Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [69]
For a quarter of a century, environmental pioneers had urged the construction of vast irrigation systems to collect and distribute Western floodwaters. John Wesley Powell and WJ McGee noted that the arid lands thus reclaimed—one third of the total area of the United States—could be sold to farmers and ranchers, and the profits recycled for further reclamation. But Congress had responded with unenforceable public land laws, allowing a “water monopoly” to grow up in the West. This combination levied extortionate rates where supply was meager, and dried out established communities in order to irrigate speculative tracts elsewhere.
Roosevelt expressed “keen personal pride” in the reclamation measure. It seemed to him properly to combine federal responsibility with private enterprise, in that water rights would be sold, deposit-free and interest-free, to small farmers, who would eventually repay the government out of the profits from their irrigated property. Although it was offered in the appropriate name of Francis G. Newlands (D., Nevada), the President felt that it had grown out of the irrigation proposals of his First Annual Message, and he protested vehemently when Newlands claimed authorship.
Cannon ignored Roosevelt’s letter, but a majority of the House, responding to strong White House pressure, voted in favor of the bill. The Senate followed suit. On 17 June 1902, Roosevelt delightedly signed the National Reclamation Act into law. It funded a six-hundred-man civil-engineering force within the National Geological Survey, and conjured up, like some glittering grail of future prosperity, a vision of dams and aqueducts bejeweling the country’s unwatered tracts. “They must be built for permanence and safety,” the President urged, “for they are to last and spread prosperity for centuries.”
Reclamationists spoke almost drunkenly of supporting a new population of one hundred million, and creating such opportunities for American producers as to make the current economy seem like penury. Mark Hanna praised the act as Theodore Roosevelt’s first major legislative achievement, and said that its importance would grow with the years. “People have not paid much attention to this business.… It’s a damn big thing.”
DURING THE NEXT two days, the Senator, grumbling “he was two thirds crazy, he was so tired,” launched a final blitz for Panama votes. Bunau-Varilla conducted a simultaneous propaganda campaign, sending every Senator a Nicaraguan postage stamp showing the live cone of Momotombo. “An official witness,” he typed beneath, “of the volcanic activity of the Isthmus of Nicaragua.” Cromwell lobbied in his own secretive fashion. One by one, the ten votes Hanna needed slipped from the Nicaragua checklist. When it was clear that Panama would prevail, the slippage became an avalanche. The final tally, on 19 June, was 67 to 6 in favor of a Panama canal.
By a margin of 44 to 34, the Senate also approved the Spooner Amendment. Theodore Roosevelt, nine months President of the United States, was handed power to join the world’s largest oceans. Forty million dollars—the largest sum in real-estate history, dwarfing the Louisiana Purchase—was placed at his disposal, plus $130 million in construction funds. Exultant, he forecast that the Panama Canal would be “the great bit of work of my administration, and from the material and constructive standpoint one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see.”
ROOSEVELT’S EUPHORIA WAS short-lived, because two days later a delegation of Republican leaders informed him that his Special Message on Cuba had failed. Hearteningly, though, Senators Aldrich, Platt, Hanna, Spooner, and Foraker had all backed him up. But the party’s endemic inability to agree on tariff reciprocity had defeated even them. He had to take what comfort he could in widespread admiration for his goodwill toward Cuba and his “spectacular courage.” Even the New York Evening Post, not usually complimentary, had called him “a brave man and a real President.”
Somewhat cheered, Roosevelt left town on 24 June