The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [304]
His industry during that first month confirms Henry Adams’s remark, “Theodore Roosevelt … was pure act.”79 In just twenty-two days of official duty he managed to write a report of his tour of the Naval Militia; inspect a fleet of first- and second-class battleships off Sandy Hook; expedite a stalled order for diagonal-armor supplies; devise a public-relations plan for press coverage of the forthcoming North Atlantic Squadron exercises; set up a board to investigate ways of relieving the chronic dry-dock shortage; introduce a new post-tradership system; weigh and pronounce verdict upon the Brooklyn Navy Yard probe; surreptitiously backdate a Bureau of Navigation employment form in order to favor a protégé of Senator Cushman Davis; extend his anti-red-tape reforms to cover battleships and cruisers; eliminate the department’s backlog of unfilled appointments; draw up an elaborate cruising schedule for the new torpedo-boat flotilla; settle a row between the Bureaus of Ordnance and Construction; review the relative work programs in various navy yards; draft a naval personnel reform bill, and fire all Navy Department employees who rated a sub-70 mark in the semiannual fitness reports—all the while making regular reports to the vacationing Secretary, in tones calculated both to soothe and flatter. “I shan’t send you anything, unless it is really important,” Roosevelt wrote. “You must be tired, and you ought to have an entire rest.” He begged Long not to answer his letters, “for I don’t want you bothered at all.” As for coming back after Labor Day, there was “not the slightest earthly reason” to return before the end of September.80
Long, happily pottering about his garden, was more than content to remain away.81 Ensconced as he was in rural Massachusetts, he probably did not see a lengthy analysis, in the New York Sun of 23 August, of European reaction to the expansionist movement in the United States. One paragraph read:
The liveliest spot in Washington at present is the Navy Department. The decks are cleared for action. Acting Secretary Roosevelt, in the absence of Governor Long, has the whole Navy bordering on a war footing. It remains only to sand down the decks and pipe to quarters for action.
“Yes, indeed,” Roosevelt was writing, “I wish I could be with you for just a little while and see the lovely hill farm to which your grandfather came over ninety years ago.… Now, stay there just exactly as long as you want to.”82
IN HIS “SPARE HOURS,” as he put it, Roosevelt amused himself by writing and editing another volume of Boone & Crockett Club big-game lore, dictating one of his enormous, prophetic letters to Cecil Spring Rice (“If Russia chooses to develop purely on her own line and resist the growth of liberalism … she will sometime experience a red terror that will make the French Revolution pale”),83 and assembling a series of quotations by various Presidents on the subject of an aggressive Navy. As he read his anthology through, it struck him as a powerful piece of propaganda, and he determined to publish it, after first mailing the text to Long for approval.84
The Secretary saw no harm in it, providing that Roosevelt inserted the words “in my opinion” somewhere in the Introduction, to show that it was not an official statement of policy by the Navy Department.85 An advance copy was sent to President McKinley on 30 August, and in early September the Government Printing Office issued it under the title The Naval Policy of America as Outlined in Messages of the Presidents of the United States from the Beginning to the Present Day.86 It drew admiring comment in most newspapers, “timely” being the adjective most frequently used. Besides being a miniature history of the U.S. Navy, the pamphlet showed a striking similarity of thought between Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, and Grant on the one hand, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt on the other. No quotations by Thomas Jefferson were deemed worthy