When Roosevelt returned to Washington in March, 1897, to take up
his duties as a subordinate officer in the National Government,
he was thirty-eight years old; a man in the prime of life, with
the strength of an ox, but quick in movement, and tough in
endurance. A rapid thinker, his intellect seemed as impervious to
fatigue as was his energy. Along with this physical and
intellectual make up went courage of both kinds, passion for
justice, and a buoying sense of obligation towards his fellows
and the State. His career thus far had prepared him for the
highest service. Born and brought up amid what our society
classifiers, with their sure democratic instincts, loved to call
the "aristocratic" circle in New York, his three years in the
Assembly at Albany introduced him to the motley group of
Representatives of high and low, bank presidents and farmers,
blacklegs and philanthropists, who gathered there to make the
laws for New York State. There he displayed the preference,
characteristic of him through life, of choosing his intimates
irrespective of their occupation or social label. Then he went
out on the Plains and learned to live with wild men, for whom the
artificial distinctions of civilization had no meaning. He
adapted himself to a primeval standard in which courage and a
rough sense of honor were the chief virtues. But this experience
did still more for him than prove his personal power of getting
along with such lower types of men, for it revealed to him the
human extremes of the American Nation. How vast it was, how
varied, how intricate, and, potentially, how sublime! Lincoln,
coming out of the Kentucky back woods, first to Springfield,
Illinois, then to Chicago in its youth, and finally to
Washington, similarly passed in review the American contrasts of
his time. More specific was Roosevelt's training as a Civil
Service Commissioner. The public had been applauding him as a
youthful prodigy, as a fellow of high spirit, of undisputed
valor, of brilliant flashes, of versatility, but the
worldly-wise, who have been too often fooled, were haunted by the
suspicion that perhaps this astonishing young man would turn out
to be only a meteor after all. His six years of routine work on
the Civil Service Commission put this anxiety to rest. That work
could not be carried on successfully by a man of moods and
spurts, but only by a man of solid moral basis, who could not be
disheartened by opposition or deflected by threats or by
temptations, and, as I have before suggested, the people began to
accustom itself to the fact that whatever position Roosevelt
filled was conspicuous precisely because he filled it. A good
while was still to elapse before we understood that notoriety was
inseparable from him, and did not need to be explained by the
theory that he was constantly setting traps for
self-advertisement.
As Police Commissioner of New York City he continued his familiar
methods, and deepened the impression he had created. He carried
boldness to the point of audacity and glorified the "square
deal." Whatever he undertook, he drove through with the
remorselessness of a zealot. He made no pretense of treating
humbugs and shams as if they were honest and real; and when he
found that the laws which were made to punish criminals, were
used to protect them, no scruple prevented him from achieving the
spirit of the law, although he might disregard its perverted
letter.
Ponder this striking example. The City of New York forbade the
sale of liquor to minors. But this ordinance was so completely
unobserved that a large proportion of the common drunks brought
before the Police Court were lads and even young girls, to whom
the bar-tenders sold with impunity. The children, often the
little children of depraved parents, "rushed the growler";
factory hands sent the boys out regularly to fetch their bottle
or bucket of drink from the saloons. Everybody knew of these
breaches of the law, but the framers of the law had taken care to
make it very difficult to procure legal evidence of those
breaches. The public conscience was pricked a little when the
newspapers told it that one of the youths sent for liquor had
drunk so much of it that he fell into a stupor, took refuge in an
old building, and that there the rats had eaten him alive.
Whether it was before or after this horror that Chief
Commissioner Roosevelt decided to take the law into his own
hands, I do not know, but what he did was swift. The Police
engaged one of the minors, who had been in the habit of going to
the saloons, to go for another supply, and then to testify. This
summary proceeding scared the rum-dealers and, no doubt, they
guarded against being caught again. But the victims of moral dry
rot held up their hands in rebuke and one of the city judges wept
metaphorical tears of chagrin that the Police should engage in
the awful crime of enticing a youth to commit crime. The record
does not show that this judge, or any other, had ever done
anything to check the practice of selling liquor to minors, a
practice which inevitably led thousands of the youth of New York
City to become drunkards.
How do you judge Roosevelt's act? Do you admit that a little
wrong may ever be done in order to secure a great right?
Roosevelt held, in such cases, that the wrong is only technical,
or a blind set up by the wicked to shield themselves. The danger
of allowing each person to play with the law, as with a toy, is
evident. That way lies Jesuitry; but each infringement must be
judged on its own merits, and as Roosevelt followed more and more
these short cuts to justice he needed to be more closely
scrutinized. Was his real object to attain justice or his own
desires?
The Roosevelts moved back to Washington in March, 1897, and
Theodore at once went to work in the office of the Assistant
Secretary of the Navy in that amazing building which John Hay
called "Mullett's masterpiece," where the Navy, War, and State
Departments found shelter under one roof. The Secretary of the
Navy was John D. Long, of Massachusetts, who had been a
Congressman and Governor, was a man of cultivation and geniality,
and a lawyer of high reputation. Although sixty years old, he was
believed never to have made an enemy either in politics or at the
Bar. Those who knew the two gentlemen wondered whether the
somewhat leisurely and conservative Secretary could leash in his
restless young First Assistant, with his Titanic energy and his
head full of projects. No one believed that even Roosevelt could
startle Governor Long out of his habitual urbanity, but every one
could foresee that they might so clash in policy that either the
head or the assistant would have to retire.
Nothing is waste that touches the man of genius. So the two years
which Roosevelt spent in writing, fifteen years before, the
"History of-the Naval War of 1812," now served him to good
purpose; for it gave him much information about the past of the
United States Navy and it quickened his interest in the problems
of the Navy as it should be at that time. The close of the Civil
War in 1865 left the United States with a formidable fleet, which
during the next quarter of a century deteriorated until it
comprised only a collection of rotting and unserviceable ships.
Then came a reaction, followed by the construction of an
up-to-date fleet, and by the recognition by Congress that the
United States must pursue a modern policy in naval affairs.
Roosevelt had always felt the danger to the United States of
maintaining a despicable or an inadequate Navy, and from the
moment he entered the Department he set about pushing the
construction of the unfinished vessels and of improving the
quality of the personnel.
He was impelled to do this, not merely by his instinct to bring
whatever he undertook up to the highest standard, but also
because he had a premonition that a crisis was at hand which
might call the country at an instant's notice to protect itself
with all the power it had. Two recent events aroused his
vigilance. In December, 1895, President Cleveland sent to England
a message upholding the Monroe Doctrine and warning the British
that they must arbitrate their dispute with Venezuela over a
boundary, or fight. This sledgehammer blow at England's pride
might well have caused war had not sober patriots on both sides
of the Atlantic, aghast at this shocking possibility, smoothed
the way to an understanding, and had not the British Government
itself acknowledged the rightness of the demand for arbitration.
So the danger vanished, but Roosevelt, and every other thoughtful
American, said to himself, "Suppose England had taken up the
challenge, what had we to defend ourselves with?" And we compared
the long roll of the great British Fleet with the paltry list of
our own ships, and realized that we should have been helpless.
The other fact which impressed Roosevelt was the insurrection in
Cuba which kept that island in perpetual disorder. The cruel
means, especially reconcentration and starvation, by which the
Spaniards tried to put down the Cubans stirred the sympathy of
the Americans, and the number of those who believed that the
United States ought to interfere in behalf of humanity grew from
month to month. A spark might kindle an explosion. Obviously,
therefore, the United States must have a Navy equipped and ready
for any emergency in the Caribbean.
During his first year in office, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt
busied himself with all the details of preparation; he encouraged
the enthusiasm of the officers of the New Navy, for he shared
their hopes; he added, wherever he could, to its efficiency, as
when by securing from Congress an appropriation of nearly a
million dollars--which seemed then enormous--for target practice.
He promoted a spirit of alertness--and all the while he watched
the horizon towards Cuba where the signs grew angrier and
angrier.
But the young Secretary had to act with circumspection. In the
first place the policy of the Department was formulated by
Secretary Long. In the next place the Navy could not come into
action until President McKinley and the Department of State gave
the word. The President, desiring to keep the peace up to the
very end, would not countenance any move which might seem to the
Spaniards either a threat or an insult. As the open speeding-up
of naval preparations would be construed as both, nothing must be
done to excite alarm. In the autumn of 1897, however, some of the
Spaniards at Havana treated the American residents there with so
much surliness that the American Government took the precaution
to send a battleship to the Havana Harbor as a warning to the
menacing Spaniards, and as a protection, in case of outbreak, to
American citizens and their property.
But what was meant for a precaution proved to be the immediate
cause of war. Early in the evening of February 15??, 1898, the
battleship Maine, peaceably riding at her moorings in the harbor,
was blown up. Two officers and 266 enlisted men were killed by
the explosion and in the sinking of the ship. Nearly as many
more, with Captain Charles D. Sigsbee, the commander, were
rescued. The next morning the newspapers carried the report to
all parts of the United States, and, indeed, to the whole world.
A tidal wave of anger surged over this country. "That means war!"
was the common utterance. Some of us, who abhorred the thought of
war, urged that at least we wait until the guilt could be fixed.
The reports of the catastrophe conflicted. Was the ship destroyed
by the explosion of shells in its own magazine, or was it blown
up from outside? If the latter, who set off the mine? The
Spaniards? It seemed unlikely, if they wished war, that they
should resort to so clumsy a provocation! Might not the
insurgents themselves have done it, in order to force the United
States to interfere? While the country waited, the anger grew. At
Washington, nobody denied that war was coming. All that our
diplomacy attempted to do was to stave off the actual declaration
long enough to give time for our naval and military preparation.
I doubt whether Roosevelt ever worked with greater relish than
during the weeks succeeding the blowing-up of the Maine. At last
he had his opportunity, which he improved night and day. The Navy
Department arranged in hot haste to victual the ships; to provide
them with stores of coal and ammunition; to bring the crews up to
their full quota by enlisting; to lay out a plan of campaign; to
see to the naval bases and the lines of communication; and to
cooperate with the War Department in making ready the land
fortifications along the shore. Of course all these labors did
not fall on Roosevelt's shoulders alone, but being a tireless and
willing worker he had more than one man's share in the
preparations.
But the great fact that war was coming--war, the test-- delighted
him, and his sense of humor was not allowed to sleep. For the
peace-at-any-price folk, the denouncers of the Navy and the Army,
the preachers of the doctrine that as all men are good it was
wicked to build defenses as if we suspected the goodness of our
neighbors, now rushed to the Government for protection. A certain
lady of importance, who had a seaside villa, begged that a
battleship should be anchored just outside of it. Seaboard cities
frantically demanded that adequate protection should be sent to
them. The spokesman for one of these cities happened to be a
politician of such importance that President McKinley told the
Assistant Secretary that his request must be granted.
Accordingly, Roosevelt put one of the old monitors in commission,
and had a tug tow it, at the imminent risk of its crew, to the
harbor which it was to guard, and there the water-logged old
craft stayed, to the relief of the inhabitants of the city and
the self-satisfaction of the Congressman who was able to give
them so shining a proof of his power with the Administration.
Many frightened Bostonians transferred their securities to the
bank vaults of Worcester, and they, too, clamored for naval watch
and ward. Roosevelt must have been made unusually merry by such
tidings from Boston, the city which he regarded as particularly
prolific in "the men who formed the lunatic fringe in all reform
movements."
It did not astonish him that the financiers and the business men,
who were amassing great fortunes in peace, should frown on war,
which interrupted their fortune-making; but he laughed when he
remembered what they and many other vague pacifists had been
solemnly proclaiming. There was the Senator, for instance, who
had denied that we needed a Navy, because, if the emergency came,
he said, we could improvise one, and "build a battleship in every
creek." There were also the spread eagle Americans, the
swaggerers and braggarts, who amused themselves in tail-twisting
and insulting other nations so long as they could do this with
impunity; but now they were brought to book, and their fears
magnified the possible danger they might run from the invasion of
irate Spaniards. Their imagination pictured to them the poor old
Spanish warship Viscaya, as having as great possibility for
destruction as the entire British Fleet itself.
At all these things Roosevelt laughed to himself, because they
confirmed the gospel of military and naval preparedness, which he
had been preaching for years, the gospel which these very
opponents reviled him for; but instead of contenting himself by
saying to them, "I told you so," he pushed on preparations for
war at full speed, determined to make the utmost of the existing
resources. The Navy had clearly two tasks before it. It must
blockade Cuba, which entailed the patrol of the Caribbean Sea and
the protection of the Atlantic ports, and it must prevent the
Spanish Fleet, known to be at the
Philippines, from crossing the Pacific Ocean, harassing our
commerce, and threatening our harbors on our Western coast.
Through Roosevelt's instrumentality, Commodore George Dewey had
been appointed in the preceding autumn to command our Asiatic
Squadron, and while, in the absence of Governor Long, Roosevelt
was Acting-Secretary, he sent the following dispatch:
Washington, February 25,'98. Dewey, Hong Kong:
Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hong Kong. Keep full
of coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will
be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic
coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep
Olympia until further orders.
ROOSEVELT
I would not give the impression that Roosevelt was the dictator
of the Navy Department, or that all, or most, of its notable
achievements came from his suggestion, but the plain fact is,
wherever you look at its most active and fruitful preparations
for war, you find him vigorously assisting. The order he sent
Commodore Dewey led directly to the chief naval event of the war,
the destruction of the Spanish Fleet by our Asiatic Squadron in
Manila Bay, on May 1st. Long before this victory came to pass,
however, Roosevelt had resigned from the Navy Department and was
seeking an ampler outlet for his energy.
Having accomplished his duty as Assistant Secretary--a post which
he felt was primarily for a civilian--he thought that he had a
right to retire from it, and to gratify his long-cherished desire
to take part in the actual warfare. He did not wish, he said, to
have to give some excuse to his children for not having fought in
the war. As he had insisted that we ought to free Cuba from
Spanish tyranny and cruelty, he could not consistently refuse to
join actively in the liberation. A man who teaches the duty of
fighting should pay with his body when the fighting comes.
General Alger, the Secretary of War, had a great liking for
Roosevelt, offered him a commission in the Army, and even the
command of a regiment. This he prudently declined, having no
technical military knowledge. He proposed instead, that Dr.
Leonard Wood should be made Colonel, and that he should serve
under Wood as Lieutenant-Colonel. By profession, Wood was a
physician, who had graduated at the Harvard Medical School, and
then had been a contract surgeon with the American Army on the
plains. In this service he went through the roughest kind of
campaigning and, being ambitious, and having an instinct for
military science, he studied the manuals and learned from them
and through actual practice the principles of war. In this way he
became competent to lead troops. He was about two years younger
than Roosevelt, with an iron frame, great tenacity and endurance,
a man of few words, but of clear sight and quick decision.
While Roosevelt finished his business at the Navy Department,
Colonel Wood hurried to San Antonio, Texas, the rendezvous of the
First Regiment of Volunteer Cavalry. A call for volunteers,
issued by Roosevelt and endorsed by Secretary Alger, spread
through the West and Southwest, and it met with a quick response.
Not even in Garibaldi's famous Thousand was such a strange crowd
gathered. It comprised cow-punchers, ranchmen, hunters,
professional gamblers and rascals of the Border, sports men,
mingled with the society sports, former football players and
oarsmen, polo-players and lovers of adventure from the great
Eastern cities. They all had one quality in common--courage--and
they were all bound together by one common bond, devotion to
Theodore Roosevelt. Nearly every one of them knew him personally;
some of the Western men had hunted or ranched with him; some of
the Eastern had been with him in college, or had had contact with
him in one of the many vicissitudes of his career. It was a
remarkable spectacle, this flocking to a man not yet forty years
old, whose chief work up to that time had been in the supposed
commonplace position of a Civil Service Commissioner and of a New
York Police Commissioner! But Roosevelt's name was already known
throughout the country: it excited great admiration in many,
grave doubts in many, and curiosity in all. His friends urged him
not to go. It seemed to some of us almost wantonly reckless that
he should put his life, which had been so valuable and evidently
held the promise of still higher achievement, at the risk of a
Spanish bullet, or of yellow fever in Cuba, for the sake of a
cause which did not concern the safety of his country. But he
never considered risks or chances. He felt it as a duty that we
must free Cuba, and that every one who recognized this duty
should do his share in performing it. No doubt the excitement and
the noble side of our war attracted him. No doubt, also, that he
remembered that the reputation of a successful soldier had often
proved a ladder to political promotion in our Republic. Every
reader of our history, though he were the dullest, understood
that. But that was not the chief reason, or even an important
one, in shaping his decision. He went to San Antonio in May, and
worked without respite in learning the rudiments of war and in
teaching them to his motley volunteers, who were already called
by the public, and will be known in history, as the "Rough
Riders." He felt relieved when "Teddy's Terrors," one of the
nicknames proposed, did not stick to them. At the end of the
month the regiment proceeded to Tampa, Florida, whence part of it
sailed for Cuba on the transport Yucatan. It sufficiently
indicates the state of chaos which then reigned in our Army
preparations, that half the regiment and all the horses and mules
were left behind. Arrived in Cuba,, the first troops, accustomed
only to the saddle, had to hobble along as best they could, on
foot, so that some wag rechristened them " Wood's Weary Walkers."
The rest of the regiment, with the mounts, came a little later,
and at Las Guasimas they had their first skirmish with the
Spaniards. Eight of them were killed, and they were buried in one
grave. Afterward, in writing the history of the Rough Riders,
Roosevelt said: "There could be no more honorable burial than
that of these men in a common grave--Indian and cowboy, miner,
packer, and college athlete--the man of unknown ancestry from the
lonely Western plains, and the man who carried on his watch the
crests of the Stuyvesants and the Fishes, one in the way they had
met death, just as during life they had been one in their daring
and their loyalty." *
* The Rough Riders, 120.
I shall not attempt to follow in detail the story of the Rough
Riders, but shall touch only on those matters which refer to
Roosevelt himself. Wood, having been promoted to
Brigadier-General, in command of a larger unit, Theodore became
Colonel of the regiment. On July 1 and 2 he commanded the Rough
Riders in their attack on and capture of San Juan Hill, in
connection with some colored troops. In this engagement, their
nearest approach to a battle, the Rough Riders, who had less than
five hundred men in action, lost eighty-nine in killed and
wounded. Then followed a dreary life in the trenches until
Santiago surrendered; and then a still more terrible experience
while they waited for Spain to give up the war. Under a killing
tropical sun, receiving irregular and often damaged food, without
tent or other protection from the heat or from the rain, the
Rough Riders endured for weeks the ravages of fever, climate, and
privation. To realize that their sufferings were directly owing
to the blunders and incompetence of the War Department at home,
brought no consolation, for the soldiers could see no reason why
the Department should not go on blundering indefinitely. One of
the Rough Riders told me that, when stricken with fever, he lay
for days on the beach, and that anchored within the distance a
tennis-ball could be thrown was a steamer loaded with medicines,
but that no orders were given to bring them ashore!
The Rough Riders were hard hit by disease, but not harder than
the other regiments in the Army. Every one of their officers,
except the Colonel and another, had yellow fever, and at one time
more than half of the regiment was sick. A terrible depression
weighed them down. They almost despaired, not only of being
relieved, but of living. To face the entire Spanish Army would
have been a great joy, compared with this sinking, melting away,
against the invisible fever.
The Administration at Washington, however, although it knew the
condition of the Army in Cuba, seemed indifferent rather than
anxious, and talked about moving the troops into the interior, to
the high ground round San Luis. Thereupon, Roosevelt wrote to
General Shafter, his commanding officer:
To keep us here, in the opinion of every officer commanding a
division or a brigade, will simply involve the destruction of
thousands. There is no possible reason for not shipping
practically the entire command North at once ....
All of us are certain, as soon as the authorities at Washington
fully appreciate the conditions of the army, to be sent home. If
we are kept here it will in all human probability mean an
appalling disaster, for the surgeons here estimate that over half
the army, if kept here during the sickly season, will die.
This is not only terrible from the standpoint of the individual
lives lost, but it means ruin from the standpoint of military
efficiency of the flower of the American Army, for the great bulk
of the regulars are here with you. The sick-list, large though it
is, exceeding four thousand, affords but a faint index of the
debilitation of the army. Not ten per cent are fit for active
work.
This letter General Shafter really desired to have written, but
when Roosevelt handed it to him, he hesitated to receive it.
Still Roosevelt persisted, left it in the General's hands, and
the General gave it to the correspondent of the Associated Press
who was present. A few hours later it had been telegraphed to the
United States. Shafter called a council of war of the division
and brigade commanders, which he invited Roosevelt to attend,
although his rank as Colonel did not entitle him to take part.
When the Generals heard that the Army was to be kept in Cuba all
summer and sent up into the hills, they agreed that Roosevelt's
protest must be supported, and they drew up the famous "Round
Robin" in which they repeated Roosevelt's warnings. Neither
President McKinley nor the War Department could be deaf to such a
statement as this: "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."
This letter also was immediately published at home, and outcries
of horror and indignation went up. A few sticklers for military
etiquette professed to be astonished that any officer should be
guilty of the insubordination which these letters implied, and,
of course, the blame fell on Roosevelt. The truth is that
Shafter, dismayed at the condition of the Fifth Army, and at his
own inability to make the Government understand the frightful
doom which was impending, deliberately chose Roosevelt to commit
the insubordination; for, as he was a volunteer officer, soon to
be discharged, the act could not harm his future, whereas the
regular officers were not likely to be popular with the War
Department after they had called the attention of the world to
its maleficent incompetence.
Washington heard the shot fired by the Colonel of the Rough
Riders, and without loss of time ordered the Army home. The sick
were transported by thousands to Montauk Point, at the eastern
end of Long Island, where, in spite of the best medical care
which could be improvised, large numbers of them died. But the
Army knew, and the American public knew, that Roosevelt, by his "
insubordination," had saved multitudes of lives. At Montauk Point
he was the most popular man in America.
This concluded Roosevelt's career as a soldier. The experience
introduced to the public those virile qualities of his with which
his friends were familiar. He had not endured the hardships of
ranching and hunting in vain. If life on the Plains democratized
him, life with the Rough Riders did also; indeed, without the
former there would have been no Rough Riders and no Colonel
Roosevelt. He learned not only how to lead a regiment according
to the tactics of that day, but also--and this was far more
important--he learned how disasters and the waste of lives, and
treasure, and the ignominy of a disgracefully managed campaign,
sprang directly from unpreparedness. This burned indelibly into
his memory. It stimulated all his subsequent appeals to make the
Army and Navy large enough for any probable sudden demand upon
them. "America the Unready" had won the war against a decrepit,
impoverished, third-rate power, but had paid for her victory
hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives;
what would the count have mounted to had she been pitted against
a really formidable foe? Would she have won at all against any
enemy fully prepared and of nearly equal strength? Many of us
dismissed Roosevelt's warnings then as the outpourings of a
jingo, of one who loved war for war's sake, and wished to graft
onto the peaceful traditions and standards of our Republic the
militarism of Europe. We misjudged him.