The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [317]
MID-MARCH CAME and went. Forsythia, magnolia, hyacinths, and tulips sweetened Washington’s warming air.66 Still the Court of Inquiry delayed its Maine report. In an atmosphere of mounting political tension, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont prepared to deliver a speech on Cuba, which he had just visited.
Proctor, despite his friendly assistance in behalf of Dewey the previous fall, was by no means as “ardent for the war” as Roosevelt supposed. He was a careful, rather colorless politician, respected on all sides as a former Cabinet officer, a friend of big business, and an intimate of President McKinley. When he rose in the Senate on 17 March, the nation listened.67
Speaking coldly and dispassionately, Proctor confessed that he had gone to Cuba an isolationist, and returned with views inclining toward armed intervention. For the next several hours he cataloged the horrors he had seen, most notably the barbaric indignities of reconcentrado camps, where four hundred thousand peasants were living like pigs and dying like flies. After discussing Spain’s promises of “autonomy” with certain eminent Cubans, he was convinced that the authorities would never yield power, and that the insurrectos would never cease to fight for it. “To me,” he concluded, “the strongest appeal is not the barbarity practiced by Weyler, nor the loss of the Maine … but the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”68
The effect of this toneless speech, after months of fiery oratory for and against war, was so great as to convert large numbers of conservative Senators to the cause of Cuba Libre. Even more significantly, Wall Street’s hitherto solid resistance to war now began to crumble, while business groups across the country expressed profound concern. Political observers predicted that if McKinley did not intervene upon receipt of the Maine report—whatever it said—Cuba Libre would become the campaign cry of the Democrats in the fall. “And who can doubt,” asked the Chicago Times-Herald, “that by that sign … they will sweep the country?”69
Three days later, on 20 March, the President was confidentially informed that the Court of Inquiry would soon make a “unanimous report that the Maine was blown up by a submarine mine.”70 Some inkling of this message must have reached Roosevelt, who vented his wrath in a positively Elizabethan outburst to Brooks Adams. “The blood of the Cubans, the blood of women and children who have perished by the hundred thousand in hideous misery, lies at our door; and the blood of the murdered men of the Maine calls not for indemnity but for the full measure of atonement which can only come by driving the Spaniard from the New World.”71
Events moved rapidly to a climax. On 24 March the Navy ordered squadron commanders to paint their white warships battlegray.72 On 25 March the American Minister in Madrid was warned that Spain’s presence in Cuba was now considered “unbearable” by the Administration, and that unless an immediate diplomatic settlement was reached “the President … will lay the whole question before Congress.”73 And on 26 March, Roosevelt publicly confronted Senator Hanna, one of the last holdouts for peace, at a Gridiron Club after-dinner speech which had the whole capital agog. “We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba,” he insisted, and smacked his fist into his palm. Then, wheeling and staring directly at Hanna, he said that “the interests of the business world and of financiers might be paramount in the Senate,” but they were not so with the American people. Anyone who wanted to stand in the way of popular opinion “was welcome to try the experiment.” Hanna’s porcine neck turned purple, and his knuckles tightened on the arms of his chair, as applause filled the room. “Now, Senator,” said his neighbor dryly, “may we please have war?”74
On 28 March the Maine report was finally made