Neither Roosevelt nor Taft could have anticipated that an insurgent rebellion against Spanish rule on the small island of Cuba would soon redirect their energies, and alter both their destinies.
THE POST OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY of the Navy proved difficult to secure for Theodore Roosevelt. Taft and Lodge lobbied intensely for his appointment and were joined in their campaign by Maria Storer, a prominent Washington socialite whose husband, Bellamy, had contributed $10,000 to a private fund so that McKinley could retire his debts. The new president was hesitant to appoint the young New Yorker. “I want peace,” he told Maria Storer, “and I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.” When Taft pressed Theodore’s case, McKinley remained unconvinced. “The truth is, Will, Roosevelt is always in such a state of mind,” he replied. Roosevelt’s friends refused to give up. “Judge Taft, one of the best fellows going, plunged in last week,” Lodge reported to Roosevelt. He enlisted the help of both John Addison Porter, his fellow Bonesman at Yale, who would soon become the president’s secretary, and Myron T. Herrick, one of the president-elect’s closest Ohio friends. “Give him a chance to prove that he can be peaceful,” Maria Storer begged. McKinley finally relented, though Taft later speculated that “more than once, when [Roosevelt] was joining with those who demanded war with Spain and almost attacking the Administration for not declaring it, I think McKinley wished he had been anywhere else than where he was.”
Even before assuming his post in the Navy Department, Roosevelt had insisted that he “would rather welcome a foreign war.” He feared that Americans had lost their “soldierly virtues” in the race for material gain and were becoming “slothful, timid,” and sedentary. “The victories of peace are great; but the victories of war are greater,” he maintained. “No merchant, no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men.” While McKinley, who had “seen the dead piled up” at Antietam, prayed for peace, Roosevelt, who had never seen combat, absurdly romanticized war. “Every man who has in him any real power of joy in battle,” he blithely wrote, “knows that he feels it when the wolf begins to rise in his heart; he does not shrink from blood and sweat, or deem that they mar the fight; he revels in them, in the toil, the pain and the danger, as but setting off the triumph.” No sooner had Roosevelt settled into his office in the Navy Department than he “became convinced” that war with Spain over Cuba was imminent.
For more than two years, Cuban freedom fighters had engaged in a guerrilla war against their Spanish occupiers. Spanish authorities had retaliated by imposing martial law throughout the island, incarcerating nearly a third of the Cuban population in unsanitary concentration camps without sufficient food, water, or medical treatment. Led by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, yellow journals carried daily, often exaggerated reports of Spanish treachery that aroused humanitarian outrage. These concerns combined with economic interests in the island to fuel jingoist sentiment in favor of intervention. In November 1897, Roosevelt confided to a friend that he recommended going to war with Spain “on the ground of both humanity and self-interest,” also citing “the benefit done to our people by giving them something to think of which isn’t material gain.”
Working under the elderly Navy secretary, John Davis Long, Roosevelt did everything in his power to prepare the U.S. Navy for war. During the long summer months when his boss vacationed in New England, Roosevelt exercised a “free hand” to purchase guns, ammunition, and supplies. He generated war plans, scheduled additional gunnery drills, stocked distant supply stations with coal, consulted Captain Alfred Mahan about the need for new battleships, and succeeded in having Admiral George Dewey placed in command of the Asiatic Fleet. “I am having immense fun running the Navy,” he boasted to Bellamy Storer.
Henry Pringle notes that “it is not easy to draw a line between Roosevelt’s anxiety to build up the navy, which was legitimate preparedness, and his lust for war.” In a comical stream of letters, Roosevelt repeatedly urged Secretary Long to prolong his vacation. “There isn’t the slightest necessity of your returning,” he told Long on June 22, 1897. “Nothing of importance has arisen.” More obviously solicitous a fortnight later, he wrote again: “You must be tired, and you ought to have an entire rest.” Three weeks later, he recommended that Long “stay there just exactly as long as you want to. There isn’t any reason you should be here before the 1st of October.” If Long had any thought of ending his vacation, Roosevelt reminded him that he was fortunate to avoid Washington and the hottest summer in memory.
In January 1898, McKinley agreed to station the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor as “an act of friendly courtesy” to the Cuban people. Steadfastly, however, he continued to resist mounting pressure for intervention. Then, on February 15, the Maine exploded, killing 262 Americans. Though the cause of the explosion was never determined with certainty, Roosevelt immediately labeled the sinking “an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards,” declaring that as prelude to war, he “would give anything if President McKinley would order the fleet to Havana tomorrow.”
THE VERY MORNING AFTER THE explosion of the Maine in Havana Harbor, Ida Tarbell was scheduled to meet with Army chief General Nelson Miles, the subject of a planned McClure’s article. Upon hearing the news, she assumed her appointment would be canceled. “It seemed as if the very air of Washington stood still,” she recalled. But when she arrived at his office, she was surprised to find that “the routine went on as usual.” She would long admire “the steadiness of General Miles” during those troublesome hours, as orderlies periodically interrupted their interview to deliver updated casualty reports.
In the weeks that followed, Tarbell “vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him.” While Roosevelt derided McKinley’s insistence upon a thorough investigation, Ida respected the president’s “suspension of judgment” until it could be determined if the blast was an accident or sabotage. Her esteem for McKinley’s restraint was matched by her disgust at Roosevelt’s “excited goings-on,” which she witnessed during her frequent appointments with General Miles—the departments of War, Navy, and State then being housed together in the Old Executive Office Building. While others worked with steadfast composure to address the crisis, Roosevelt “tore up and down the wide marble halls,” she contemptuously recalled, “like a boy on roller skates.” War had not yet been declared, yet “already he saw himself an important unit in an invading army.”
Though Tarbell was later drawn to the compelling energy of Roosevelt’s “amazing” personality, her initial assessment of his unseemly, overwrought avidity for war was wholly accurate. “I am more grieved and indignant than I can say at there being any delay on our part in a matter like this,” he told his brother-in-law, William Sheffield Cowles. “A great crisis is upon us, and if we do not rise level to it, we shall have spotted the pages of our history with a dark blot of shame.” He had no patience with President McKinley, whose “weakness and vacillation” he considered “even more ludicrous than painful.” He summarily rejected all who argued against intervention, dismissing any possibility of legitimate objection. “The only effective forces against the war are the forces inspired by greed and fear,” he categorically proclaimed, “and the forces that tell in favor of war are the belief in national honor and common humanity.”
As Tarbell feared, the “warlike element” on the Hill, the yellow press, and an aroused public sentiment exerted a combined pressure that proved “too much” for McKinley to resist: “He steadily grew paler and thinner, and his eyes seemed more deep-set than ever,” she noted. On April 11, 1898, he finally summoned Congress to authorize armed intervention in Cuba. Two weeks later, the United States formally declared war against Spain. Later that same day, Secretary Long c
abled Admiral Dewey to “proceed at once to Philippine Islands,” using “utmost endeavor” to attack the Spanish fleet.
That Dewey was equipped to win the famous Battle of Manila Bay was largely due to Roosevelt’s exertions months earlier. As acting secretary, he had ordered the squadron to Hong Kong at the beginning of the year. “Keep full of coal,” Roosevelt had cabled Dewey when Long was out of the office: “In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast.” Indeed, Taft later asserted, “if it had not been for Theodore Roosevelt, we would never have been in a position to declare war, for it was he and only he who got from Congress sufficient ammunition to back any bluff we might make with actual play.”
The war marked a turning point in the lives of Roosevelt and Taft, and signaled a transformation in the nature of McClure’s magazine. “In all its earlier years,” Tarbell explained, the publication had sought “to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers.” It strove to provide “an eager welcome” to newly discovered fiction writers and poets, introducing recent inventions in science, while illuminating “the best of the old” in its extended series on Napoleon, Lincoln, and the Civil War. In the spring of 1898, however, McClure jettisoned plans for the June issue to create a special war edition, which, in the months ahead, led to “a continuous flow of war articles.” Tarbell was assigned to cover McKinley’s White House, Baker to analyze how the press reported the war, and White to gauge the heartland’s response to the president’s call for 125,000 volunteers. Stephen Crane and Frank Norris were recruited as correspondents from the warfront. “The editors of McClure’s Magazine, in common with thousands of other American citizens, have to face new conditions and new interests,” McClure told his readers. “We hope to obtain a record that will have absorbing human and dramatic interest,” he explained, “and one that will prove to be of permanent historical value.”
The shift from historical research to current affairs had a profound effect upon Ida Tarbell. She had contemplated returning to Paris after completing her Lincoln series, but realized, she later wrote, that she “could not run away to a foreign land” and become “a mere spectator.” Her new assignment allowed an intimate perspective on the hard choices confronting McKinley: “I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service,” she recalled, “of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it?” While others inflamed public sentiment with sensational reports, Tarbell relied upon documentary evidence and dozens of interviews with cabinet officers, White House staff members, congressmen, and senators; using these sources Tarbell analyzed the pressures brought to bear upon McKinley in those two months between the destruction of the Maine and his decision to intervene. She revealed a president who struggled gallantly for a peaceful resolution until he was finally overwhelmed by the popular call for war. Her absorbing portrait of the political and psychological strains on a president in wartime created an enduring new model of political journalism.
McClure’s also afforded Ray Baker the opportunity for a novel investigation of the newspaper industry itself—a definitive analysis of the unprecedented torrent of news generated by the Cuban conflict. This extensive war coverage, which vastly increased newspaper circulation, was considered “a triumph of the new journalism.” College-educated reporters and writers with literary ambitions vied to be dispatched as correspondents. Newspapers spent anything necessary to scoop their rivals. Baker calculated the daily costs incurred by publications that maintained scores of correspondents in both Cuba and Florida: he added up rental fees for the private vessels carrying messages from Havana to Key West; he discovered covert signals indicating the receipt of important intelligence; he followed waiting cabs from the wharf to offices where the messages were cabled to New York; he computed the expense of every transmitted word. “It is a little short of stupendous, the amounts of money being spent in getting up a newspaper which sells for a penny,” he told his father. In fact, Arthur Brisbane, the editor of the New York Evening Journal, later remarked that had the war not come to a swift conclusion, his paper and many other major dailies would have collapsed into insolvency.
In “When Johnny Went Marching Out,” William Allen White described the nationalistic zeal that swept the country with the declaration of war. “Populists stopped watching the money power, Republicans ceased troubling themselves over repudiation, Democrats forgot the deficit,” he observed. The indelible marks of regionalism were all but obliterated as northerners and southerners joined to fight under the same flag. “A simple but great emotion, that of patriotic joy, was stirring the people,” White felt, “and they moved as men move under stress of strong passion.” Children who once staged skirmishes between cowboys and Indians now waged war against the Spanish, adopting “Remember the Maine!” as their rallying cry. Immense crowds greeted the trains rushing soldiers to the front: “Everywhere it was flags: tattered, smoke-grimed flags in engine cabs; flags in buttonholes; flags on proud poles; flags fluttering everywhere.”
While McClure’s special war issue mirrored popular fascination with the Spanish conflict, a concluding article, “The Cost of War,” sounded a compelling cautionary note. The generation who lived through the Civil War, the journalist George Waldron tellingly observed, “have not been the most ardent to join in the clamor for war. They know the havoc it wrought, and are not eager to repeat the experience. The thousands slain in battle, the tens of thousands afflicted with wounds which often resulted in death after days of agony, the losses of relatives and friends, the anxious waiting for news, the want and distress of body and mind following in the train of warfare, all have left impressions so vivid that thirty-three years of peace have not sufficed to wear them away.” And beyond the social and emotional toll, Waldron calculated that the financial outlay of the Civil War “would have bought the freedom of every slave, and left enough to pay all the peace expenses of the Federal Government for half a century. The divided nation expended money enough during the struggle to supply every man, woman and child with ample food for the entire four years.”
This balance of vivid, responsible war coverage and comprehensive analysis made McClure’s one of the most respected magazines in the country. With a circulation now approaching 400,000, the pressroom and bindery had to operate “day and night” to meet increased demand. The advent of the Spanish-American War fueled the magazine’s evolution toward a new role, a crucial engagement in American society. “Having tasted blood,” Tarbell recalled, “it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part.”
DURING THE WINTER AND EARLY spring of 1898, as the country moved inexorably toward war, Edith Roosevelt was gravely ill. She had never recovered from the birth of her fifth child, Quentin, the previous fall. “For weeks we could not tell whether she would live or die,” Roosevelt told a friend. Finally, in early March, doctors diagnosed a massive abscess in a muscle near the base of her spine. A dangerous operation was performed that would require many weeks of slow recovery. During this same spring, ten-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., underwent treatment for what appeared to be “kind of a nervous breakdown.”
Despite the fragility of his family, Roosevelt later acknowledged, he could not forgo the opportunity to go to Cuba. “You know what my wife and children mean to me,” he told Archie Butt, “and yet I made up my mind that I would not allow even a death to stand in my way; that it was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring-rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to have answered the call.”
Roosevelt was offered a position as colonel but wisely r
equested to serve as a lieutenant colonel under his friend Leonard Wood, an Army surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient. The press found the story of the so-called Rough Riders irresistible from the start—a volunteer regiment in which cowboys, miners, and hunters served on an equal footing with Ivy League graduates, Somerset Club members, polo players, tennis champions, and prominent yachtsmen. And no journalist was better suited to cover Theodore Roosevelt and his colorful regiment than Richard Harding Davis, a war correspondent so legendary “that a war hardly seemed a war if he didn’t cover it.”
Indeed, at the outset of the war, Richard Harding Davis enjoyed far wider recognition than Theodore Roosevelt himself. The son of the feminist novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, thirty-four-year-old Richard was a man of many talents—an award-winning correspondent, best-selling fiction writer, successful playwright, and editor of Harper’s Weekly. His handsome face and athletic physique had adorned countless magazine covers as Charles Dana Gibson’s ideal exemplar of masculine beauty. “We knew his face as we knew the face of the President of the United States,” the novelist Booth Tarkington remarked, “but we infinitely preferred Davis’s. . . . Of all the great people of every continent, this was the one we most desired to see.”
Roosevelt and Davis first met in New York in 1890. After reading “Gallegher,” the short story that made Davis a household name, Roosevelt invited the young author to dinner at his sister’s Madison Avenue home. Two years later, they encountered each other at a dinner party hosted by members of the British legation. This time, a caustic interchange was sparked by Roosevelt’s recent Cosmopolitan essay deriding rich Americans who evinced a “queer, strained humility” toward Englishmen and failed to take pride in their own statesmen, soldiers, and scholars. Rebuked by Davis, who affected an aristocratic British accent and admired British customs, Roosevelt later reported the testy exchange to his friend James Brander Matthews. “He apparently considered it a triumphant answer to my position to inquire if I believed in the American custom of chewing tobacco and spitting all over the floor,” Roosevelt noted sarcastically, continuing to insist that “I did; and that in consequence the British Minister, who otherwise liked me, felt very badly about having me at the house, especially because I sat with my legs on the table during dinner.”