The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [319]
Bigelow, unimpressed, told Secretary Long that Roosevelt might by the same token “wear no clothes in the street to prove that he is not a negro.”83
THE PRESIDENT HAD DECIDED to send his war message up to the Hill on Monday, 4 April, but hints from Madrid that further concessions might be made mañana caused a postponement until Wednesday the sixth. Belligerents in Congress, who now comprised a majority, did not see why they should have to wait two more days, or for that matter two more hours, before settling with “the butchers of Spain.” When the message was postponed a second time, in order to allow for free evacuation of American citizens from Cuba, frustrated legislators crowded the White House so threateningly that McKinley was obliged to lock the precious document in a safe. “By God,” one Senator growled to Assistant Secretary of State Rufus Day, “don’t your President know where the war-declaring power is lodged?”84
As always, Theodore Roosevelt produced the most quotable insult. “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”85
7 April was Holy Thursday in Havana. Under lowering skies, bands throughout the city played soothing sacred music. On Good Friday, Roosevelt assured his classmate Bob Bacon that he did not want to annex Cuba, only to free it from “medieval” fiefdom: “Let us fight on the broad grounds of securing the independence of a people who, whether they amount to much or not, have been treated with hideous brutality by their oppressors.” On Saturday the American Minister in Madrid was told that at the behest of the Pope, Spain would declare an armistice in Cuba after all. On Easter Sunday, the Minister followed up with a personal appeal to McKinley: “I hope nothing will now be done to humiliate Spain.” But on Monday, 11 April, the President finally sent his message to Congress. Debate still rages as to whether by doing so McKinley confessed his inability to hold the dogs of war any longer, or whether a study of Cuban history persuaded him that Spain’s promises were not to be believed. If he wanted peace, why did he not keep the message locked up, and announce that, thanks to the armistice, a diplomatic victory was at hand? If he wanted war, why did he not send in the message sooner? Perhaps the President realized that nothing he thought or said was of much consequence now. America, as Theodore Roosevelt kept saying, “needed” a war. “I have exhausted every effort to relieve the intolerable condition of affairs which is at our doors,” McKinley told Congress. “Prepared to execute every obligation imposed upon me by the Constitution and the law, I await your action.”86
DURING THE WEEK THAT Congress took to debate McKinley’s message—pausing, once, to roar out an impromptu chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”87—Roosevelt redoubled his efforts to secure a commission in the Army. There was no question of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy applying for service at sea—“I shall be useless on a ship”—and he was equally determined not to become “part of the garrison in a fort.”88 Preliminary mobilization was ordered on 15 April, well in advance of any declaration of war, and he at once began to pester the Secretary of War, Russell A. Alger, and General-in-Chief Nelson A. Miles. Neither man impressed him. “Alger has no force whatsoever … Miles is a brave peacock,” he wrote in a new pocket diary. “They both told me they could put 100,000 men in Tampa in 24 hours! The folly, the lack of preparation, are almost inconceivable.”89
Frustration at the slowness of Congress to act, at his own inability to get a place in any New York regiment, vented itself in further jabs of angry ink. “The President still feebly is trying for peace. His weakness and vacillation are even more ludicrous than painful.… Reed …