Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [75]
The word judicial in the society’s title reflected the influence of Elihu Root, who, as secretary of state in 1908, had been frustrated by the failure of the Second Hague Peace Conference to establish a strong world tribunal. Taft would have been happy to do without strength, in the sense of punitive power, altogether: his preference was for a peace movement that put its faith in arbitration. Optimistic and sentimental, he believed that all human beings were the same at heart. “If we do not have arbitration,” he told the society in his inaugural address, “we shall have war.”
Roosevelt scoffed at such naïveté. He had stood in the way of too many charging lions to believe for one minute that aggression was not a fact of nature. He detected no common peaceableness among human beings, let alone between nations vying for power. Men were either weak or they were strong. Only the strong could enforce “righteousness”—a word that the dictionary was vague about, but which to him had concrete meaning.
A case in point presented itself early in March, when revolutionary unrest in Mexico threatened the authoritarian government of Porfirio Díaz. Forces headed by Francisco Madero, Pascual Orozco, and Pancho Villa prepared to attack Ciudad Juárez. Taft, worrying about the security of American interests, stationed twenty thousand troops on the border. He assured Díaz that this mobilization was for exercise purposes only, and was “not intended as an act hostile to the friendly Mexican government.”
Roosevelt smelled civil war, and a consequent need for el Coloseo del Norte to restore order. The vague urge that had stirred him at the Cheyenne rodeo returned and clarified itself. “I most earnestly hope,” he wrote the President, “that we will not have to intervene.… But if by any remote chance … there should be a serious war, a war in which Mexico was backed by Japan or some other big powers, then I would wish immediately to apply for permission to raise a division of cavalry, such as the regiment I commanded in Cuba.” He was certain that, given a free hand, he could whip up “as formidable a body of horse riflemen … as has ever been seen.”
“OPTIMISTIC AND SENTIMENTAL, HE BELIEVED THAT ALL HUMAN BEINGS WERE THE SAME.”
William Howard Taft as President of the United States. (photo credit i6.2)
Anyone less passionate, pressing such a dream upon Taft, would have heard the President’s slow rumble of amusement, his great sedentary body (unimaginable in military uniform!) quivering like blancmange. But Roosevelt was already mentally recruiting ten or twelve thousand rough riders. “My brigade commanders would be Howze and Boughton of the regular army, and Cecil Lyon of Texas. My nine colonels would include …” As he drummed out name after name, his dream shifted from the prospect that beguiled to a retrospect that filled him with bloodthirsty pride. “I ask, Sir, that [you] remember that in the war with Spain our regiment was raised, armed, equipped, mounted, dismounted, drilled, kept two weeks on transports, and put through two vigorous fights in which it lost almost a quarter of the men engaged, and over one third of the officers, a loss greater than that suffered by any but two of the twenty-four regular regiments in that same army corps; and all this within sixty days.”
Coincidentally, Roosevelt happened at that moment to be heading to El Paso, just across the river from Ciudad Juárez. It was as if fate was speeding him toward the epicenter of the Mexican revolution, via the very country where he hoped to find most of his recruits.
But for the moment, his mission was peaceful. He was on the southwestern leg of a fifteen-state lecture tour. Edith was traveling with him. She wanted to see two of their sons—Archie in Mesa, Arizona, where he was registered at a health-building school, and Ted, establishing himself as a businessman in San Francisco. Cool and equable, Edith saw no prospect of her husband being ordered back into the saddle for any war.