Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [163]
Miller’s habits at home were irrelevant to his freedom, as a federal employee, to take an antiunion stance on principle. Reinstating him was a matter of executive privilege. “And as to this my decision is final.”
The delegation trooped out, looking grim under the lights of the porte cochere. Secretary Loeb distributed copies of Roosevelt’s statement to reporters. Gompers, aware that he had been scooped by a master of press relations, refused any comment. “It would not be respectful,” he said, and strode down the dark driveway.
Editorial opinion the next morning almost unanimously supported the President. Radical unions remained resentful, but Gompers bowed to the popular mood, and saw to it that anti-Roosevelt resolutions were defeated at the AFL convention. The open shop became official government policy. “It seems to me that this was the greatest act of your administration,” gushed Ray Stannard Baker. Baker did not realize that the President was already working on something that better deserved that superlative.
“YOU MAY HAVE noticed that I have not said a word in public about the canal,” Roosevelt wrote Mark Hanna on 5 October. “I shall have to allude to it in my Message.” He had decided to call a special session of Congress in November, ostensibly to secure bicameral approval of the Cuban-reciprocity treaty, but also to have legislative support at hand, in case emergency action was needed in Panama.
There was no doubt now that the province would soon—must—secede from the Colombian federation. Bogotá’s rejection of the canal treaty, and Washington’s apparent acceptance of that rejection, amounted to dual deathblows to the Istmusenos. Not only had they lost their long-dreamed waterway, spilling wealth on both sides forever, but their railroad, too, would become redundant, once the Nicaragua Canal opened for business. With no paved highways, no bridges, little industry, and less commerce, they might just as well revert to jungle living.
The President could not help feeling sympathetic. Here was a little ridge of country, about as wide as southern Vermont, a half-drowned hogback of mostly impenetrable rain forest, walled off from the rest of Colombia by mountains. Geographically, it belonged to Central America. Its only surface communications with the southern continent were by sea or mule train. Letters took fifteen days to get to Bogotá, if they got there at all; about the only reliable deliveries were those carrying tax money out of the Isthmus.
Panama’s political status as a provincia of Colombia was equally tenuous. It had spontaneously joined the New Granadian Federation in 1821, and seceded with its disintegration in 1830. Bogotá had reasserted control twelve years later, and from then on Panama had alternated stormily between semi-autonomy and subjugation. Roosevelt counted no fewer than fifty-three isthmian insurrections, riots, civil disturbances, and revolts since 1846. None had been perpetrated with any American help. On at least ten occasions (six times at Bogotá’s request, twice during his own presidency), Washington had blocked rebel movements and shipments along the Panama Railroad.
In doing so, it had argued that it sought only to protect the railroad’s neutral right-of-way, which civil war might compromise. Now an infinitely greater right—that of all trading nations to enjoy the benefits of a Panama Canal—had been denied by the “corruptionists” of just one government. “This does not mean that we must necessarily go to Nicaragua,” Roosevelt wrote. “I feel we are certainly justified in morals, and therefore justified in law, under the treaty of 1846, in interfering summarily and saying that the canal is to be built and