Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [171]
IT IS POSSIBLE THAT MOVEMENT MAY BE MADE TONIGHT AT PANAMA TO DECLARE INDEPENDENCE, IN WHICH CASE I WILL PROTEST AGAINST TRANSIT OF TROOPS NOW HERE.
A certain lack of urgency at the railroad yard in collecting the cars necessary for such transit suggested that Hubbard would not have to do much protesting. Around 11:30, Shaler received a call confirming that General Tovar’s party had arrived in Panama City. It had been welcomed by an impressive delegation of civic leaders, headed by Governor Obaldía, and by General Huertas and the garrison guard, glittering in full dress uniform. The first order of business, of course, was to have the Governor’s office arrange for delivery of the tiradores—but while this was being done, Tovar and his staff were invited to join Obaldía for lunch and a siesta.
AT 2:34 P.M., ROOSEVELT’S special train pulled out of Jersey City for Washington. Facing six hours of travel, he remembered that Nicholas Murray Butler had asked him for a list of recommended books. It seemed like a strange request, coming from the President of Columbia University, yet deserving of a full answer. He cast his mind back over what he had read since taking the oath of office, and began to scribble.
Parts of Herodotus; the first and seventh books of Thucydides; all of Polybius; a little of Plutarch; Aeschylus’ Orestean Trilogy; Sophocles’ Seven Against Thebes; Euripides’ Hippolytus and Bacchae; and Aristophanes’ Frogs. Parts of The Politics of Aristotle.
All these had been in translation. However, he had read, in French, the biographies of Prince Eugene of Savoy, Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, Henri Turenne, and John Sobieski. He had also browsed, if not deeply studied, Froissart on French history, Maspero on the early Syrian, Chaldean, and Egyptian civilizations, “and some six volumes of Mahaffey’s Studies of the Greek World.” What else?
The Memoirs of Marbot; Bain’s Life of Charles the Twelfth; Mahan’s Types of Naval Officers; some of Macaulay’s Essays; three or four volumes of Gibbon and three or four chapters of Motley. The battles in Carlyle’s Frederick the Great; Hay and Nicolay’s Lincoln, and the two volumes of Lincoln’s Speeches and Writings—these I have not only read through, but have read parts of them again and again; Bacon’s Essays … Macbeth; Twelfth Night; Henry the Fourth; Henry the Fifth; Richard the Second; the first two cantos of Milton’s Paradise Lost; some of Michael Drayton’s Poems—there are only three or four I care for; portions of the Nibelungenlied.…
ROOSEVELT HAD BARELY settled in his seat before the first hint of trouble in Panama reached the State Department. Hubbard’s early-morning dispatch from Colón had gone astray; this one came from Oscar Malmros, the United States Consul in Colón.
REVOLUTION IMMINENT … GOVERNMENT VESSEL CARTAGENA, WITH ABOUT 400 MEN, ARRIVED EARLY TODAY, WITH NEW COMMANDER IN CHIEF, TOVAR … NOT PROBABLE TO STOP REVOLUTION.
Washington was ill prepared to deal with such sudden news, since most of its top officials, including Root, Moody, and the President himself, were out of town on election trips. Assistant Secretary Loomis cabled Felix Ehrman, the United States Vice Consul in Panama City, ordering him to keep the State Department apprised of the situation in Panama City. Ehrman could reply only that it was “critical,” but not yet violent. Some sort of uprising was expected “in the night.”
Had the Vice Consul been better informed, he might have noticed the curious frequency with which deadlines of “five o’clock” recurred in local communications. Governor Obaldía had promised the increasingly desperate Tovar that his battalion would be delivered at that hour. The fire brigade was on notice to be ready for action then, and a freelance scribe assigned to write an important public proclamation