The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century - Hardcover

Clay Risen is the deputy op-ed editor at The New York Times and the award-nominated author of The Crowded Hour; Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland; The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act; the bestselling American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit; and A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

The Crowded Hour CHAPTER 1

“THE PUERILITY OF HIS SIMPLIFICATIONS”

On January 13, 1898, John D. Long, the secretary of the navy, was sitting in his office in the State, War and Navy Building, a Second Empire jumble of columns and mansard roofs next to the Executive Mansion that Mark Twain had called the ugliest edifice in America. Long, fifty-nine, was a stoop-shouldered, gently cerebral former governor of Massachusetts whom President William McKinley had called out of private legal practice in Hingham, a coastal town south of Boston, to serve in his cabinet. He was an able administrator and politician, but he was happiest writing poetry and reading Latin; one of his proudest achievements was publishing a verse translation of The Aeneid.1

Long was, in other words, the exact opposite of Theodore Roosevelt, his assistant secretary, who at that minute burst into his boss’s morning reverie. Roosevelt shut the door and, Long recalled, “Began in his usual emphatic and dead-in-earnest manner” to run through his latest efforts on the part of the department. Then, his face reddening, Roosevelt turned to Cuba, along with Puerto Rico the last remnant of the once vast Spanish Empire in the Western Hemisphere, and his certainty that Spain and the United States would soon come to blows over the island’s struggle for independence. “He told me that, in case of war with Spain, he intends to abandon everything and go to the front,” Long wrote.2

The cause of Roosevelt’s eruption that day was an anti-American riot in Havana on January 12. The McKinley administration was putting diplomatic pressure on Spain to reach an end to its war in Cuba; after rumors reached Havana that the government in Madrid had finally agreed to Washington’s demands, Spanish loyalists and soldiers had rampaged across the center of the island’s capital, attacking newspaper offices and the American consulate. Fitzhugh Lee, the consul general in Havana, cabled Washington with the news: While there was little damage to American property, the violence bode poorly for any hope of a negotiated settlement to the nearly three-year war, which had decimated the Cuban economy and killed well over 100,000 civilians, along with tens of thousands of Spanish soldiers and Cuban rebels.3

Long kept quiet as his assistant seethed. One didn’t just listen to Roosevelt; one felt him. He seemed to have no inside voice. He expounded grandiloquently before crowds as small as one, in forums as intimate as the office of the secretary of the navy. He had a slightly high pitch to his voice and he spoke in rapid spurts, with long vowels and chopped-off consonants. He boomed, he hissed, he spat out words—“bully!,” “delighted!”—like a Gatling gun. And he didn’t speak merely with his mouth: His whole body shook in rhythm, his fists banging into his palms to drive home a point. But while he was often full of bluster, it wasn’t hot air. Roosevelt was widely regarded as one of the most intelligent, well-read people in Washington, with a steel-trap of a mind and an ability to recall minor facts consumed years before. Even his detractors found Roosevelt’s extemporaneous orations a thing to behold: He could speak off the cuff about everything from New England wildlife to German politics, whatever fit the moment.4

Still, it could be a lot to take in, and those who tolerated Roosevelt usually did so with resignation, rarely with enthusiasm. In the months since they had joined the department together, Long had learned to manage Roosevelt’s energies, a full-time job in itself. When he wasn’t preparing for war with Cuba, Roosevelt was ordering up new warships, or restructuring the department’s procurement policy, or investigating mismanagement at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. “He bores me with plans of naval and military movement,” Long wrote in his journal the night after Roosevelt barged into his office. “By tomorrow morning, he will have got half a dozen heads of bureaus together and have spoiled twenty pages of good writing paper, and lain awake half the night.”5

Roosevelt had been thrust upon Long by President McKinley, and he in turn had been thrust upon McKinley by New York politics and Roosevelt’s close friend Henry Cabot Lodge, a Republican senator from Massachusetts. Long appreciated Roosevelt for his energy, but he would have much preferred a quietly competent career naval officer as his second. Unlike Roosevelt, Long did not think war was coming. If anything, he was naive about the situation in Cuba and Spain’s desire and ability to improve it. “My own notion is that Spain is not only doing the best it can, but is going very well in its present treatment of the island,” Long wrote in his diary. “Our government certainly has nothing to complain of.”6

More than temperament divided the two men. They came from different generations—both born on October 27, Long was exactly twenty years older than Roosevelt—and had vastly different ideas about America and its place in the world. Long’s generation was both scarred and motivated by the experience of the Civil War; they knew what war was, and they believed that their achievements since—social stability, economic growth, industrialization, and the closing of the Western frontier—had made large-scale conflict unnecessary, at least as far as the United States was concerned. Minor wars might embroil Europe, but Europe was far away. Wise, sustained growth and a restrained, conservative foreign policy, the hallmarks of the Republican Party and its domination of national politics in the late nineteenth century, would ensure that America would never again face the horrors of war, domestic or otherwise. With no small amount of self-awareness, Long called a published edition of his diary America of Yesterday.

Roosevelt stood out even among his generation in taking exception to Long’s vision of the world. He had grown up in the shadow of the Civil War and its veterans; he admired (and envied) their experience, but also questioned why, after such a searing war, they should be so afraid of another one that they refused even to prepare for it—an error that, Roosevelt believed, made another war more likely. Even more, it was America’s responsibility, to its own interests as well as the world’s, to use its growing power to shape foreign affairs. In his own autobiography, Roosevelt called the chapter on the Spanish-American War “The War of America the Unready.”

· · ·

Born in Manhattan in 1858 and called Teedie by his family, Roosevelt later described himself as a scrawny, sickly child, hindered by asthma and poor eyesight—“a great little home-boy,” his sister Bamie said. To make up for his self-perceived deficiencies, he spent long hours as a boy exercising, hiking, and swimming. He kept daily records of his physical activity and subsequent gains in strength, weight, and stamina. He worked out alone when necessary, but he liked a partner because he favored violent sports, especially boxing. His love for the pugilistic arts continued long after he reached maturity, even after he returned from Cuba—as governor of New York, he had a ring installed in his mansion in Albany.7

Whatever physical ailments Roosevelt suffered, his greatest debilitation was his hero worship of his father, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. “My father was the best man I ever knew,” Theodore Junior said. In letters and diary entries, he called his father “Greatheart,” after the heroic giant-slayer in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Theodore Senior was born into wealth and proved a proficient if sometimes distracted businessman; he engaged with politics but resisted the opportunities that America’s unbound postwar corruption offered. He cofounded New York institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. But he had also avoided service during the Civil War by hiring someone to go in his place—a legal, not uncommon avenue for wealthy Americans to get out of their martial obligations, but one that his son could never quite square with his faith in his father’s courage. Nor was his father able to give him the paternal support his son needed; Roosevelt Senior loved his family deeply, but was also often absent from it, away on business. And then he died, of stomach cancer, when his Teedie was nineteen and a sophomore at Harvard. What this all amounted to, in the figure of Theodore Junior, was a man who burst with energy and intelligence, came from sufficient wealth to give him room to exploit his gifts, and carried an enormous chip on his shoulder. A man who had nothing to prove seemed to believe that he had everything to prove.

While still a teenager, Roosevelt climbed mountains in Maine and Switzerland, Germany and upstate New York. He taught himself taxidermy, and practiced it avidly, frequently emerging from his room covered in the blood of some animal he had killed on a weekend hunting trip. At Harvard he lifted himself from a middling B average as a freshman to Phi Beta Kappa; he was invited to join the Porcellian Club, the most exclusive undergraduate social organization on campus; and on the side wrote a book, The Naval War of 1812, that remained a standard text in college classrooms for decades. Along the way, he built himself from being “a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development,” as one classmate recalled, into a physical brute, strutting about the Yard, often shirtless, with gnarly muttonchops bewhiskering his cheeks. He once rowed from Long Island to Connecticut, alone, in a single day, a full twenty-five miles. Some of the stories told about Roosevelt as a Harvard man later proved apocryphal, but like so much in his life, their veracity is beside the point: The myth is inextricable from the man. Roosevelt also developed a reputation as an ill-tempered, prudish elitist—uninterested in anyone not of the “gentleman-sort”—and as a result had few friends around Cambridge. In fact, what he disdained were the leisure classes. He admired those whom he judged, fairly or not, to come from hearty, hardy New England stock, whether they had used their brains and brawn to build wealth or simply earn a good day’s pay. He had no time for those who took to the lighter side of life, who accepted the “gentleman’s C,” at Harvard or later as adults.8

As he neared the end of his studies, Roosevelt wasn’t sure where to go next. Looking back, his career from graduation to inauguration as president—spanning just twenty-one years—seems to follow a straight line from achievement to achievement, from strength to strength. But in fact he often felt undirected and unwilling to commit to one single endeavor. He inherited a small fortune from his father, paying about $8,000 a year (a little under $200,000 in 2018), which allowed him to live comfortably without having to work for an income. His real love was science, especially what would later be called evolutionary biology, but was put off by the fact that serious graduate work, at the time, meant years studying in Germany, home to the world’s best research institutions.9

Lacking a specific direction, Roosevelt went to law school, at Columbia. But he had already fallen into local politics, and left school in 1881 without graduating to run for, and win, election to the New York State Assembly. He proved an able and energetic politician, committed to the Republican Party but also willing to buck against its establishment in pushing reform bills. He led an anticorruption campaign against the railroad tycoon Jay Gould, and another campaign to ban the home manufacture of cigars. In all this he made no shortage of enemies, who called the twenty-three-year-old legislator “Young Squirt,” “Weakling,” and, most colorfully, “Jane-Daddy.” Two years later, just as his political career was taking off, Roosevelt’s wife, Alice, died from Bright’s disease (kidney inflammation) soon after she had given birth to their daughter, and on the same day that his mother passed away, in the same house. Though he rarely spoke about his first wife again, Roosevelt was devastated. A few months afterward (and following the 1884 Republican National Convention in Chicago, where he tried, and failed, to block the nomination of James G. Blaine) he left political life and his daughter behind and moved to the Dakota Territory, where he intended to become a cattle rancher.10

Roosevelt had already spent time in the Dakotas, hunting deer and bison along the Little Missouri River. It was more than a hobby; his connection to the West was part of his self-identity: Almost immediately and for the rest of his life, he liked to tell crowds that he was “at heart as much a Westerner as an Easterner.” Still, when he arrived in the town of Medora, near his new ranchstead, he was greeted skeptically, even derisively, on account of his thick glasses and unsullied clothing. He was, by appearance, a dude. As a group of cowhands watched, he dismounted and walked into the town’s general store. While he was inside one of the men switched his saddle and bridle to a similar-looking, but very wild, bronco they called White-Faced Kid. Roosevelt came out of the store, mounted the horse—and the animal bucked him straight in the air.

The shopkeeper, Joe Ferris, came running out. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“Not a bit,” said Roosevelt. He remounted the horse, and once again went skyward.

“It’s too bad I broke my glasses” was all he said, and he went inside for a new pair. And once again, he got back on the horse, who this time went flying off down the street with Roosevelt still in the saddle, dust clouds whirling behind them. The crowd grew worried; someone went looking for a doctor. But after a few minutes Roosevelt returned, shouting and grinning and trotting along on White-Faced Kid. “We took a shine to him from that very day,” recalled one of the ranch hands, Fred Herrig, who years later would join Roosevelt as a Rough Rider in Cuba. “Any fellow who could ride White-Faced Kid at one trial and holler like that was the man for our money; except that we didn’t have any money, until we’d hired out to Roosevelt.”11

Despite his dramatic entrance, ranching proved one of the few failures of Roosevelt’s life. He simply couldn’t commit to the unending demands that came with being a cattle baron. He frequently returned to New York to see his daughter and keep his hand in state politics. On those trips he also began to court a childhood sweetheart, Edith Carow; the two were married in 1886. After a blizzard killed off most of his cattle, he conceded that one could not be a part-time rancher, like one could be a gentleman farmer back East, and sold his stock and property for a loss. It was inevitable, blizzard or not—his life was on the East Coast. In 1887 Edith gave birth to their first of five children, Theodore III (later known as “Junior,” despite being third in the line), and Roosevelt began building a sprawling house for his new family in the village of Oyster Bay, on the North Shore of Long Island. He called his home Sagamore Hil...