The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [200]
These Rough Riders were the pride of Roosevelt’s heart, and his inextinguishable enthusiasm kept their morale high. Good-heartedly Roosevelt gave up his private berth to a trooper with measles, taking a coach seat with his men. He was determined not to treat his privates like indentured household servants. To kill time, some of the men, while waving away hatching flies, wrote a jingle about going down the “dusty pike” with Colonel Roosevelt, ready to “throttle the sons of Spain.”27 Roosevelt was reading Edmond Demoulins’s Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons (1897), a foray into social Darwinism. Demoulins wrote that France, his native country, lacked the “independence and ability to fight life’s battles fearlessly,” qualities that the Anglo-Saxons possessed in spades.28 He also believed that education—at which the British excelled—was the key to developing a great country. All this was music to Roosevelt’s ears. As the train rumbled eastward Roosevelt consoled himself with Demoulins’s notions of natural selection in the human arena.
Once he finished the book, Roosevelt, flaunting his authority, called his men together at a depot stop near the Sabine River. He lectured them on Darwinism, describing how natural selection explained everything, from the size of their noses to the wings on the mosquitoes they were swatting. Many of the Rough Riders had taken to calling the Spaniards “greasers” or “dagoes,” and Roosevelt promised to explain shortly why the epithet wasn’t entirely unfair.29 Seizing Darwin’s image of a “tangled bank,” which ended On the Origin of Species, Roosevelt now made it his own. “Through all nature,” Roosevelt intoned, “it is a case of the survival of the fittest. Look at the magnificent trees along the river. The ones that started crooked were crowded out and died. The strong and the straight saplings appropriated all the food.”30
That wasn’t the extent of Roosevelt’s lecture on Darwinism. Inspired by Demoulins, he took a leap forward, bringing humans and mammals into the mix. “It is the same with wild animals,” he continued. “The cripples and the inefficients that cannot support themselves are killed off.” Humans, Roosevelt maintained, were just highly developed animals. So just as the Chinese purged themselves of the criminal class and the wicked, the United States, if it wanted to achieve greatness, needed to sanitize its society by getting rid of criminals. (To be fair, he did, however, add the important point that the blind or crippled or chronically infirm of sound mind needed to be cared for by society at large.)
Roosevelt then segued into the unfitness of Spaniards, the weak link in European affairs. Most, he said, were shiftless and of weak moral fiber. As Americans, his men had a newfound responsibility to liberate Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, because the Spanish had proved themselves tyrannical. Obviously Roosevelt was trying to arouse his fighting forces. Verbally attacking the enemy in training was a practice older than Rome. Taking the jingoist notion one step farther, Roosevelt, as if reeling off a paragraph of Kipling, boasted that the Rough Riders had a sacred obligation to revenge the Maine. “The old vigilantes in Montana did not have a single law,” he reminded