The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (118 page)

His industry during that first month confirms Henry Adams’s remark, “Theodore Roosevelt … was pure act.”
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In just twenty-two days of official duty he managed to write a report of his tour of the Naval Militia; inspect a fleet of first- and second-class battleships off Sandy Hook; expedite a stalled order for diagonal-armor supplies; devise a public-relations plan for press coverage of the forthcoming North Atlantic Squadron exercises; set up a board to investigate ways of relieving the chronic dry-dock shortage; introduce a new post-tradership system; weigh and pronounce verdict upon the Brooklyn Navy Yard probe; surreptitiously backdate a Bureau of Navigation employment form in order to favor a protégé of Senator Cushman Davis; extend his anti-red-tape reforms to cover battleships and cruisers; eliminate the department’s backlog of unfilled appointments; draw up an elaborate cruising schedule for the new torpedo-boat flotilla; settle a row between the Bureaus of
Ordnance and Construction; review the relative work programs in various navy yards; draft a naval personnel reform bill, and fire all Navy Department employees who rated a sub
-70
mark in the semiannual fitness reports—all the while making regular reports to the vacationing Secretary, in tones calculated both to soothe and flatter. “I shan’t send you anything, unless it is really important,” Roosevelt wrote. “You must be tired, and you ought to have an entire rest.” He begged Long not to answer his letters, “for I don’t want you bothered at all.” As for coming back after Labor Day, there was “not the slightest earthly reason” to return before the end of September.
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Long, happily pottering about his garden, was more than content to remain away.
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Ensconced as he was in rural Massachusetts, he probably did not see a lengthy analysis, in the
New York Sun
of 23 August, of European reaction to the expansionist movement in the United States. One paragraph read:

“Yes, indeed,” Roosevelt was writing, “I wish I could be with you for just a little while and see the lovely hill farm to which your grandfather came over ninety years ago.… Now, stay there just exactly as long as you want to.”
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I
N HIS “SPARE HOURS,”
as he put it, Roosevelt amused himself by writing and editing another volume of Boone & Crockett Club big-game lore, dictating one of his enormous, prophetic letters to Cecil Spring Rice (“If Russia chooses to develop purely on her own line and resist the growth of liberalism … she will sometime experience a red terror that will make the French Revolution pale”),
⁸³
and assembling a series of quotations by various Presidents on the
subject of an aggressive Navy. As he read his anthology through, it struck him as a powerful piece of propaganda, and he determined to publish it, after first mailing the text to Long for approval.
⁸⁴

The Secretary saw no harm in it, providing that Roosevelt inserted the words “in my opinion” somewhere in the Introduction, to show that it was not an official statement of policy by the Navy Department.
⁸⁵
An advance copy was sent to President McKinley on 30 August, and in early September the Government Printing Office issued it under the title
The Naval Policy of America as Outlined in Messages of the Presidents of the United States from the Beginning to the Present Day.
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It drew admiring comment in most newspapers, “timely” being the adjective most frequently used. Besides being a miniature history of the U.S. Navy, the pamphlet showed a striking similarity of thought between Presidents Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, and Grant on the one hand, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt on the other. No quotations by Thomas Jefferson were deemed worthy of inclusion.
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A
BOUT THIS TIME
Roosevelt added yet another influential voice to his expansionist propaganda machine.
⁸⁸
William Allen White was not yet thirty, but he was proprietor and editor of a powerful Midwestern newspaper, the
Emporia Gazette
, and had won a national following in 1896 with a diatribe against the Populists, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Printed first as an editorial in his own paper, then reprinted and distributed in millions of copies by Mark Hanna, the piece had been the single most effective broadsheet of McKinley’s campaign.
⁸⁹
Roosevelt had read the famous editorial with interest. Here was the natural Republican antidote to William Jennings Bryan, and a much better metaphorist to boot. If he could take White in hand and teach him the gospel of expansionism, he would enlarge his own sphere of influence by thousands of readers and thousands of square miles. Roosevelt did not care
who
propounded Rooseveltian views, even if they won glory by doing so: what mattered was that the message got through. When he heard that White was in Washington on a patronage mission, he asked for him to be sent down to the Navy Department.
⁹⁰

Blond, red-faced, and pudgy, White looked the typical corn-fed “hick” journalist, yet his intelligence was acute, and his language rich and rolling as the Midwest itself. Their meeting was casual—little more than a handshake and an agreement to have lunch next day—but Roosevelt was so radiant with newfound power that White was unable to sit down for excitement afterward. “I was afire with the splendor of the personality that I had met.”
⁹¹

The little Kansan was still “stepping on air” the following afternoon, when Roosevelt escorted him to the Metropolitan Club and signaled for the menu.
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Both men were compulsive eaters and compulsive talkers, and for the next hour they awarded each other equal time, greed alternating with rhetoric. In old age White fondly recalled “double mutton chops … seas of speculation … excursions of delight, into books and men and manners, poetry and philosophy.”
⁹³

Roosevelt spoke with shocking frankness about the leaders of the government, expressing “scorn” for McKinley and “disgust” for the “deep and damnable alliance between business and politics” that Mark Hanna was constructing. White, whose worship of the Gold Dollar amounted to religion, flinched at this blasphemy, yet within another hour he was converted:

Later they strolled for a while under the elms of F Street, and when they parted “I was his man.” Years later White tried to analyze the elements of Roosevelt’s conquering ability. It was not social superiority, he decided, nor political eminence, nor erudition;
it was something vaguer and more spiritual, “the undefinable equation of his identity, body, mind, emotion, the soul of him … It was youth and the new order calling youth away from the old order. It was the inexorable coming of change into life, the passing of the old into the new.”
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W
HEN
A
CTING
S
ECRETARY
Roosevelt boarded the battleship
Iowa
on Tuesday, 7 September, the Virginia Capes had long since slipped below the horizon.
⁹⁶
Apart from a forlorn speck of color floating some twenty-five-hundred yards off—the target for today’s gunnery exercises—the world consisted of little but blue sky and glassy water, in which seven white ships of the North Atlantic Squadron sat with the solidity of buildings. Biggest and most sophisticated by far was the eleven-thousand-ton
Iowa
, a masterpiece of naval engineering, and the equal of any German or British battleship. She was so new that she had not yet engaged in target practice, and many of her crew had never even heard her guns fired.

Captain William Sampson welcomed Roosevelt aboard and escorted him to the bridge amid a terrific clamor of gongs. The decks were cleared for action, breakables stowed away, and porthole-panes left to swing idly as sailors scampered to their stations. Roosevelt, who had just been lunching with the Admiral, looked placid and happy. Word went around that he wanted to see how quickly the “enemy” could be demolished.

The jangling of the gongs gave way to silence, broken only by a general hum of automatic machinery. (It was the constructor’s boast that almost nothing on the
Iowa
was done by hand “except the opening and closing of throttles and pressing of electric buttons.”)
⁹⁷
A surgeon distributed ear-plugs to the Acting Secretary and his party.
⁹⁸
“Open your mouth, stand on your toes, and let your frame hang loosely,” he advised.

“Two thousand yards,” called a cadet monitoring the ship’s course. A few seconds later there was a silent flash of fire and smoke from the 8-inch guns, followed by a thunderous report that shook the
Iowa
from stem to stern. Plumes of spray indicated that the shells were fifty yards short of target. A second salvo landed on range, but slightly to one side. Bugles announced that the
Iowa’s
main battery of 12-inch guns was now being aimed at the floating speck. There was an apprehensive pause, followed by such vast concussions of air, metal, and water that a lifeboat was stove in, and several locked steel doors burst their hinges. Two members of Roosevelt’s party, who had forgotten to assume the necessary simian stance, were jerked into the air, and landed clasping each other wordlessly. They were escorted below for ear ointment, while Roosevelt continued to squint at the target through smoke-begrimed spectacles. Had it been a Spanish battleship, and not a shattered frame of wood and canvas, it would now be sinking.

The exercises lasted another two days, and Roosevelt returned to Washington profoundly moved by what he had seen. “Oh, Lord! If only the people who are ignorant about our Navy could see those great warships in all their majesty and beauty, and could realize how well they are handled, and how well fitted to uphold the honor of America.”
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