Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [15]
LOEB ANNOUNCED THE Secretary of War. Roosevelt willingly cast aside his newspapers. Elihu Root was the one person on the train he felt he could talk to freely. Soon, both men were deep in conversation, swaying in their seats as the train sped south. About 9:30, its momentum slowed so that a farm boy was able to race it through the fields, waving a flag. The outbuildings of Arcade, N.Y., came into view, followed by a little railroad station. Almost reluctantly, the train stopped. About twenty Grand Army veterans snapped to attention on the platform. Their ancient tunics looked pinched and trussed, but they held themselves stiff with respect for a fallen comrade. A few much younger soldiers stood to one side. Their uniforms were intimately familiar to Roosevelt: he had worn that khaki himself (hand-tailored by Brooks Brothers) in the Spanish-American War. He drew the blinds, afraid they might salute him rather than McKinley.
For ten minutes, while the locomotive took on water, Roosevelt and Root sat in semidarkness, listening to the sound of a band playing “Nearer My God to Thee.” Evidently they were to hear little else on their long way to Washington. Between strophes, there was a crunch of boots in the gravel, and an old soldier’s voice called quaveringly: “We’re all heartsore for Major McKinley.”
Much as Roosevelt coveted the respect of Grand Army veterans, he knew they would never love him as they had loved his predecessor. McKinley had marched with them at Antietam, when “Teedie” Roosevelt had been but a child in a zouave suit. A gulf, not merely of years but of ideology, separated him from these heroes of the past. They had fought to preserve the Union; he had fought to create a world power. The old soldiers had cheered when the young soldiers liberated Cuba, but they fell silent when similar “freedoms” were imposed on Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. They had watched with worried eyes as the Stars and Stripes rose over Hawaii, Wake Island, and half of Samoa, and Secretary Hay began negotiations to purchase the Danish West Indies. Was their beloved republic, they asked, taking on the trappings of an imperial power?
The ideological gulf had yawned even wider when the young soldiers persuaded McKinley that occupation of Spain’s former colonies should continue well beyond armistice. Cuba and Puerto Rico would need two or three years to perfect new constitutions and build independent economies. The Philippines would need much longer, half a century perhaps. Seven million largely illiterate tribesmen could not be left to govern themselves without reverting to the laws of the jungle.
Powerful commercial, strategic, and moral arguments to this effect had been advanced by the young soldiers—Theodore Roosevelt prominent among them—campaigning for McKinley’s re-election. They had trumpeted the islands as new markets for America’s superabundant production, cited naval research in favor of a global defense system, and looked to Congress to ensure that America would hold on to what the Supreme Court euphemistically called its “unincorporated territories.”
The old soldiers remained fiercely opposed to expansionism. They asked how a nation that had won its own independence in a colonial war could force dependence upon others. They rejected McKinley’s assurance, “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind.” So did most intellectuals, and Democrats looking for an issue to break the Republican Party. As yet this anti-imperialist lobby remained a minority, but its numbers were growing, and its propaganda was powerful. Roosevelt could see the day when it might paralyze his foreign policy.
“World duties,” he felt, were the inevitable and welcome consequence of America’s aggrandizing power. Old men and “mollycoddles” had no understanding of the huge historical forces at work. Just two weeks ago in Minnesota, he had dismissed the cliché that all great nations come to dust:
So they have; and so have all others. The weak and the stationary have vanished as surely as, and more rapidly than, those whose citizens felt within