Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [207]
Wilson had at first pursued a paradoxical policy of refusing to recognize the assertive populist government of General Huerta, on the ground that it had seized power by bloody means. He resented having to choose between either of Huerta’s more capital-friendly rivals, Venustiano Carranza and Emiliano Zapata, saying that “morality and not expediency” should be the code of American conduct abroad: “It is a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in terms of material interest.” This distanced him from William Howard Taft’s Dollar Diplomacy, but he had come to realize that other powers were profiting from his unwillingness to do business with Huerta. So he had lifted an embargo, imposed by the Taft administration, on the shipment of arms to Carranza and Pancho Villa. Enraged, Mexican authorities had stepped up their harassment of Americans south of the border.
Just when Roosevelt was floating free of the Dúvida’s last rapids, Wilson had gone before Congress to say that if such “annoyances” were to continue, they could burgeon into an outrage “of so gross and intolerable a sort as to lead directly and inevitably to armed conflict.” He asked for advance approval of any military action he might deem necessary to take.
This kind of personal appeal was something new in presidential politics. Roosevelt would never have gone to the Capitol, top hat in hand, to beg legislators for any indulgence whatsoever. His method had been to bombard them—and the press—with written messages that amounted to draft bills, ready to be signed into law. One such had featured what was now known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:
Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.
Wilson at least seemed to have come to his senses on that score. In a development straight out of the Corollary, he had acted to prevent the unloading, at the port of Vera Cruz, of a consignment of German arms ordered by Huerta. He was convinced that these weapons might be used against the United States, and had directed the seizure of the entire town. This the Marine Corps had proceeded to do, at the cost of nineteen American and two hundred Mexican lives.
Roosevelt had thrilled to the news of this casus belli when it reached him in Manáos. By the time he got home, however, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile had intervened as mediators, saving both Wilson and Huerta from a war that neither of them wanted.
FOR A WHILE AFTER the Vera Cruz incident, Woodrow Wilson had looked sepulchral, his normally pale skin blanched to the color of parchment. “I never went into battle, I never was under fire,” he admitted to a naval audience. “But I fancy there are some things just as hard to do as to go under fire.”
If any haggardness lingered as he sat making polite conversation with Roosevelt, it was due less to the burden of being commander in chief than worry about his wife, critically ailing upstairs with Bright’s disease. Roosevelt, haggard himself, made a polite inquiry about her health. For the rest of the interview, he and the President were content to talk about books and his expedition (Roosevelt joking that British geographers doubted there was any such thing as the “River of Doubt”).
“HIS FORTE WAS ABSTRACT, ANALYTICAL THOUGHT.”
President Woodrow Wilson. (photo credit i17.1)
On the former subject, they had little to share. Wilson was not the sort of man to enjoy Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, a novel for boys that Roosevelt was currently devouring. Nor, for that matter, was he likely to curl up with Life-Histories