The rise of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [345]
This was a telling blow to any aspiring Governor of New York State. An instant storm of criticism blew up in the press. The Journal accused Roosevelt of “irresistible self-assertion and egotism,” ill-suited to his “really admirable services in the field.” The Philadelphia Press remarked that in view of “intense indignation” among the militia, it was unlikely that the New York Republican party could now nominate Theodore Roosevelt for Governor. But many newspapers found equal fault with Secretary Alger, and charged him with treachery in publishing a private letter. The Colonel could surely be excused his overweening pride in his regiment, commented the Baltimore American; after all, “he led these men in one of the noblest fights of the century.”144
Within three days Shafter’s army was ordered to Montauk, Long Island.145
The Rough Riders sailed out of Santiago Harbor on 8 August, leaving Leonard Wood behind as Military Governor of the city. They were not sorry to see Cuba sink into the sea behind them. In seven weeks of sweaty, sickly acquaintance with it, they had seen it transformed from a tropical Garden of Eden to a hell of denuded trees, cindery fields, and staring shells of houses.146 The island’s bugs were in their veins, the smell of its dead in their nostrils, the taste of its horse meat and fecal water in their mouths. It would be days before the Atlantic breezes, cooling and freshening as they steamed north, swept away this sense of defilement.
Yet the farther Cuba dropped away, the brighter shone the memory of their two great battles—in particular that rush up Kettle Hill behind the man with the flying blue neckerchief. They had done something which orthodox military strategists considered impossible, namely, stormed and captured a high redoubt over open ground, using weapons inferior to, and fewer than, those of a securely entrenched enemy.147 In doing so they had been the first to break the Spanish defenses; charging on, they had been first to take and hold the final crest overlooking Santiago.
For Roosevelt himself, the “crowded hour” atop San Juan Heights had been one of absolute fulfillment. “I would rather have led that charge … than served three terms in the U.S. Senate.” And he would rather die from yellow fever as a result than never to have charged at all. “Should the worst come to the worst I am quite content to go now and to leave my children at least an honorable name,” he told Henry Cabot Lodge. “And old man, if I do go, I do wish you would get that Medal of Honor for me anyhow, as I should awfully like the children to have it, and I think I earned it.”148
With fulfillment came purgation. Bellicose poisons had been breeding in him since infancy. During recent years the strain had grown virulent, clouding his mind and souring the natural sweetness of his temperament. But at last he had had his bloodletting. He had fought a war and killed a man. He had “driven the Spaniard from the New World.” Theodore Roosevelt was at last, incongruously but wholeheartedly, a man of peace.
CHAPTER 26
The Most Famous Man in America
From the contending crowd, a shout,
A mingled sound of triumph and of wailing.
IT WAS MONDAY, 15 August 1898. All morning the crowd scattered across the sands of Montauk Point grew larger, as the troopship Miami wallowed at anchor three miles out to sea. Soldiers and civilians, women and children, reporters and Red Cross staff squinted over the water, wondering when the Rough Riders would be allowed to disembark. While they waited, a westerly breeze snapped the sails