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Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [345]

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freedoms enjoyed by United States citizens, “only such fundamental rights as were derived from natural law” (Dulles, America’s Rise, 56). These included rights to life, liberty, and property, but did not include guarantees of, say, uniform tariff and excise rates, nor necessarily any of democratic vote (ibid., 57). TR agreed with William Howard Taft that the Supreme Court’s attitude was just: “What does well here would work ruin there [the Philippines]—trial by jury in all cases, for example” (TR, Letters, vol. 3, 105). Cynical observers suggested that the court’s ruling had been affected by the pro-imperialism vote of 1900.

94 The old soldiers Frederick H. Harrington, “The Anti-Imperialist Movement in the United States, 1898–1900,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Sept. 1935; see also Howard C. Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean (Chicago, 1927), 13, and Robert L. Beisner, Twelve Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900 (New York, 1968).

95 “World duties,” TR, Works, vol. 15, 332.

96 “So they have” Ibid., 333.

97 Cuba, for example Upon arrival in Washington, the President stated emphatically that he wanted to get out of Cuba (Francis E. Leupp to Oswald Garrison Villard, 20 Sept. 1901 [CS]). “Never in recent times,” TR asserted, “has any great nation acted with such disinterestedness as we have shown in Cuba” (ibid., 476–77). While repeating these sentiments twelve years later in his Autobiography, he admitted that in 1901 “our own direct interests were great, because of the Cuban tobacco and sugar, and especially because of Cuba’s relation to the projected Isthmian Canal” (214).

98 “Sometimes,” Roosevelt TR, Letters, vol. 3, 105.

99 Clearly, a vast World’s Work, Sept. 1901; Richard Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (Boston, 1954), 26–28; Alexander E. Campbell, America Comes of Age (New York, 1971), 94–95; Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Lawrence, Kans., 1989), 114–15. TR, in Letters, vol. 3, 209, sneers at “those amiable but very far from wise philanthropists who think that we can … benefit the Filipino by getting out of the Philippines and letting him wallow back into savagery.” Review of Reviews remarked, in an article on the problems confronting Governor-General Taft: “Under the most liberal estimates, there are not over a half-million people in the islands who possess anywhere near the capacity for selfgovernment exhibited by the most ignorant negro in the black belt of our own South” (Aug. 1901). For TR’s intense prepresidential interest in the Philippines (he wanted to be the first Governor-General), see Oscar M. Alfonso, Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines (New York, 1974), chap. 1.

100 President McKinley’s Leopold, Elihu Root, 34–35; TR, Works, vol. 15, 337–38. Taft disclaimed some of the rumors in a letter to Root (2 Aug. 1901 [ER]), but admitted others were true. According to Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 226, 230, Filipinos were being exterminated, at the height of the insurrection, at a ratio of five dead to every one wounded. For a contemporary view of the relations between the United States and its new dependencies, see Arthur W. Dunn, “The Government of Our Insular Possessions,” Review of Reviews, Dec. 1901.

101 THE TRAIN BEGAN The New York Times, 17 Sept. 1901; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 3, 20, 23; Alexander E. Campbell, Great Britain and the U.S., 1895–1903 (London, 1960), 179–83; A. Northend Benjamin, “Russia in the East,” Munsey’s, June 1901.

102 Both powers were Frederick W. Marks III, Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt (Lincoln, Nebr., 1979), 4–5; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 8th ed. (New York, 1968), 482; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 3, 20, 26, 112; Raymond A. Esthus, Theodore Roosevelt and Japan (Seattle, 1966), 8. See also A. Gregory Moore, “Dilemma of Stereotypes: Theodore Roosevelt and China, 1901–1909” (Ph.D. diss., Kent State University, 1978).

103 Worldwide, the balance A modern historian redefines this as “an imbalance

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