Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [68]
For another hour, Hanna cited alarming seismological, social, and navigational evidence against Nicaragua. Even as he spoke, Mont Pelée was erupting again. Reports of his speech in the evening newspapers jostled news of sky-darkening clouds and six-foot fluctuations of sea level.
AS LONG AS THE canal debate lasted, the President kept his own counsel. Two senators visited him with learned arguments for Nicaragua, and he listened to them solemnly, scribbling on a notepad. Had they been able to look over his shoulder, they would have seen that he was merely doodling the names of his children, over and over again.
MEANWHILE, HIS CUBAN reciprocity bill was being lobbied to death. The House of Representatives had authorized him to grant a 20 percent tariff reduction on all Cuban exports to the United States—with the exception of refined sugar, which could come in free. But this last, seemingly generous provision guaranteed opposition in the upper chamber. Senators beholden to the American refining industry—mainly Easterners, mainly Democrats—objected to foreign favoritism, while Senators from states that produced beet sugar—mainly Westerners, mainly Republicans—condemned the bill as antiprotectionist. “I wish,” Roosevelt sighed, “that Cuba grew steel and glass.”
Common sense suggested that he leave trade policy to such experts as Nelson Aldrich. But his always active conscience (“In this particular case of reciprocity a moral question is concerned”) plagued him. And morality aside, he believed that commercial sweets would reconcile Cubans to the sour taste of a United States garrison at Guantánamo.
On 13 June, Roosevelt took the bold step of sending Congress a “Special Message on Cuba.” He did so knowing that the Message could well fail, and advertise to the world that he had no power of presidential persuasion. It might even lead to a general tariff battle, a split party, and defeat for himself in 1904. His hope against hope was that the warring senators would be shamed into a compromise. “Cuba is a young republic,” he wrote, “still weak, who owes to us her birth, whose future, whose very life, must depend on our attitude toward her.”
Some senators detected a note of self-identification in this appeal, and guffawed as it was read aloud. Meanwhile, sugar-heavy freighters wallowed in the island’s ports, symbols of prosperity held in check.
ANOTHER CAUSE DEAR to Roosevelt’s heart—reclamation of the arid West—was preoccupying the House that same day. He did not want to have a second Special Message laughed at, so he wrote a passionate letter to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee:
My dear Mr. Cannon: I do not believe that I have ever before written to an individual legislator in favor of an individual bill, but I break through my rule to ask you as earnestly as I can not to oppose the [National Reclamation Bill]. Believe me this is something of which I have made a careful study, and great and real though my deference is for your knowledge of legislation, and for your attitude in stopping expense, yet I feel from my acquaintance with the Far West that it would be a genuine and rankling injustice for the Republican party to kill this measure. I believe in it with all my heart from any standpoint.… Surely it is but simple justice for us to give the arid regions a measure of relief, the financial burden of which will be but trifling.… I cannot too strongly express my feeling upon this matter.
Faithfully yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
Representative Joseph (“Not One Cent for Scenery”) Cannon was Congress’s leading anticonservationist. In Illinois, where he hailed from, well-watered corn thrust tall out of the nation’s richest soil. But the President spoke for a harsher, more remote West, where recent settlers struggled to fertilize the desert. He had tasted enough alkali dust as a young rancher in the Badlands to understand the desperation of stockmen unable to breed, farmers unable to reap or sow.