Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [78]
ON CAPITOL HILL, Representative Henry T. Rainey, Democrat of Illinois, demanded “an investigation of the means by which President Roosevelt ‘took’ the Isthmus of Panama from the United States of Colombia.” The New York Times, usually quick to criticize the Colonel, remarked with some sympathy that the move persecuted a man who was at present “down and out.” Ambitious Democrats thinking ahead to 1912 seemed to be hoping for “some kind of scandal that will wipe the name of Theodore Roosevelt clear off the map of political possibilities in this country.” The Panama Canal was “about the most popular asset of recent history, and it will be very difficult to convince the public that Mr. Roosevelt was not a great public benefactor in ‘taking’ the canal zone.”
“NOT A WORD, GENTLEMEN,” a suntanned Roosevelt told reporters when he got back to New York on 16 April. “Not a word to say.”
This did not stop him from saying plenty about the political situation in private to such intimates as James Garfield and Gifford Pinchot—the latter reunited with him in mutual contempt for Taft. All three agreed that the President could be renominated only “by default” in 1912, absent a major progressive challenger. La Follette did not appear to be developing any real strength in the East. If anyone was, it was the Democratic Party’s rising star, Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey.
Roosevelt did not wait for Stimson to move into the War Department before making his first public break with Taft. His weapon of choice was a signed editorial in The Outlook. He wished to discuss national honor, and what he saw as the President’s willingness to compromise it.
Since agreeing to head up the American Society for Judicial Settlement of International Disputes, Taft had fixated on the concept of a series of arbitration treaties that would subject all signatory nations to the authority of a world court, when situations arose to threaten the security of any of them. Roosevelt voiced no particular objection to Taft’s prototype treaty with Great Britain, feeling that it merely cemented an Anglo-American alliance already in place. But he noted that France and Germany—whose intense mutual hostility he had so recently felt at first hand—were also on the State Department’s wish list, not to mention Japan, and a number of other warlike or meddlesome powers.
Roosevelt was aware that he had espoused the spirit of arbitration himself as President, in the moderation of labor disputes and such international questions as the proper plotting of borders. When calling for “a League of Peace” in his address to the Nobel Prize Committee, however, he had stressed that such an authority should be armed. Nor had he ever countenanced the idea of the United States abrogating the right to police its own interests.
Taft proposed to do just that, telling the peace society, “Personally, I don’t see any more reason why matters of national honor should not be referred to a court.” The President believed that its judges, like himself, would be gentlemen who “understood” what honor meant.
This kind of fantasy was enough to provoke, in private, Roosevelt’s hottest language. He restrained himself in print, addressing only the British treaty and declaring, “The United States ought never specifically to bind itself to arbitrate questions respecting its honor, independence, and integrity.” But the fact that he had never before criticized Taft publicly made his demurral sound like a shout.
Its echoes were still reverberating on 6 June, when he found himself seated next to the President at a jubilee in Baltimore honoring James Cardinal Gibbons. Fellow celebrants looked for signs of rancor between them, but they managed the encounter