Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [63]
An especial closeness linked them this season, because Edith felt maternal pangs stirring within her. The President boasted to complete strangers that he expected “a most important event in his household,” come October.
ELIHU ROOT RETURNED from Cuba to find a virulent pamphlet making the rounds, entitled “Secretary Root’s Record: Marked Severities in Philippine Warfare.” Published by the Anti-Imperialist League, it was more spiteful than accurate, and Roosevelt decided that the time had come for a counteroffensive. He summoned Henry Cabot Lodge and asked him to defend Root on the floor of the Senate.
When Lodge rose to do so on 5 May, every seat in the chamber was taken. He began by admitting “with deep regret” that a number of American soldiers had tortured and killed Filipino guerrillas. No effort would be spared to bring the guilty to judgment. “But why,” he asked rhetorically, “did these things happen?”
He began to read an official catalog of horrors that soon had his audience wincing. Some American prisoners of war had had their eyes slashed, their ears cut off, and their bowels hacked out. Others had been slow-roasted, dismembered with axes, buried alive, and stoned to death. Drowning men had been used for target practice. Medics had been knifed in the back as they tended the wounded. Lodge could not bring himself to report publicly, as he did in private, that some captives had been castrated and gagged with their own testicles. “Perhaps,” he drawled in his dry voice, “the action of the American soldier is not altogether without provocation.”
Over the next few days, a barrage of pro-Administration statements, interviews, and editorials appeared in the Republican press. Reasonable voices were heard suggesting that the Army should be allowed to complete its current investigations, notably that of General Smith, before Elihu Root was held to further account. Groaningly, the big Philippines civil-government bill began to move toward passage. It promised a legislative assembly, an independent judiciary, and an expanding array of civil rights. Senate Republicans closed ranks behind it.
Only George F. Hoar of Massachusetts—stately, white-haired, Ciceronian—joined the Democratic opposition in calling for a declaration of total independence for the Filipinos. His eloquence was such that Roosevelt interrupted a Sunday walk to pluck at his toga. “I sympathize with—I sympathize with you,” the President said, stuttering in his earnestness. “I agree with you entirely, but how can I make any declaration just now? You respect Governor Taft? Don’t you?”
Hoar evaded the question, but, like Senator Hanna, could not help being beguiled by the questioner. “Everybody that knows President Roosevelt knows his sincerity,” he wrote the veteran anti-imperialist Carl Schurz.
ROOSEVELT’S DESIRE TO hold on to the Philippines, for strategic and idealistic reasons, did not affect his corresponding urge to let go of Cuba, the independence of which he and the Rough Riders had fought for in 1898. What better time to do so than now—and who more fitting to represent him at the transition ceremony than his old comrade, the military governor of the island, Brigadier General Leonard Wood?
A few seconds before noon on 20 May 1902, Wood clicked to attention in Havana’s Palacio del Gobernador, before an audience of local dignitaries. “Sirs,” he read, “under the direction of the President of the United States I now transfer to you as the duly elected representatives of the people of Cuba the government and control of the island—”
On the roof of the palace, Lieutenant Frank McCoy