more like its classical simplicity and dignity, presided with quiet grace over the evening festivities, always insisting that the public had no right to interviews with the first lady, and that all such attention should be focused on the president himself. But even she found it difficult to shield her noisy and active brood from the loving attention of the crowd. Her stepdaughter, beautiful and decidedly independent, was known to an admiring press as “Princess Alice,” and the boys were an integral part of the White House vision as it appeared to every visitor. A crowd waiting outside the gate was once astonished to see the departing president making grotesque faces out the window of his carriage, not realizing that he was continuing some game with little Quentin waving from the doorstep.