Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [76]
Neither did Taft. The President politely acknowledged Roosevelt’s eligibility for a command, but informed him that the administration would make no move into Mexico without the consent of Congress.
ROOSEVELT ROLLED ON through deserts and mountains stippled with spring flowers. It was, he assured Taft, “the last speaking tour I shall ever make.” The campaign of 1910 had enabled him to visit much of the Midwest, Deep South, and Atlantic seaboard—exactly half the forty-six states. Now he wanted to chant a swansong across the borderland and up the Pacific Coast into the Northwest. He spoke and gripped flesh with all his old energy, but as Ray Stannard Baker had noted, he seemed to have lost his political touch. Taft was convulsed to hear that the Colonel’s response, to a Texan complaining that Mexican insurrectos had carried off his son, had been an absentminded “Fine, fine, splendid!”
In further evidence that he was no longer front-page news, he found himself, for the first time since 1898, without a press car hitched to his train. Only local correspondents reported his appearances, and few of their stories were syndicated nationwide. Even such a story as his dedication, in Arizona on 18 March, of Roosevelt Dam—the monumental apotheosis of his reclamation policy as President—rated no higher than page sixteen of The New York Times.
He pressed the obligatory button, and three cascades spilled out into the Salt River Valley. The reservoir was still only half full, but it had already submerged the dam’s construction town (also named after him) and collected enough water to irrigate the Phoenix area through two years of drought. Nothing he had accomplished, he said, matched this project for grandeur—except the Panama Canal.
“MONUMENTAL APOTHEOSIS OF HIS RECLAMATION POLICY.”
Theodore Roosevelt Dam, Arizona. (photo credit i6.3)
PRIDE IN THE LATTER achievement overcame him five days later at the University of California at Berkeley. The canal was much on local minds, for San Francisco had just been chosen as host city for a grand “Panama-Pacific” international exposition, once the western and eastern oceans were joined. That consummation no longer seemed remote: after a record one and a half million tons dug in February, the immense earthwork was more than two-thirds complete.
Speaking in the university’s Greek amphitheater, Roosevelt said, “The Panama Canal I naturally take an interest in, because I started it.”
He had come to Berkeley to deliver a series of lectures on morality in politics, but today was Charter Day, and the sunshine was sweet. His audience was enormous, spreading out onto the surrounding slopes, pointillistic in places with academic silk.
“If I had acted strictly according to precedent,” he continued, “I should have turned the whole matter over to Congress; in which case, Congress would be ably debating it at this moment, and the canal would be fifty years in the future.”
Roosevelt was referring to the controversy, early in his presidency, over whether to cut an isthmian waterway across Nicaragua or Panama. He began to talk about another controversy, concerning his role in the Panamanian Revolution of 1903. Why he raised this vexed subject, half-forgotten over the years, was a mystery. He could have been rambling, were he not reading from his own script.
The revolution, he joked, had “fortunately” occurred when Congress was in recess, enabling him to act with executive freedom. “Accordingly I took a trip to the Isthmus, started the canal, and then left Congress—not to debate the canal, but to debate me. But while the debate goes on, the canal does too; and they are welcome to debate me as long as they wish, provided that we can go on with the canal.”
What his script said was not what all note-takers in the amphitheater recorded. A staff stenographer entered the words I took a trip to the Isthmus into the official text of Roosevelt’s remarks, for publication in the next issue of the University of California Chronicle. Scattered reporters, however, alternately heard, or thought they heard, I took