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By Root 1054 0

enemies in New York politics with his reformist victories, many saw him as the man to drag a muddled Washington bureaucracy and outmoded American military into the inner sanctum of the great Western powers. Though initially overlooked by McKinley, as Roosevelt was “always getting into rows with everybody,” the president-elect warmed to the man and placed the former New York firebrand in a relatively insulated position in his administration as the non - decision - making assistant secretary of the navy. Roosevelt would, in essence, become a toothless dog, all bark and no bite. After all, they thought, what harm could he do if he was kept busy with running unending series of tedious administrative errands?

After a brisk summer of report readings, military consultation, and innocuous facility inspections, the new assistant secretary of the navy set about improving America’s standing as a world power with his limited resources. As Roosevelt began overseeing weapons tests, personnel shifts, and supply reorganizations, he publicly shared his views of his administration. He called cowardice “an unpardonable sin,” charged that “no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrate of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasures, its tears like water rather than to admit to the loss of honor and renown,” and charged the navy with overcoming tradition in the pursuit of war preparedness and eternal vigilance.

President McKinley and Secretary of Navy John Long scolded Theodore Roosevelt for his presumptuousness and inflammatory rhetoric but went no further. The assistant secretary of the navy’s words, deemed the idiosyncratic trappings of an attention-grabbing upstart New Yorker, were considered brief flashes of annoyance when measured against the positive image Roosevelt held with the press as well as the general public. Even an angry toothless dog could be kept at heel if tethered to a short enough leash.

Meanwhile, the island of Cuba was in revolt.

Though a seemingly inconsequential geographic location, the Spanish-held Caribbean island had been a key trading point for centuries of American–European commerce, but as the Triangle Trade (slaves to sugar/molasses to rum) grew obsolete with the demise of the international slave trade and the rise of the machine age, the island’s international importance and economic feasibility sharply declined (as did the failing power of the Spanish Empire). Long past their former glory, the once-grand European power of Spain and her minor Caribbean colony had been reduced to the level of subsistence at the price of her lower classes.

Ironically, in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the United States had just about become Spanish Cuba’s main economic investor (according to Stefan Lorant in The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt, in 1893 alone the United States had held $100 million in trade with the meager island nation), but American speculation in Cuba’s sugar harvesting and related industries in recent years was becoming strained. Determined to wring their full measure from the colonials, Spain turned toward the employment of excessive military force to extract more economic worth from the already strained colony. Pushed too far, the Cuban people took to the hills and the streets in protest and the island devolved into revolution.

Though Spain had put down similar rebellions across their once - world - spanning empire in the past, the empire had never before met the outrage and indignation of the American press or the deft machinations of America’s political undercurrent. Each day mainstream and yellow journalists across the United States fanned the flames of outrage and righteous indignation as they painted the colonies of the failing Spanish Empire in the same colors as America’s first generation of revolutionaries. As Spain moved to implement extreme measures to pacify the rebellion, the American populace added their voice in support of “Cuba Libre,” and Theodore Roosevelt made his move.

Throwing