Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [281]
The President, as H. G. Wells had noticed, was incapable of seeing negatives except in positive translation. The sheer extremity of Panama’s challenges—meteorological, technological, geological, psychological—was wine to his head. He could not wait, the next morning, to get back to the Culebra Cut, even though rain was falling heavier than ever, and a landslide near Paraíso diverted his train. Dynamiters blew the top off a bluff for him. Steam shovels ate rock. A choir of “Zonian” schoolchildren sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” John Stevens, chief engineer, stood him on a hilltop, map in hand, and verbally built a new town in minutes.
All around them, flash cascadas ran down the slopes, and villages lay half drowned, as if the canal was already rising. Descending to the floor of Gatun Dam, Roosevelt was struck by the thought that in a few years’ time, ocean liners would be floating in water a hundred feet above his head.
“STEVENS AND HIS MEN,” the President wrote Kermit a few days later, “are changing the face of the continent, are doing the greatest engineering feat of the ages, and the effect of their work will be felt while our civilization lasts.”
He was returning home on the Louisiana, with two other war vessels in convoy, able for the first time to visualize the true enormity of his achievement in Panama. What he had made possible, Stevens was making real. The chief engineer was just his kind of person: “a big fellow, a man of daring and good sense, and burly power.”
Kermit, who was expected to keep this letter for posterity, may have recognized the unconscious, if slightly enlarged, self-portrait his father always painted when he described someone he admired. Stevens was actually five years older and an inch taller than the President, but the key words, perhaps, were daring and burly power.
A newer element in Roosevelt’s letter was what the Kaiser might call the Erdenton, or earth note. Its implication, again unconscious, seemed to be that Stevens and his technicians, “so hardy, so efficient, so energetic,” were not the only Americans changing the face of the world in 1906. Theodore Roosevelt, too, wanted to leave his impress on civilization.
That made the cable that awaited him at Ponce, Puerto Rico, on 21 November all the more annoying:
NEW YORK REPUBLICAN CLUB AND MANY OTHERS APPEALING FOR A SUSPENSION OF THE ORDER DISCHARGING COLORED TROOPS UNTIL YOUR RETURN.… MUCH AGITATION ON THE SUBJECT AND IT MAY BE WELL TO CONVINCE PEOPLE OF FAIRNESS OF HEARING BY GRANTING REHEARING. TAFT.
If press reports were to be believed, Taft had actually granted such a suspension, pending the President’s return. Roosevelt was quick to countermand it. “Discharge is not to be suspended,” he wired back, “unless there are new facts of such importance as to warrant your cabling me. I care nothing whatever for the yelling of either the politicians or the sentimentalists.”
While he continued his voyage north (bypassing Cuba), Army processors obediently reduced the ranks of the Twenty-fifth Infantry to zero. The last “Brownsville raider” surrendered his uniform on 26 November, a few hours before Roosevelt got back to Washington.
BY NOW, A BURGEONING editorial consensus had begun to express dismay at the insubstantiality of the War Department’s reports on Brownsville. The New York Times noted that there was “not a particle of evidence” in any of them to justify dismissal without honor. Read in sequence, the documents showed that every authority concerned, from Major Penrose to the President, had proceeded on an assumption of guilt and challenged the soldiers to prove their own innocence.
This case was made most forcefully by