Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [66]
Roosevelt reminded his audience that legislation to that effect was now before Congress. There was scattered applause. “We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands … how to make good use of their freedom.”
The year’s first hot sun beat down on bald heads and bright medals. A breeze came off the Potomac, stirring hundreds of flags up the hill, and swaying the oaks over Roosevelt’s head. Invisible choirs of seventeen-year cicadas buzzed in counterpoint to his voice. Perhaps Filipinos would govern themselves the next time locusts sang at Arlington. Perhaps not. “When that day will come,” Roosevelt shouted, “it is not in human wisdom to foretell.”
For the time being, America’s global interests mandated a continuing presence in Manila. “The shadow of our destiny …”
He had been working on his speech for weeks, in an attempt to make it the first great oration of his Presidency. But another shadow darkened his face, and he improvised a sudden, disastrous apologia for the recent military scandals:
Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines—worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it.
Had he spat upon the porch of the Custis-Lee Mansion, he could not have more effectively unified Democratic opposition to the Philippines bill. The ugly word lynchings, which he had so far avoided using in public, sounded deliberately provocative. “I do not think the South will care much for Mr. Roosevelt after this,” said an outraged Dixie Senator. “He is dead so far as my section is concerned.”
Sure enough, when the bill came up for vote on 3 June, the Senate divided along party lines. The Republican majority prevailed (Senator Hoar alone dissenting), but Roosevelt took no credit for the vote. Neither could he console himself with Northern reaction to his outburst: even the New York newspapers called it “indiscreet,” “unfortunate,” and “in extremely bad taste.” Bruised and rueful, he hoped for passage of his Cuban reciprocity bill, as a sign that Congress was not totally hostile toward him.
ANOTHER MEASURE, HOWEVER, had precedence in the legislative logjam. On Wednesday, 4 June, Senator Morgan called for the reading of House Resolution 3110, “To provide for the construction of a canal connecting the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” Despite January’s Canal Commission turnaround on Panama, Morgan was confident that the Nicaragua route would prevail. His own Committee on Interoceanic Canals had reported in favor of it, seven to four. Parliamentary rules required a reading of Senator Spooner’s half-forgotten amendment to the resolution:
Be it enacted & c. That the President of the United States is hereby authorized to acquire, for and on behalf of the United States, at a cost not exceeding $40,000,000, the rights, concessions, grants of lands [etc.] owned by the New Panama Canal Company, of France.… The President is hereby authorized to acquire … a strip of land, the territory of the Republic of Colombia, ten miles in width, extending from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean … and to excavate, construct, and to perpetually maintain, operate and protect thereon, a canal, of such depth and capacity as will afford convenient passage of ships of the greatest tonnage and draft now in use.
Morgan laid down his copy of the amendment with an old man’s tremor, and made his final, weary plea for the Nicaragua route. He had no new technological arguments to present. Instead, he spent half an hour condemning Panama as a cesspool of racial and political squalor. He expressed Alabaman disgust for its “low grade” population. Panamanians were not only unclean, but unstable: they lived—always had lived—in “a chronic