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

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Clay Risen, a reporter and editor at The New York Times, is the author of The Crowded Hour, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019 and a finalist for the Gilder-Lehrman Prize in Military History. A member of the Society of American Historians, he is also the author of two other acclaimed books on American history, A Nation on Fire and The Bill of the Century. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two young children.

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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...