The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [308]
Long returned to the Navy Department on 28 September and was greatly annoyed to find what political intrigues had been going on in his absence. Tradition required that he appoint the senior officer, and besides he personally favored Howell. But McKinley’s memo could not be ignored; and so, to quote the sonorous words of Theodore Roosevelt, “in a fortunate hour for the Nation, Dewey was given command of the Asiatic Squadron.”114
The Secretary was still in an irritable mood when Dewey called to thank him and apologize for using the influence of Senator Proctor. It had been necessary, Dewey explained, to counteract Senator Chandler’s recommendation of Howell. “You are in error, Commodore,” snapped Long. “No influence has been brought to bear on behalf of anyone else.”
A few hours later Long, in turn, sent apologies to Dewey. It appeared that Senator Chandler had indeed recommended his rival, but the letter “had arrived while he was absent from the office and while Mr. Roosevelt was Acting Secretary and had only just been brought to his attention.”
The culprit was serenely unrepentant about his delay in forwarding Senator Chandler’s letter, and saw nothing wrong in Dewey’s enlistment of senatorial aid. “A large leniency,” Roosevelt wrote, “should be observed toward the man who uses influence only to get himself a place … near the flashing of the guns.”115
BY 30 SEPTEMBER, Roosevelt was free to go north for a fortnight’s rest at Sagamore Hill. Before leaving he asked the Secretary’s permission “to talk to him very seriously about the need for an increase in the Navy.” He proceeded to urge the instant construction of six battleships, six large cruisers, seventy-five torpedo-boats, and four dry docks, together with the modernization of ninety-five guns to rapid fire, the laying in of nine thousand armor-piercing projectiles, and the purchase of two million pounds of smokeless powder.
Long could only suggest that Roosevelt list these demands in a memorandum. The Assistant Secretary was eventually persuaded to settle for one battleship.116
ROOSEVELT WAS BACK in Washington on 15 October, accompanied by his wife and family. Installing them at 1810 N Street, “a very nice house, just opposite the British Embassy,” he set off almost immediately on the campaign trail, stumping in Massachusetts for local candidates, and in Ohio for Senator Hanna.117 On 27 October he turned thirty-nine.
With November came the familiar, seasonal quickening of his activity, as the days shortened and crisp winds stimulated his blood. The ground of Rock Creek Park grew hard under his hobnailed boots, as he and Leonard Wood strolled their endless visionary miles, talking of Cuba, Cuba, Cuba.118
Roosevelt’s duties as Assistant Secretary were not numerous enough to divert him, and he began to show signs of intellectual restlessness. He plotted four more volumes of The Winning of the West, took Frederic Remington to task for rendering badgers “too long and thin,” and yearned for a war with Spain “within the next month.”119 Long sympathetically appointed him president of a board investigating the Navy’s most chronic ailment: friction between line and staff personnel.120 The resultant work load was heavy, yet Roosevelt now toyed with the idea of writing “a historical article on the Mongol Terror, the domination of the Tartar tribes over half of Europe during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.”121
Early in the morning of 19 November he sent joyful news to Bamie: “Very unexpectedly Quentin Roosevelt appeared just two hours ago.” Pausing only to enter the boy for Groton, he marched off to work and dictated his most bellicose letter yet, to Lt. Comdr. W. W. Kimball, author of the department’s original war plan.122 “To speak with a frankness which our timid friends would call brutal, I would regard a war with Spain from two standpoints: first, the advisability