American Rifle - Alexander Rose [135]
Lower down in the system, line officers hated reporting to staffers back in comfortable Washington, whom they imagined were rather more concerned with fighting turf wars than real ones. Instead of building a war machine, they complained, the red-tape brigade was turning the army into a paper mill. Line officers argued that the plethora of semi-autonomous, closed-shop bureaus (like Ordnance) and technical departments was unwieldly, inefficient, and expensive. Bureau chiefs, fiercely protective of their rights and freedoms, retorted that they ran specialist outfits that were dependent on expertise and that no ordinary infantry captain could be expected to just “fill in” when it came to building bridges, designing advanced artillery, or practicing medicine.1
In the summer of 1898 the line-officer faction seemed to have pulled ahead when General Nelson A. Miles (anointed commanding general in 1895) began fancying a White House run to replace Republican president William McKinley in the 1900 election.
Miles was the very model of the traditional major general, and he knew it. His golden epaulettes glittering, his breast jangling with medals, his legs encased in the most polished of leather boots, Miles was a military hero who adored the peacockery of Victorian-style uniforms. He was now a far cry from his obscure beginnings as a clerk in a Boston crockery store with a basic grammar school education; through sheer application and unrelenting will, he had gained his lieutenancy without either a West Point or Ivy League pedigree.2
Miles, despite his accomplishments, was perpetually disappointed that his heroism had never translated into public acclamation. So desperately did he want to be popular that he launched a quixotic quest to weaken McKinley by embroiling McKinley’s ally, Secretary of War Russell Alger, in a scandal over military food supplies. The general publicly claimed that the War Department had sickened the troops by feeding them contaminated beef in Cuba. In so doing, Miles not only forced McKinley to oust the colorless Alger but strengthened his own position as commanding general against the War Department staffers.3
Miles’s luck, however, was running out. A board of inquiry investigated his accusations of beef profiteering and departmental ineptitude and found insufficient grounds for them. Public opinion, which had recently lauded him as a valiant whistleblower, rapidly soured on the aging warhorse. Miles’s quixotic ambitions were finally quashed when Republicans, casting about for a suitable military hero to buttress McKinley for his 1899–1900 presidential campaign, chose as his vice-presidential nominee not the tainted Miles but the sainted Theodore Roosevelt, victor of San Juan Hill. Just as unfortunately, Alger’s replacement at the War Department in August 1899 was Elihu Root, a far more dangerous and cunning adversary than his hapless predecessor.
Born in 1845, Root, the son of a professor of mathematics, attended law school at New York University and made a name for himself defending Tammany Hall capo William “Boss” Tweed during his criminal trial for corruption. After serving as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he chaired the Republican County Committee during Roosevelt’s 1886 run for mayor of New York City. Roosevelt’s bid failed, but Root again proved his indispensability and his fidelity two years later when he suppressed some pernickety questions about whether Roosevelt, in an effort to “minimize” his taxes, had fulfilled the state’s residency requirements during his governorship campaign.4
As he was a lawyer with no military experience, Root’s appointment as secretary of war came as a surprise to most everyone, not least himself. But McKinley felt that the very absence of a soldierly background was an asset, for it meant, ostensibly at least, that Root had no dog in the unending feud between