Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [94]
His voice echoed in the Senate through Lodge, who repeated the argument that the Canal would make a Cuba a “necessity.” As extra inducement to Senators more materially than strategically minded, he expanded on how that “splendid island … still sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility” offered great opportunities for the investment of American capital and as a market for American goods. Roosevelt, although he had no such forum, was earnestly pleading the same cause wherever he had a hearing. The vociferous campaign he and Lodge were waging reached an august listener who was not pleased.
President Charles William Eliot of Harvard, the “topmost oak” of New England, speaking in Washington on the much-debated issue of international arbitration, denounced the doctrine of jingoism as “offensive.” Associated with countries where there had always been a military class, it was, he said, “absolutely foreign to American society,… yet some of my friends endeavor to pass it off as patriotic Americanism.” He then laid down firmly the principles which he believed made America different from the old nations. “The building of a navy and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American.… The building of a navy and particularly of battleships is English and French policy. It should never be ours.” The American policy was reliance upon strength in peace, whereas Jingoes were a creation “of the combativeness that is in man.” He specifically identified Lodge and Roosevelt as Jingoes and privately, it was learned, called them “degenerated sons of Harvard.”
Eliot spoke with unmatched authority. Descended from Eliots and Lymans who had been settled in New England since the Seventeenth Century, he belonged to a group who felt themselves the best. “Eliza,” protested Mrs. Eliot when a friend joined the Episcopal church, “do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any of my family will ever do that!” His father, a mayor of Boston and a Congressman, was also, as treasurer of Harvard, a member of the seven-man Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, which an English observer called “government by seven cousins.” His own quarter of a century as president of Harvard had been an unremitting battle against the traditionalists to transform the college from an Eighteenth Century backwater into a modern university. During that time he had, as President Hyde of Bowdoin said, been “misunderstood, maligned, misrepresented, hated,” and Eliot himself confessed that in all his public appearances during those years, “I had a vivid sense that I was addressing a hostile audience.” Being a fighter, this did not halt him. He was not naturally an ingratiating man. Over six feet tall, with “an oarsman’s back, a grave and sculptured head,” he was a “noble presence” born to command. A strawberry birthmark which covered one side of his face and pulled a corner of his lip into a seeming superciliousness had set him apart from boyhood and given him a quality of loneliness. With this to overcome and the additional handicap of being, as Professor of Chemistry, a scientist, he had nevertheless been named president of Harvard at thirty-five. His ideal of behavior, in his own words, was that of “a gentleman who is also a democrat.” He was inflexible about what he thought was right. When a star baseball player was left off the Harvard team because of low marks, Eliot was heard to remark that this was no loss because he