Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [177]
Professor John Bassett Moore was pleased to see some of his own language in the announcement, and sent Straus a note of mutual congratulation. “Perhaps, however, it is only a question … of the ‘covenant running away with the land’!!”
CHAPTER 19
The Imagination of the Wicked
A man can be r-right an’ be prisidint, but he can’t
be both at th’ same time.
AFTER TWENTY-TWO years in politics, Theodore Roosevelt was used to critical noise, but the uproar following the recognition of Panama threatened even his robust eardrums. Loudest of all were the cries of Oswald Garrison Villard in the New York Evening Post.
This mad plunge of ours is simply and solely a vulgar and mercenary adventure, without a rag to cover its sordidness and shame.… At one stroke, President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay have thrown to the winds the principles for which this nation was ready to go to war in the past, and have committed the country to a policy which is ignoble beyond words.
If Villard meant the strictures of Abraham Lincoln against secession, Roosevelt could cite an earlier principle, fought for by George Washington. Panamanians now, as Americans then, were tired of paying taxes to a remote, autocratic government that invested nothing in return. He would have counted himself “criminal, as well as impotent,” had he not defended the revolution. But a time to reply would come. For the moment, his protesters had the floor.
In tones approaching libel, Villard denounced the “indecent haste” with which Roosevelt had betrayed trust, “just for a handful of silver.” Colombia had not rated so much as a warning:
It is the most ignominious thing we know of in the annals of American diplomacy.… And this blow below the belt is dealt by the vociferous champion of fair play! This overriding of the rights of the weaker is the work of the advocate of “a square deal”! The preacher to bishops has shown that, for him at least, private morality has no application to public affairs.… If the President is careless of the national honor, and ready at a word to launch us upon unknown seas, the duty of Congress is but the more imperative. Let this scandal be thrown open to the public gaze.
Villard’s attacks continued for several days, until even the doubtful demurred. “I rather hope you will continue to pitch in to Roosevelt,” one reader wrote, “[but] as a matter of constitutional and international law, he was fully justified in all he did last week.” Colombia had received ample warning—from Panamanians, if not from Roosevelt. She had been too cowardly, or too corrupt, to fight. Roosevelt was bound to recognize her usurper, as other Presidents had accepted the obsolescence of New Granada. Nor could he be blamed for moving quickly, along with Britain, France, and Germany: “Nations must strike when irons are hot.”
Anti-imperialists, who had been starved of an issue since the end of the Philippines war, would not be quieted. “Nothing that Alexander or Nero ever did had a coarser touch of infamy,” William Henry Thorpe wrote in The Globe. “And all the depredations of England in Ireland, in Africa, or India have been gentlemanly compared with this sleek and underhanded piece of national bank robbery.” The Chicago Chronicle worried about “the distrust which we shall hereafter inspire among South and Central American countries.” Homer Davenport, cartoonist for the New York American, sketched a majestic eagle with a tiny, isthmus-shaped animal dangling from its claw.
However, 75 percent of the nation’s more conservative (if less strident) newspapers supported Roosevelt. “Colombia has simply got what she deserved,” the Pittsburgh Times commented, in words echoed by many. The Chicago Tribune agreed with John Hay that “the action of the President … was the only course he could have taken in compliance