Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [305]
Bryan himself—improbably resurgent after the defeat of Alton B. Parker—had gracious things to say. “It is a brave message and needed at this time. All friends of reform have reason to rejoice that the President has used his high position to call attention to the wrongs that need to be remedied.”
All friends of Roosevelt were not, however, friends of reform, as he discovered when he received a letter from Nicholas Murray Butler early in February. More than six years had passed since Butler had sat listening to the “accidental” President ruminate in Commander Cowles’s parlor—years in which Butler’s own self-discovery, as president of Columbia University, had hardened into chronic self-importance.
Of all your real friends perhaps I, alone, am fond enough of you to tell you what a painful impression has been made on the public mind by your Special Message.…
Surely the sorry record of Andrew Johnson is sufficient proof that a President, whether right or wrong, cannot afford to argue with his adversaries, after the fashion of a private citizen, other than in a state paper or in a formal public address. If you will read this Message over quietly, and then read any of the most important Presidential Messages which have preceded it, you will, yourself, see exactly what I mean. You will see how lacking it is in the dignity, in the restraint, and in the freedom from epithet which ought to characterize so important a state paper.…
My honest opinion is that so far as the Message has had any purely political effect, it is to bring Mr. Bryan measurably nearer the White House than he has ever been before.
Roosevelt declined to accept Butler’s censure. “You regret what I have done. To me your regret is incomprehensible.”
ON 7 FEBRUARY, the Great White Fleet, dispatched toward unknown possibilities by an allegedly deranged (William James preferred the term dynamogenic) Commander-in-Chief, entered the Strait of Magellan. Since leaving Hampton Roads, it had become a diplomatic phenomenon, attracting worldwide press attention and spreading as much goodwill as foam along the Brazilian and Argentine coastlines. Even Punta Arenas, Chile, a windswept wood-and-iron outpost near the extreme tip of the continent, welcomed Admiral Evans and his sailors with elaborate hospitality and specially hiked prices.
For twenty-two hours, the Chilean destroyer Chacabuco led Evans’s flagship Connecticut through the misty Strait—a surreal Doppelgänger of the waterway being carved across Panama—while fifteen other coal-heavy ships wallowed behind at four-hundred-yard intervals. No more than three men-of-war had ever performed this maneuver in convoy, and the going was hazardous even for single units. But the fleet steamed steadily through. It veered off course only once, when a sudden turbulence proclaimed the conflicting levels of two oceans. By the time the last vessel emerged into open sea, the first was already steaming toward Valparaiso, and the Pacific theater had received its largest-ever infusion of battleships.
ROOSEVELT HAD still not announced his intention to send the fleet around the world—its official destination remained San Francisco. But Japan was aware that another war scare in the United States could quickly alter the fleet’s course; Admiral Dewey’s “ninety-day lag” no longer applied. This knowledge, combined with mounting diplomatic pressure from Elihu Root, now forced the conclusion of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” on which Tokyo had been politely stalling for nearly a year.
Throughout 1907, the influx of Japanese coolies into the United States had continued to pour unabated, making a mockery of the new immigration law. Root had tired of pointing out that the flow had to be restricted at its source, as per Tokyo’s verbal