Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [16]
While the nation that has dared to be great, that has had the will and the power to change the destiny of the ages, in the end must die, … [it] really continues, though in changed form, to live forever-more.
His vision was too grandiose to be merely territorial. He had no interest in square miles as such. Expansion, to him, meant a hemispheric program of acquisition, democratization, and liberation. Cuba, for example, was already eligible for freedom (of sorts) and should have it (in a way) as soon as Congress worked out a policy for tariff reciprocity with the island. Puerto Rico was semi-independent, in the sense that Secretary Root had ended the military government there and given most powers to a native legislature. The real problem was what to do about the Philippines. “Sometimes,” Roosevelt confessed, “I feel it is an intensely disagreeable and unfortunate task which we cannot in honor shirk.”
Clearly, a vast, primitive archipelago, divided by seven thousand waterways, seventy dialects, and the world’s most mutually incompatible religions—Christianity and Islam—needed an authoritarian government to hold it together. If not America’s, whose? There were also reasons of strategy to consider. Given half a chance, base-hungry powers such as Germany or Japan would annex and enslave the islands in perpetuity. The United States could at least be trusted not to hold them a day longer than democratic scruples required.
President McKinley’s enduring ambition was noble, yet Filipinos seemed ungrateful. Rebellion had been raging on the archipelago for almost two years; Root needed a seventy-thousand-man army to control it. Some measure of peace had at last been achieved. Today’s papers were blessedly free of bad news from “over there.” But neither Roosevelt nor Root cared to speculate what nice, clean-cut American boys were doing to keep that peace.
THE TRAIN BEGAN to move again. Root took his leave, and Roosevelt finished going through the newspapers. Great Britain offered “sincere expressions of sympathy” to the “bereaved” United States. No doubt the sympathy was sincere—an Anglo-American rapprochement had been under way for at least three years. Moscow confirmed another plot to assassinate Tsar Nicholas II—in Marseilles, of all places. One would have expected it rather in Tokyo: the most dangerous current rivalry in the world was that between Russia and Japan.
Both powers were circling like wolves about that sick mammoth, China. Their first snap and snarl would probably be over the mammoth’s Manchurian extremity, Kwangtung Province. Other wolves were on the prowl: German ones trailing the Russian pack, British behind the Japanese. America had its own “Open Door” trade relations with China to protect, and a corollary pledge to “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative integrity.” Roosevelt’s instinct was to stand watchfully aside for the moment. He might one day have to leap in—as into those hounds in Colorado!—and sort out the predators with his bare hands.
Worldwide, the balance of power was to his advantage. As long as Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany (his likely enemy, he felt, in any foreseeable war) remained preoccupied with the Tsar, and the Tsar and the Meiji Emperor of Japan continued to mass forces around Kwangtung, the President of the United States could surely perfect a partnership with King Edward VII to control the Western Hemisphere. Of course, he must do most of the controlling. The United States acknowledged Britain’s dominion of Canada (what a pity, he always felt, that President Polk had not “taken it all” in 1846!), but he intended to end, once and for all, a languid argument about the southern Alaskan boundary line. “I have studied that question pretty thoroughly and I do not think the Canadians have a leg to stand on.” They were entitled to the few miles of coast that were theirs by treaty, and not a pebble more.