In this palace he lives like a king.
“THE PRESIDENT RETURNS to Secretary Hay the two little German brochures on the trust question,” said Roosevelt, dictating. “The President has troubles of his own, and positively declines to read these articles in the original. If the enthusiastic consul who sent them will translate them (by preference into verse), the President may or may not look at them.”
He was in high good humor as his forty-fourth birthday approached. The late October air was fragrant with political fruit. With arbitration of the coal strike under way, Democratic Congressional candidates were unable to campaign on the theme of labor unrest. Nor could they attack the Republican Party in other vulnerable areas. Harper’s Weekly noted how deftly the President had neutralized such issues as trust control, Philippine independence, Cuban reciprocity, and tariff reform. If the GOP was rescued from a rout in November, it had Theodore Roosevelt to thank. “The power of one man thus to cover his party with the mantle of his own strength is unprecedented in the history of American politics.”
Tributes, in the form of endorsements from state Republican conventions, were already piling up, each gaily wrapped with the ribbon “1904.” Political veterans could not remember a time when delegates across the country had pledged themselves to a sitting President so soon. At latest count, Roosevelt had 394 votes from fifteen states. Ninety-eight more votes would give him half of the projected maximum of 984, and he had nineteen months to expand that half into a majority. Wall Street, of course, still wanted Senator Hanna in the White House. Yet J. P. Morgan had shown that it was possible to do business with the President and not burst a blood vessel. Even E. H. Harriman now proclaimed himself a Roosevelt man, and had “come to the front handsomely” with campaign contributions.
Roosevelt’s long-term prospects, indeed, were so favorable that he had lost interest in the current campaign. “I feel like throwing up my hands and going to the circus.” Secretly, he plotted a postelection hunting trip to Mississippi, and allowed himself several bad puns on the words Baer and bear.
It was not blood he craved, so much as exercise. His left leg had now healed, but he was lame from the wheelchair, and his girth was increasing. He felt he might turn fat to muscle with a few days’ violent activity. The alternative method of losing weight did not seem to occur to him: he continued to eat heartily three times a day. A guest at lunch noticed that waiters “were always moving toward the President.”
He had, besides, a sound domestic reason to quit town as soon as possible. The newly restored White House was ready for occupancy—or would be, as soon as it stopped reeking of fresh paint and varnish. Edith was busy choosing fabric and furnishings for some twenty large rooms. Such delicate details were beneath his robust attention. To hunt swatches of chintz was a woman’s job; to kill Ursus horribilis, a man’s.
ON 4 NOVEMBER, Roosevelt was chagrined to see Oyster Bay fall to the Democrats. Only the traditional Republican vote of northern New York saved his native state from a takeover. Governor Benjamin B. Odell, Jr., won re-election by fewer than ten thousand votes. Nationwide, the Democratic Party gained twenty-six new Congressmen.
Even so, analysis of the results showed that the GOP had performed better than normal for a ruling party in off-year elections. It still had a House majority of thirty seats, ample for legislative purposes, and its margin of dominance in the Senate was unchanged. Some seriously eroded fields of support south of the Mason-Dixon Line could be written off as Democratic territory anyway. Everywhere else, except Nevada, the aggregate of votes cast indicated statewide Republican pluralities.
Roosevelt’s hopes for nomination in 1904 were thus extended to probable election as President in his own right, by a margin of nearly 170 electoral votes. No doubt he would never capture Dixie, but the rest of the country offered a dazzling perspective. The only flecks in this kaleidoscope were those of Republican insurgents in the Midwest—Governor LaFollette of Wisconsin looming particularly large. One of these days, that particular crystal would have to be shaken into the pattern, no matter how jarring its color.
A SIGNBOARD READING SMEDES dripped with the damp of a Mississippi autumn afternoon. On one side of the rails was a depot; on the other, a plantation store. Cotton fields sprawled dully, their extent incalculable behind curtains of mist. About twenty Negroes waited on bales, swinging their legs and staring down the track toward Vicksburg. The President had tried to keep the location of his hunting trip secret, but bush telegraph advised that he would look for bear hereabouts, on the banks of the Little Sunflower River.
Among the bale-sitters, at least, Roosevelt was guaranteed a welcome. Ever since his dinner for Booker T. Washington, Southern blacks had called him “our President” and compared him to Lincoln. They did not care that he had only just announced his first appointment of a Negro to high federal office—Dr. William D. Crum, Collector-designate of Customs in Charleston, South Carolina. It was good enough that he elsewhere favored moderate white Democrats over the “Lily White” extremists of his own party. Had not Dr. Washington himself declared Roosevelt’s opposition to any further “drawing of the color line” in Southern politics?
Within the depot, two plantation owners were also waiting. George H. Helm and Hugh L. Foote were not ashamed to show support for the President in a state where so many of his own race despised him. Roosevelt could hardly have chosen a worse time to visit the Yazoo delta. The idea of Dr. Crum (wealthy, cultured, conscientious, but … black) seated in a position of power overlooking Fort Sumter was incendiary enough to revive the passions of a year ago—not to mention the passions of 1861. James K. Vardaman, a prominent Mississippi Democrat, had openly advertised for “16 coons to sleep with Roosevelt.” Given such propaganda, the President’s hosts were worried about a possible assassination attempt. Hence the secrecy surrounding his hunt, and the remoteness of his camp, fifteen miles east of Smedes, in a privately owned forest choked with bud vine and briar. Only one access trail had been hacked. Armed guards were on patrol, ready to stop with buckshot any unauthorized stranger.
Shortly before four o’clock, a locomotive and private car steamed out of the mist and clanked to a halt. Roosevelt emerged in leather leggings, a blue flannel shirt, and a rough corduroy jacket. Around his waist was a cartridge belt, flashing with steel-jacketed and soft-nose bullets. An ivory-handled hunting knife rode on his hip, and he gripped his favorite .40-.90 Winchester. The gun was custom-made, with a crescent cheek-piece that somehow helped alleviate Roosevelt’s 8-D myopia. Its walnut butt was scarred with Colorado cougar bites.
He stepped down with a crunch of hobnail boots onto Mississippi soil, followed by George Cortelyou and the rest of his hunting party. Helm and Foote, assuming he wanted to shed his presidential identity, addressed him politely as “Colonel.” He shook hands, then heaved himself onto a waiting horse. His companions mounted, too, and they rode off together into the fog.
THE NEXT FIVE DAYS made for the worst hunt of Roosevelt’s life: “simply exasperating … I never got a shot.” Bears were not rare around the Little Sunflower, just rare wherever he went. His veteran catcher, Holt Collier (lifetime tally, 1,600 specimens), tried to lure game within range of the presidential rifle, yet hunter and prey invariably moved in different directions.
The other men in the party did not dare to bag anything themselves. Roosevelt insisted on first blood. “I am going on this hunt to kill a bear, not to see anyone else kill it.” Embarrassingly, he had given representatives of the three press agencies permission to visit camp once a day. The resultant nonstories caused national hilarity. He was obliged to let his companions shoot a bear and a deer, if only to soothe their Southern pride.
Paradoxically, one misadventure worked to his political advantage, and spawned the most enduring of all Rooseveltian myths. Early on the morning of 14 November, Holt Collier’s hounds scented bear and began to yelp. Roosevelt and Foote galloped after the pack, but thickening brush cut them off. Collier tactfully suggested that they stake out a nearby clearing, while he rounded up the critter and drove it past them—“same as anybody would drive a cow.”
The yelping of the hounds receded into silence. Roosevelt and Foote sat for hours, sweating as the sun climbed and cooked the humidity of the forest. Noon came, and with it boredom and hunger. Eventually they concluded that Collier’s bear had gone astray, so they might as well ride back to camp for lunch.
No sooner had they left than a lean black bear burst through the brush with the pack at its heels. Hot and exhausted, it lunged into a pond, and the dogs splashed after it. The bear reared and struck out, crushing one hound’s spine. Collier threw a lariat over the shaggy neck and pulled tight. Then he waded in and cracked the bear’s skull with the butt of his gun—carefully, because he wanted it to stay alive.
Back at the camp, the hunters heard excited horn calls. A messenger from Collier galloped up. “They done got a bear out yonder about ten miles and ‘Ho’ wants the Colonel to come out and kill him.”
Roosevelt rode back at full speed. He was both disappointed and upset, on reaching the pond, to find a stunned, bloody, mud-caked runt tied to a tree. At 235 pounds, the bear was not much bigger than he. He refused to shoot. “Put it out of its misery,” he said. Somebody dispatched it with a knife.
The hunt continued for another three days, but the curse of that tortured bear kept Roosevelt’s bullets cold. He did not know, as he crashed vainly through the mists, that the outside world was already applauding his “sportsmanlike” refusal to kill for killing’s sake. Clifford Berryman, the Washington Post cartoonist, was inspired to make a visual pun linking the incident with the President’s race policy. He sketched a very black bear being roped about the neck by a very white catcher, and Roosevelt turning away in disgust, with sloped rifle. The cartoon appeared on the front page of the Post on 16 November, captioned DRAWING THE LINE IN MISSISSIPPI.
Whether or not readers got Berryman’s pun, they rejoiced in his imagery, and demanded more “bear cartoons” after Roosevelt returned to Washington. Berryman obliged—again and again, as he realized he had hit upon a symbol the public adored. With repetition, his original lean bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter. He drew it as “a poor measly little cub with most of its fur rubbed off, and big ears like prickly pears,” and it became the leitmotif of every cartoon he drew of Theodore Roosevelt.
That winter, by one of the mysterious coincidences that yoke inventions, stuffed, plush bear cubs with button eyes and movable joints began to issue from Margarete Stieff’s toy factory in Giengen, Germany. Three thousand were ordered by F.A.O. Schwarz of New York City, while in Brooklyn a storekeeper named Morris Michtom began producing something similar at $1.50 each. The competing bears soon fused, along with Berryman’s cub, into a single cuddly entity that attached to itself the nickname of the President of the United States. For decades, perhaps centuries to come, uncounted millions of children across the world would hug their Teddy Bears, even as the identities of Stieff, Michtom, Berryman, and Roosevelt himself rubbed away like lost plush.
EDITH ROOSEVELT RECEIVED her husband in a White House immeasurably different from the dark, dank mansion they had inherited from the McKinleys. Gone were the executive offices crowding the second floor, and the malignant outgrowth of greenhouses on the west facade. Gone were the sagging floorboards that needed to be shimmed up during receptions, the barroom glass screens and scuffed wooden stairs, the curly wallpaper and wainscots jaundiced with fifty years of tobacco spit. Gone, too, were the mustard carpets, the dropsical radiators, the sad-smelling laundry, the vertical wooden pipes that made flatulent noises in wet weather. Best of all, gone was the china hen, hatching a nestful of china eggs, that had bid a glazed welcome to every visitor to the vestibule since the time of President Hayes.
For this improvement alone, the Roosevelts were entitled to the thanks of a grateful nation. But McKim, Mead & White had done more than strip; they had extensively rebuilt, while remaining faithful to Roosevelt’s injunction that the White House should be “restored to what it was planned to be by Washington.” Outwardly it was the same, except for fresh paint and the addition of two sweeping pillared pavilions. Even these were not altogether new, for the eastern pavilion rose on the site of one demolished thirty years before, while the western, designed by Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas Jefferson, was simply exposed after decades of being hidden behind greenhouse glass.
The pavilions flanked a spacious basement that had been transformed into reception rooms capable of handling thousands of visitors at a time. In place of pipes and boilers—now sunk out of sight and earshot—there were parlors for ladies and gentlemen entering from the new porte cochere on East Executive Avenue. A separate, oval luxury lounge was provided for diplomats arriving through the south door. The vaulted corridor linking these suites with the central stairway made an art gallery. Edith Roosevelt had graced its white walls with portraits of First Ladies. Now Dolley Madison, “Lemonade Lucy” Hayes, and Edith herself, sumptuously portrayed in white chiffon by Théobald Chartran, could observe the flow of guests strolling up to the ground floor.
“The first impression one gets,” an architectural critic wrote of the main vestibule, “is that its size has been greatly increased.” Cleared of all clutter, refinished in buff and pure white, soaring above marble slabs that shone like mirrors, the hall seemed to breathe light and air. A delicate screen of wrought iron barred any further ascent of the stairs, while six stately columns invitingly revealed the crimson-carpeted corridor. There was a dramatic feeling of entrance, of access to power.
Thanks to solid reconstruction, it was now possible to walk the length of the corridor without creakings or precautionary detours. A further burst of light heralded the East Room. This great parlor was so changed that only people remembering the days of President Monroe could view it without shock. Charles McKim had scraped, chipped, and burned away eighty-four years’ accretion of fust and filigree, leaving nothing but the original walls. New waxed parquet reflected three coruscating chandeliers. Bronze standards glowed in every corner, and marble wainscots and consoles augmented the general radiance. Twelve classical bas-reliefs replaced the dark portraits that used to hang over the doors like guillotine blades. Window drapes and banquette seats were of yellow silk. The room’s only baroque decoration was a magnificently carved and gilded grand piano, courtesy of Steinway and Sons.
South of the corridor, the three smaller state parlors had been relined with silks and velvets, but they kept their traditional color schemes, at Roosevelt’s command. A pair of exquisitely carved Empire-style mantels adorned the Green and Red Rooms. The Blue Room in between was stiff with corded silk. Two new silver-knobbed side doors allowed for a speedier flow of handshakers past the President at receptions.
The most Rooseveltian—and least authentic—of McKim’s restorations was the State Dining Room. Almost two thirds larger than the old, with seating for more than one hundred guests, it was oak-paneled and mahogany-furnished, the chairs padded with tapestry. A disgruntled-looking moose, and some dozen other North American game mammals, stared glassily out from the walls, bracing for years of presidential monologues.
Roosevelt, marching through, did not affect any aesthetic rapture. Subtlety, balance, refinement of line, harmonies of color and texture escaped his eye, as music bypassed his ears. To him, game heads were not decorative statements so much as reassuring tokens that he was (pace Mississippi!) a mighty hunter. Gentlemen of his class—McKim included—felt at home dining beneath tusks and antlers, ensconced in oiled wood. Even effete little Henry Adams liked this room.
Breeding, however, saved Roosevelt from the pretensions of the nouveau riche. Having deaccessioned the china hen, he felt no urge to replace it with a Japanese miniature tree, or a collection of Bavarian steins. He was too much of a professional himself to venture any amateur design suggestions. Indeed, his only mild criticism was that here and there McKim had not been austere enough.
Upstairs, Edith Roosevelt had fewer scruples. Fortunately, her fondness for brown-and-green upholstery, and pink-and-green garlanded curtains, left intact the structural grand plan. Two big new bedrooms where the executive suite used to be increased the White House’s total of domestic apartments to seven. Now that Kermit had followed Ted to Groton, there was plenty of room for houseguests. The oval library had been turned into an elegant parlor, suitable for the entertainment of fashionable ladies. Next door, the former Cabinet Room became Roosevelt’s writing “den,” with leather chairs, a deep fireplace, and yards of books. Knowing her husband’s love of all things nautical, Edith set an old desk carved from the timbers of HMS Resolute in the center of the room. Here, late at night, after she had gone to bed, he could work on the final draft of his Second Annual Message.
THE DOCUMENT WAS half the length of its predecessor and clearly the work of a cautious Chief Executive. Roosevelt had little to say on matters of domestic policy, except to demand a special fund for antitrust prosecutions, and to insert the word urgent into his repeat request for a Department of Commerce. He took a peaceable survey of international affairs, noting that the United States and Mexico had just become the first powers to submit a legal dispute to The Hague.
“As civilization grows,” he wrote, “warfare becomes less and less the normal condition of foreign relations.” Yet he could not resist pointing out a corollary responsibility for the strong to maintain order. “More and more the increasing interdependence and complexity of international political and economic relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world.”
By this he did not mean to threaten well-behaved Latin American nations. On the contrary, they could look for protection against European aggression, under guarantee of the Monroe Doctrine. The Western Hemisphere was secure. “There is not a cloud on the horizon at present … not the slightest chance of trouble with a foreign power.”
With these bland words, Theodore Roosevelt revealed—or, rather, further concealed—an unguessed aspect of his character; namely, that of the covert diplomat practicing Louis XV’s secret du roi. Foreign policy was, he acknowledged, “the subject on which I feel deepest.” The very depth of his feeling convinced him that negotiations, in times of crisis, should be private and verbal, hence undocumented.
He had a far-flung network of intermediaries and informants, men of diplomatic or intellectual or social stamp, by no means all Americans. Most of them were globe-trotting friends from prepresidential days, such as Cecil Spring Rice of Berlin, Constantinople, and St. Petersburg; Henry White, chargé d’affaires at the American Embassy in London; and Arthur Hamilton Lee, a Tory member of the British Parliament. Their urbane, literate reports kept him up to date with court affairs and privileged gossip. As members of the secret, they were able to negotiate without paper, and keep agreements quiet, protecting the sensitivities of parties. They in turn could trust Roosevelt’s absolute discretion.
Not until after he left the White House would he reveal, confidentially, that in late 1902 “the United States was on the verge of war with Germany.” Even then, his allusions to “the Venezuela business” were to be cryptic and contradictory, enough for a generation of historians to call him a liar. Seven decades had to pass before cohering bits of evidence suggested that the basic facts of the story were accurate, and that Roosevelt had remained silent about it in order to spare the dignity of an emperor.
The full extent of the crisis would have to be inferred circumstantially, from an extraordinary void in the archives of three nations—deletion after deletion hinting at some vanished enormity, a painted-out battle of Titans visible in pentimento through layers of pale wash.
ROOSEVELT HAD SEEN the crisis coming for eleven months. It involved a familiar situation: failure by a Latin American republic to repay European loans. Venezuela, bled white by civil war and corruption, owed some sixty-two million bolivars to an impatient consortium headed by Great Britain and Germany. These powers, acting in unlikely alliance, were now proposing to blockade Venezuela with a multinational armada until Caracas paid up. Both nations had scrupulously assured the United States that they were interested in debt collection only, and had no desire to establish footholds in the Western Hemisphere.
The President sympathized with their frustration. Ever the stern moralist, he blamed Cipriano Castro, caudillo of Venezuela, for ignoring honorable obligations. The fact that Castro was only five feet tall, and simian in appearance, confirmed his general prejudice against Latin Americans as political primates, low in the pantheon of nations. To evolve, they must be taught responsible behavior. Or as he robustly advised a contemporary houseguest, the German diplomat Speck von Sternburg: “If any South American country misbehaves toward any European country, let the European country spank it.”
Baron von Sternburg, about to return to Berlin, was a charter member of the secret du roi. British-born and-educated, married to a pretty blonde from Kentucky, he had known Roosevelt since 1889. He understood that uninhibited private language did not necessarily translate into policy. However, this was no longer the young Civil Service Commissioner blustering away at the Cosmos Club. This was the President of the United States, dominating a new, austere White House that gave off a chilly radiance of power.
When Roosevelt condoned the “spanking” of New World republics, then, one had to remember a significant qualifier in his First Annual Message: “provided that punishment does not take the form of acquisition of territory by any non-American power.”
Current Anglo-German assurances of benign intent suggested that this qualifier was being heeded. Roosevelt believed, at least, what Britain said. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty amounted to a guarantee that King Edward’s government had no designs on the Western Hemisphere. But a secret memorandum from Rear Admiral Henry Clay Taylor, Chief of the Bureau of Navigation, warned that Germany was otherwise inclined. Taylor wrote that the Kaiser’s navy would bombard Venezuela within weeks if President Castro resisted the blockade. She would then “certainly demand indemnity for her expenses.” But Castro had no money. Thus, in logical steps:
§Venezuela … could offer nothing but territory, or mortgage her revenue in such a way as to place herself in complete political dependence on Germany.
§The United States could not allow either of these, and yet Germany’s right to indemnity would be incontestable.
§The only courses open to the United States [would then be] payment of the indemnity, taking such security as she can from Venezuela, or war.
“The first method,” Taylor concluded, “is cheapest, the second most probable.”
His argument had crude force. Roosevelt was saddened by the whole situation. “I have a hearty and genuine liking for the Germans, both individually and as a nation.” His identification with German culture was deep and strong, dating back to his days as a teenage student in Dresden. German blood flowed in his veins. He could recite long passages of the Nibelungenlied by heart; Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck rated among his personal heroes.
Part of him welcomed the idea of German capital investment in Latin America, on the ground that countries such as Venezuela would benefit from development by a superior civilization. Another part of him agreed with Taylor that Germany wanted more than dividends in the New World. There was an ominous sentence in her proposal to cosponsor the blockade: “We would consider the temporary occupation on our part of different Venezuelan harbor places and the levying of duties in those places.”
The adjective temporary reminded him that in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II had “temporarily” acquired Kiauchow, China, on a lease that had somehow lengthened to ninety-nine years. Germany’s well-known shortage of Lebensraum—in Spring Rice’s phrase, its “curbed feeling”—translated into an explosive need for new horizons. Burgeoning yet hemmed in, the Reich had to feed a million new mouths a year, and market a gross national product that was doubling every decade. Its army was already the most formidable in the world; now it was building a huge new navy. This combination of social, economic, and strategic aggrandizement, to a President who had recently reread Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, portended the rise of a new, militaristic imperium in Europe, just as the sun was beginning to set on British South Africa.
What better place to establish a collection house today, a colony tomorrow, than lush, crippled Venezuela? Spring Rice and von Sternburg had given Roosevelt, over the years, a shrewd idea of the Weltpolitik of Germany’s militarist ruling class. Expansionists such as Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow regarded the Monroe Doctrine as an insult, at best a hollow threat. Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State for Naval Affairs, made no secret of his desire to establish naval bases in Brazil (where three hundred thousand Germans lived already), and in the Dutch Caribbean islands.
Germany, therefore, stood isolated in Roosevelt’s sights as he braced himself for the shock of foreign aggression in South America. He could not guess that at even deeper levels of secrecy, Wilhelmstrasse strategists were working on a plan for the possible invasion of the United States. The plan called for Tirpitz to dispatch his fleet to the Azores at the first signal of transatlantic hostilities. From that point, the fleet would steam south and take “Puerteriko,” then launch surprise attacks along the American seaboard. A likely landing place was Gardiners Bay, on Long Island—which meant that when German troops advanced on New York City, they would march right past Roosevelt’s house.
THE PRESIDENT, lacking precise intelligence, had to rely on intuition as the Venezuelan crisis developed. Fortunately, that intuition, in situations concerning the Monroe Doctrine, was acute. His animal Americanism—a buffalo nervously sniffing the prairie wind—sensed the circlings of a distant predator. As long as Tirpitz held off (there had been no formal blockade announcement yet), he could technically state that the diplomatic horizon was clear. But he gave notice in his Message that the United States was looking to her defenses. “For the first time in our history, naval maneuvers on a large scale are being held under the immediate command of the Admiral of the Navy.”
Coincidentally or not, these maneuvers were directed at the same theater as the Anglo-German blockade. On 21 November, four battleships of the North Atlantic squadron arrived off Isla de Culebra, Puerto Rico. Four cruisers and two gunboats of the Caribbean squadron lay in wait for them. From other points in the Western Hemisphere, other white warships put to sea, converging like slow bullets upon the target area.
SEA POWER, that early obsession of Roosevelt’s youth, had returned to haunt him as Commander-in-Chief. Since entering the White House he had been, in his own words, “straining every nerve to keep on with the upbuilding of the Navy.” Perhaps his most important achievement in that regard was the appointment of two ardent strategic reformers as Secretary of the Navy and Chief of the Bureau of Navigation. William H. Moody and Admiral Taylor were working to create a larger, more war-ready fleet. They did not lack for funds. Roosevelt’s First Message to Congress had generated enough money to finance the construction of two new battleships and two armored cruisers, plus a special appropriation for the maneuvers. The President had also, at the urging of a messianic young lieutenant named William S. Sims, instigated a program to improve fleet marksmanship. With less fanfare, he had approved a six-month survey of the Venezuelan coastline, and had transferred control of Culebra to the Navy Department, “in case of sudden war.”
The most recent tables of world naval strength ranked the United States behind Britain, France, and Russia in ships built and building, but ahead of Germany at 507,434 to 458,482 tons. This position would soon improve, since the United States had more tonnage under construction than any country except Britain. Germany, however, had more vessels in commission—especially in the Atlantic, at twelve battleships to eight American. The latter were more heavily armored, with standard twelve- and thirteen-inch guns. But in aggregate fighting mass, Germany enjoyed an advantage of about 50 percent.
For two years, tacticians at the Naval War College had been trying to “combat” this, in maneuvers charted across an ocean of cartographic paper. They sat cross-legged on contoured islands, or perched on mainland stools, and smoked and threw dice while celluloid ships—Blue for the United States, Black for Germany—crept over the grid lines, trailing dotted wakes and firing tiny broadsides of pencil. The results were not encouraging. In almost every engagement, Black’s tighter track curves, the sheer range and accuracy of its lead shot, combined to scatter Blue all over the table.
Germany, the tacticians concluded, could seize key harbors in any Caribbean confrontation. A more optimistic view was put forward by the General Board of the Navy, the duty of which was to review such findings for the President. It found that if he established another base south of the one at Isla de Culebra, the hemisphere would be secure as far south as the Amazon.
As far as Roosevelt was concerned, the forthcoming maneuvers would show, better than any calculation by college or committee, just how much sea power the United States actually had. Real ships, and real guns, were being committed to this “game.” If Germany and Britain wanted to splash in the same water, they must play by American rules, or the game could become deadly.
HE WAS ABLE TO stage a tableau to this effect at his first dinner in the new Executive Dining Room, on 24 November. Pale, frail Speck von Sternburg was the guest of honor. Elsewhere at the same table sat pale, frail John St. Loe Strachey, editor of the LondonSpectatorand another of Roosevelt’s cosmopolitan circle. The two foreigners were visiting America for “personal reasons,” in response to invitations from the White House. They had opposing rooms upstairs. Each had been vouchsafed a flattering presidentialtête-à-tête—von Sternburg at dead of night, Strachey on horseback in the rain. Agog at such favors, they could be counted on to return home with the kind of intelligence that, in von Sternburg’s phrase, was “better talked over than written.” The Baron was well-connected on the Wilhelmstrasse, and Strachey, through his periodical, was one of the most powerful opinion-shapers in Britain.
Between the two foreigners Roosevelt placed the Admiral of the United States Navy, as someone who could not fail to impress them. George Dewey, about to leave for the Caribbean exercises, was America’s greatest military hero. He had destroyed the entire Spanish fleet at Manila in ’98. (Given permission, he would have bombarded Germany’s ships, too.) Blessed by Admiral Farragut and anointed by McKinley, he gave off an almost divine aura. There were people who carried little icons of him at their bosoms. Some Filipinos thought he communed directly with God.
The Admiral was now almost sixty-five. His immaculate mustache was snowy, and his well-pressed uniform did not hang as straight as it had three years before, the day he rolled down Fifth Avenue behind Governor Roosevelt’s prancing horse. Too many good lunches at the Metropolitan Club had pinkened the mahogany tan; he tended to nod off in the late afternoon. Awake, however, Dewey still had formidable authority, accentuated by the glitter of four gold stars. As Roosevelt reminded him, in the order sending him back to sea, his “standing” was enough to ensure world attention to the Caribbean maneuvers.
But Dewey had more than prestige to suit the President’s current purpose. He was notoriously the most bellicose Germanophobe in the United States. And if Speck von Sternburg could not see that, over the white flowers and wineglasses, he needed a stronger monocle.
THE NEXT DAY, Britain and Germany officially informed the State Department of their intents to proceed against Venezuela. There would be an ultimatum followed by a blockade, within the bounds of the Monroe Doctrine. Secretary Hay replied that the United States “greatly deplored” any European intervention in the affairs of a South American republic. He conceded, however, that such action was sometimes justifiable.
Meanwhile, the United States armada off Culebra was joined by a flotilla of support vessels, including colliers and torpedo boats. Farther south, two battleships and four cruisers of the European and South Atlantic squadrons met near Trinidad, at a point only 125 miles from the Venezuelan coast.
Finally, on 1 December, Admiral Dewey went down to the Navy Yard in Washington, where Roosevelt’s yacht Mayflower awaited him as his flagship. He ordered its crew to prepare for the open sea.