Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [77]
If I had followed traditional, conservative methods I would have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to Congress, and the debates on it would be going on yet. But I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on, the canal does also.
Actually, lawmakers had long ceased to question Roosevelt’s opportunism in 1903. What “debate” there was these days concerned the canal’s strategic and commercial potential. Naval and military authorities wanted to fortify it, while American shippers lobbied for preferential tolls, or none, since its construction costs were borne by the United States. But now the syntagma I took (what, exactly, had he taken—a trip, a zone, a country, a historic opportunity?) echoed south of the border, and revived Colombia’s anger at having been cheated of its expectations in 1903.
Philander Chase Knox, his not very supportive attorney general at the time, was now Taft’s secretary of state, and remained unconvinced that Roosevelt had been fair in denying Colombia any compensation for the loss of its precious province. Knox agreed with Senator Root that the United States was pledged from the start to be “passive” in any domestic revolution in Colombia, albeit “active” in maintaining transit across the Isthmus. He also agreed, to an extent, with the Colonel’s current language, but not for reasons Roosevelt would consider supportive: “The fact is we practically took Panama. We did not take it from Colombia, we took it from the Panaman[ian]s, and this is the only sense in which that statement is true.”
Roosevelt, luxuriating in the warmth of his reception at Berkeley, and the even warmer hospitality of Ted’s house in San Francisco, seemed not to care about the fuss his “boast” had caused. He had other priorities now. Eleanor was pregnant with his first grandchild. After a final few farewell speeches en route home—one, in Wisconsin, to praise Senator La Follette—he should be back at Sagamore Hill in time to see the budding of the fruit trees. Qui plantavit curabit.
OLD FRIENDS WERE not persuaded that this was the Colonel’s last political tour. “Quiescence for him is an impossibility,” James Bryce observed in early April, comparing Roosevelt to Gladstone for out-of-office fame. “He is a sort of comet … but much denser in substance; and not so much attracted by as attracting the members of the system which he approaches.” At every whistle-stop, women stood holding up their children for him to touch. “It seems,” Edith wrote Cecil Spring Rice, “as if in proportion with the hatred of Wall Street, is the love which is lavished upon him in the West.”
Taft continued to woo him, in the hope that their rapprochement would strengthen the GOP through difficult days ahead. The Sixty-first Congress had just come to an end, and with it the Party’s majority rule. Opposition from both progressives and Republican stalwarts had stalled Taft’s pet project, reciprocity with Canada. He had called an immediate session of the new Congress to reconsider the measure. That meant dealing from now on with hostile Democrats, and the President, seeking to counter their hostility, needed allies.
He sought to please Roosevelt with a pair of cabinet appointments almost pandering in their progressiveness: Walter L. Fisher as secretary of the interior, and Henry L. Stimson as secretary of war. The former, replacing Richard Ballinger, was a Pinchot-friendly conservationist, and the latter could be counted on to deploy the Colonel in any military emergency. But Roosevelt felt that Taft was “absolutely lost” as a leader. Ballinger’s resignation was symbolic in more ways than one. It cast a moral afterglow on the accusations of Gifford Pinchot, and reestablished conservation as an ideological issue of prime importance.
Rhetorically, what