The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [322]
LATE ON THE AFTERNOON of 1 May 1898, Americans were stunned to hear of a near-incredible naval victory by an unfamiliar commander in an archipelago on the other side of the world—about ten thousand miles away from what they imagined to be the likely theater of naval operations. In seven hours of stately maneuvers off Manila, George Dewey had destroyed Spain’s Asiatic Squadron. Almost every enemy ship was sunk, deserted, or in flames; not one American life had been lost, in contrast to 381 Spanish casualties. The victorious Commodore (who was promptly promoted to Rear-Admiral) modestly ascribed his success to “the ceaseless routine of hard work and preparation” demanded of him by the Navy Department. His government patron lost no time in taking due credit. “You have made a name for the nation, and the Navy, and yourself,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt on 2 May. “And I can’t say how pleased I am to think that I had any share in getting you the opportunity that you have used so well.”111
Assured of leaving the Navy Department in triumph, he telegraphed Brooks Brothers for an “ordinary cavalry lieutenant-colonel’s uniform in blue Cravenette,” and prepared to receive his commission on 6 May. Some instinct to have done with his past, with youth itself now he was nearing forty, caused him to sell off his few remaining cattle and give away his Elkhorn Ranch to Sylvane Ferris. He took out life insurance. He drove his recuperating wife through the blossoming countryside. He wrote a moving farewell to Secretary Long. “I don’t suppose I shall ever again have a chief under whom I shall enjoy serving as I have enjoyed serving under you … I hate to leave you more than I can say.” He acknowledged gifts of maple syrup, poetry, clockwork, and spurs. When he left for San Antonio on 12 May he took the spurs with him.112 It remained only to win them.
“A man of unbounded energy and force,” Secretary Long remarked in his diary. “He thinks he is following his highest ideal, whereas, in fact, as without exception every one of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing and strike a very high mark.”113
“Without waiting for diplomatic niceties … the country whooped to war.”
A troop of black volunteer soldiers en route to Tampa, 1898. (Illustration 23.2)
CHAPTER 24
The Rough Rider
These and many more like these,
With King Olaf sailed the seas.
“THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF of the American Army,” reported a Madrid newspaper in the early days of the war, “is one Ted Roosevelt, formerly a New York policeman.” By way of background information, the paper added that Roosevelt had been “born near Haarlem,” but “emigrated to America when young,” and was educated at “Harvard Academy, a commercial school.” He now went about the country accompanied by a bodyguard of toughs, fittingly known as “rough-rioters.”1
Commercial or not, Harvard supplied a sizable number of recruits to the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, as did the other Ivy League schools and the better clubs of Manhattan and Boston. Roosevelt had enlisted fifty of these “gentleman rankers,” as he called them, in order to give the regiment its necessary tone. He made it clear, however, that no man would earn a commission save through bravery and merit, and that once in Texas, “the cowboys and Knickerbockers ride side by side.”2 In choosing them, Roosevelt paid as much attention to physique as ancestry. There was his old classmate Woodbury Kane, a yachty dandy who “fought with the same natural ease as he dressed.”3 There was