The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [274]
ROOSEVELT WOULD HAVE WELCOMED a war of any sort during those early months of 1896. His preference, he confessed to Bamie, ran to the foreign variety.42 The nation was caught up in great excitement over President Cleveland’s Venezuela Message, and pressures were mounting for Congress to recognize the rebellion in Cuba. Roosevelt vigorously championed both causes. He sent a letter of congratulation to the President, and received a long, grateful response. Cleveland, however, seemed unwilling to venture into the Caribbean, much to Roosevelt’s disgust. “We ought to drive the Spaniards out of Cuba … it would be a good thing, in more ways than one, to do it.”43
His frustrations over the Police Board deadlock vented themselves in a series of speeches, articles, and open letters aimed at “the peace-at-any-price men,” or, more specifically, “beings whose cult is non-virility.”44 The editors of the Harvard Crimson were assailed for their “spirit of eager servility toward England,” and sternly reminded that John Quincy Adams, the real formulator of the Monroe Doctrine, had been a Harvard man. Students at the University of Chicago were warned that the adult world was “rough and bloody … but if you have enough of the lust of battle in you, you will have a pretty good time after all.” Elsewhere in the Windy City, in a major address to mark Washington’s birthday, he thundered his gospel, “Life is strife,” against a backdrop of Stars and Stripes. “There is an unhappy tendency among certain of our cultivated people,” Roosevelt went on, “to lose the great manly virtues, the power to strive and fight and conquer.” He urged his audience, in the name of Washington, to be ready for the day when America had to uphold its honor “by an appeal to the supreme arbitrament of the sword.”45
The nonvirile, in reply, made amused reference to his failure to conquer anyone at Police Headquarters. “When a man of marked ability is obviously uncomfortable where he is,” wrote a correspondent of the Evening Post, “it is a satisfaction to find some place where his energies will have unchecked swing.” The writer suggested that Roosevelt should leave immediately for South Africa, where the Boers—“Dutchmen pure and simple”—were fighting a losing battle for control of the Transvaal. “Let him shake from his feet the dust of ungrateful Manhattan … let him offer himself as General-in-Chief to President Kruger, and head the staunch conservatives who hold the fort from the Vaal to the Limpopo; perhaps he may succeed in rolling back the British aggressor.”46
E. L. Godkin, editor of the Post, agreed that this was an excellent idea. “Speaking for the American public, we say that, much as we esteem Mr. Roosevelt as a Police Commissioner we think his value to the community would be greatly increased if somehow he could somewhere have his fill of fighting.” After two or three campaigns for Kruger, he would be purged, and would be able to resume the life of a dedicated public servant. In barbed sentences that seem to have embedded themselves in Roosevelt’s hide, Godkin went on:
Now, in our opinion, no man—and especially no man of Mr. Roosevelt’s bellicose temperament—is qualified to give advice about war who has not seen war … The sight of a battlefield is one of the most awful lessons in international ethics which a civilized man can receive … Before Mr. Roosevelt sends round the fiery cross among the young men of the country any more, he ought, therefore, to have