If Theodore Roosevelt’s father had fought in the Civil War, the boy might have become an Army man. But Theodore Sr. paid a substitute and took civilian service, leaving the lad—six and a half years old at Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox— to find other models of heroism. His first came from literature, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn and “The Saga of King Olaf.” Young Theodore was a sickly child, confined to his bed and room while his peers were falling out of trees and bloodying one another’s noses; he curdled his own blood with the exploits of the Vikings.
“Sound the horns,” said Olaf the King;
And suddenly through the drifting brume
The blare of horns began to ring,
Like the terrible trumpet shock of Regnarock,
On the Day of Doom! . . .
All day has the battle raged,
All day have the ships engaged,
But not yet is assuaged
The vengeance of Eric the Earl.
The decks with blood are red,
The arrows of death are sped,
The ships are filled with the dead,
And the spears the champions hurl.1
It was enough to put dreams of battle at sea in any young boy’s head. It certainly put them in the head of Theodore Roosevelt, who walked from his house on 20th Street in Manhattan to the foot of the island to watch the ships sail south through the narrows and out to sea. He haunted the East River yards, where some of the finest sailing ships on earth were built; he saw the sailors come ashore while their vessels were rerigged and readied to set forth again.
He gained a personal stake in naval affairs through his mother’s relatives. The Bullochs became famous during the Civil War. They fought for the losing side, to be sure, but they fought very gallantly. Uncle James Bulloch was an admiral in the Confederate Navy, as well as a secret agent for President Jefferson Davis, and was the point man in the construction of the raider Alabama. Uncle Irvine Bulloch, a mere teenager, was a member of the Alabama’s crew in her climactic battle with the Kearsarge in the English Channel. According to family lore, Uncle Irvine fired the last shots from the Alabama before the ship had to be abandoned. He and the captain, the last two over the side, were picked up by a British yacht and carried to neutral safety. In later years, Roosevelt visibly identified with Irvine Bulloch as he recounted the tale of his heroic uncle. A reporter following Roosevelt remarked, “One would suppose that the President himself fired the last two shots from the Alabama instead of his uncle. Mr. Roosevelt’s relationship with a Confederate officer is accepted as practically equal with having fought for the cause himself.”2
This was quite a statement. In everything else, Roosevelt had nothing but scorn for the Confederacy and its treason against the Union. The Civil War, more than anything else, was what kept him from becoming a Democrat, the party to which he was closer philosophically than the Republican party he joined. But a boy had to find his heroes where he could, and in the extended Roosevelt family they came from the Confederate Navy.
Roosevelt’s interest in naval affairs took an academic turn in college. By then he had embarked on the regimen of self-improvement that made a boxer, a hunter, an oarsman, and anything else that required stamina or simply determination, out of the weak, asthmatic boy. He wanted to study science at Harvard but the experimentalists, whose slicing and dicing did not appeal to a young man who liked his biology on the wing and the hoof, had seized the Biology Department there. History was more congenial, not least since Roosevelt had a nearly photographic memory. He commenced a study of the naval campaigns of the War of 1812, which he completed as a book after graduation.
Readers might have been forgiven for confusing Roosevelt’s Naval War of 1812 with Longfellow’s “Saga of King Olaf.” The prose was as energetic as Roosevelt himself: cannon boom their summons to death, cannonballs scream as they splinter masts and rend canvas, sailors and Marines slip in the blood that coats the pitching decks. The book remains a riveting read more than a century later. Its opinions are as robust as its prose. Roosevelt lauded the men who actually did the fighting: “It must be but a poor- spirited American whose veins do not tingle with pride when he reads of the cruises and fights of the sea-captains, and their grim prowess, which kept the old Yankee flag floating over the waters of the Atlantic for three years, in the teeth of the mightiest naval power the world has ever seen.” But he damned the leaders who had left the United States unprepared for the conflict. The principal lesson Roosevelt drew from the war—from which the United States was lucky to survive with honor and territory intact—was that the nation must never be caught unready again. “There is only success for those who know how to prepare it.’”
This first book of Roosevelt’s (of an eventual 40 or 50, depending on how the counting is done) brought him to the attention of a small cadre of what in a later time would be called “defense intellectuals.” Foremost of these was Alfred Thayer Mahan, who threw his historical net rather farther than Roosevelt. During the 1880s—while Roosevelt tried and abandoned law school, entered state politics in New York, then left politics and New York for the Badlands of Dakota following the sudden death of his first wife, then returned east after the endless winter of 1887 froze half his stock, then remarried and reentered politics, this time as an appointed official—Mahan was weighing the fate of nations against their ability to bring naval power to bear. His 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, opened a new chapter in U.S. strategic planning. And Roosevelt was one of the heralds of what he, Mahan, and Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican senator from Massachusetts, called their “large policy” for the United States.
Roosevelt wrote an influential review of Mahan’s book in the Atlantic Monthly, the premier journal for big thinkers. “Captain Mahan shows very clearly the practical importance of the study of naval history in the past to those who wish to estimate and use aright the navies of the present,” Roosevelt said. “He dwells on the fact that not only are the great principles of strategy much the same as they ever were, but that also many of the underlying principles of the tactics of the past are applicable to the tactics of the present; or, at least, that the tacticians of today can with advantage study the battles of the past.” Mahan, Roosevelt said, demolished the notion dear to U.S. antimilitarists, that the country did not need a navy but could rely on privateers in time of war. Mahan also demonstrated that in the modern world of steam and steel, advance preparation was necessary for success at sea. “There is a loose popular idea that we could defend ourselves by some kind of patent method, invented on the spur of the moment. This is sheer folly.”
What Americans required was a bigger, better navy. “Our ships should be the best of their kind—this is the first desideratum. But, in addition, there should be plenty of them. We need a large navy, composed not merely of cruisers, but containing also a full proportion of powerful battleships, able to meet those of any other nation. ... It is not economy—it is niggardly and foolish shortsightedness— to cramp our naval expenditures, while squandering money right and left on everything else, from pensions to public buildings.”4
Roosevelt did more than cheer Mahan. He collaborated (and sometimes conspired) with Mahan, as well as Lodge, to push naval issues to the front of the U.S. political agenda. When a coup by Americans in Hawaii in 1893 led to the overthrow of the monarchy there and to the application of the new regime for annexation to the United States, Roosevelt, Mahan, and Lodge agitated for quick acceptance of the application. They did not care about the sugar the planters wanted to slip under the U.S. tariff wall, but they cared immensely about Pearl Harbor. And they were outraged when President Grover Cleveland allowed his democratic scruples about the illegality of the coup and the unrepresentative nature of the new government in Hawaii to stand in the way of seizing the finest port in the northern Pacific.
Prospects improved with the election of William McKinley in 1896. McKinley was hardly more assertive by nature than Cleveland, but his Republican party included most of the U.S. expansionists of the era and few of those opposed. Equally pertinent, McKinley owed a debt to Roosevelt, who had been a good Republican soldier for many years and one of the most effective stump speakers on behalf of the GOP. Roosevelt, with Lodge’s encouragement, allowed himself to fantasize about the Secretaryship of State, but McKinley—and especially his manager, Mark Hanna, who deeply distrusted Roosevelt—decided the Navy Department was where he belonged. Roosevelt could not be Secretary of the Navy; that post went to the more senior and deserving John Long. But Roosevelt could be Long’s number two, the Assistant Secretary. Roosevelt was delighted when the Washington grapevine indicated his appointment was imminent. “Sinbad has evidently landed the old man of the sea,” he wired Lodge.5
One of the secrets of Roosevelt’s success was an ability to make the most of whatever circumstance in which he found himself. He soon discovered that John Long was quite happy to leave the day-to-day operations of the department in the hands of his energetic assistant. Roosevelt pushed this cracked door wider and wider until he was not only running, the daily affairs of the department but also setting long-term policy.
Roosevelt confided in Mahan and Lodge more than in Long and McKinley. “As regards Hawaii I take your views absolutely,” Roosevelt wrote Mahan. “If I had my way we would annex those islands tomorrow. If that is impossible I would establish a protectorate over them.” Cleveland had committed a “colossal crime” in failing to annex the islands at once. “We should be guilty of aiding him after the fact if we do not reverse what he did.” Roosevelt considered the entire Pacific at risk. “I am fully alive to the danger from Japan. . . . My own belief is that we should act instantly before the two new Japanese warships leave England. I would send the Oregon and if necessary also the Monterey (either with a deck load of coal or accompanied by a coaling ship) to Hawaii, and would hoist our flag over the island, leaving all details for after action. . . . Even a fortnight may make a difference. . . . With Hawaii once in our hands most of the danger of friction would disappear.”
From the Pacific, Roosevelt turned his gaze east. Spain was having difficulties in the Caribbean, and the United States, he contended, should add to Spanish woes. “Until we definitely turn Spain out of those islands (and if I had my way that would be done tomorrow), we will always be menaced by trouble there.” Trouble might take the form of German adventurism, but tossing Spain out would “serve notice that no strong European power, and especially not Germany, should be allowed to gain a foothold.” Britain had the bigger navy, but Roosevelt was not worried about the British. “Canada is a hostage for her good behavior.”
The main thing, though, was armament. Without new and better ships, U.S. grand strategy would mean nothing. “We should build a dozen new battleships,” he told Mahan, before adding, “I need not say that this letter must be strictly private. I speak to you with the greatest freedom . . . but to no one else excepting Lodge do I talk like this.”6
As the Spanish troubles in the Caribbean, particularly Cuba, increased, Roosevelt agitated for war. He did not dismiss the interests of the Cuban rebels fighting for freedom, but he was far more concerned with what a war might yield to the United States. In the first place, the war would demonstrate U.S. resolve. It was during Roosevelt’s stint at the Navy Department that he gave a speech at the Naval War College that came to be considered his paean to war. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he told the gathered officers. “And the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its right to stand as the equal of the best. . . . We ask for a great navy, partly because we think that the possession of such a navy is the surest guaranty of peace, and partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and tears like water rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown. . . . Better a thousand times err on the side of overreadiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed. . . . No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.”7
Roosevelt complemented his rhetoric by playing sailor. In September 1897, illness and hot weather at Washington sent John Long north, leaving Roosevelt to supervise naval exercises off Hampton Roads. “I never enjoyed or profited by anything more than I did my three days with the fleet,” he wrote. “I was aboard the Iowa and the Puritan throughout their practice under service conditions at the targets, and was able to satisfy myself definitely of the great superiority of the battleship as a gun platform. ... I saw the maneuvers of the squadron as whole, and met every captain and went over with him on the ground what was needed. . . . 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 they are handled, and how well fitted to uphold the honor of America, I don’t think we would encounter such opposition in building up the Navy to its proper standard.”8
As war with Spain approached, Roosevelt made ready. In February 1898, the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbor. Roosevelt thought he knew the cause. “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards 1 believe,” he declared privately.9 While naval and congressional examiners investigated the explosion, Roosevelt sprang into action. On a Friday when Long started his weekend early, Roosevelt fired cables to the far corners of the planet. The most important—and soon most famous—was an order to Commodore George Dewey, commander of the Asiatic squadron.
Order the squadron, except the Monocacy, to Hongkong. Keep full of coal. In the event of declaration of war Spain, your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast, and then offensive operations in Philippine Islands. Keep Olympia until further orders.10
Roosevelt was quite pleased with his performance. Leonard Wood, McKinley’s physician (and soon to be Roosevelt’s commander in the Rough Riders), described meeting Roosevelt the next day. “Suddenly 1 saw him trotting around the court from Connecticut Avenue to my house at 2000 R Street, with a broad smile on his face. As I met him at the door he said: ‘Well, I have had my chance, Leonard, and I have taken advantage of it. Yesterday afternoon the Secretary of the Navy left me as acting secretary. He has gone to take a short and much-needed rest, and I have done what I thought ought to be done. I have placed various ships in commission with orders to be ready for sea at once. I have given large orders for the purchase and shipment of coal. I have assembled supplies and forwarded munitions. In other words, I have done everything I can to get the Navy ready.’”11
And then, having done more than anyone else to precipitate the war, and having prepared the Navy to fight, Roosevelt abruptly resigned his post at the Navy Department as soon as the war began, to volunteer for cavalry service in Cuba. There was neither strategic nor bureaucratic logic to Roosevelt’s decision. By any reckoning he could do far more good for the country running the Navy Department—as he certainly would have—than slogging through the forests of Cuba. But as one who had extolled the glories of war, he had to throw himself into the thickest of the fight. The war would test the United States, but it also would test Theodore Roosevelt.
He passed the test with flying colors. After service with the Rough Riders in Cuba, he came home to be elected Governor of New York, and then Vice President of the United States after he annoyed New York Republican boss Tom Platt. On McKinley’s assassination in September 1901, Roosevelt became President—a position he never could have achieved by ordinary means, but which he grew into almost overnight. “It is a dreadful thing to enter the Presidency this way,” he told Lodge. “But it would he a far worse thing to be morbid about it. Here is the task, and I have got to do it to the best of my ability, and that is all there is about it.”12
As President, Roosevelt employed the Navy—although not in a way many Roosevelt watchers expected. The warmongering naval secretary became a borderline pacifist as President. To be sure, he threatened to use the fleet. In 1902, Germany and Britain blockaded the coast of Venezuela, which had been slow paying debts to European creditors. Roosevelt did not worry much about the British, who had lost their taste for territorial acquisition (at least in the Western Hemisphere), but he did not want the Germans getting any ideas about permanent influence in the Caribbean. He ordered Admiral Dewey to begin maneuvers off Puerto Rico, with instructions that the squadron be ready to steam at a moment’s notice to the Venezuelan coast. He discreetly let the German ambassador know of the exercises, even as he delivered an ultimatum to Berlin to arbitrate its differences with the Venezuelan government. The ambassador, startled at the stiffness of Roosevelt’s approach, inquired of the President if he understood the possible consequences. “1 answered that I had thoroughly counted the cost before I decided on the step,” Roosevelt answered, “and asked him to look at the map, as a glance would show him that there was no spot in the world where Germany in the event of conflict with the United States would be at a greater disadvantage than in the Caribbean sea.”" The ultimatum worked; the Kaiser accepted arbitration, which Roosevelt followed up in 1904 with what came to be called the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, claiming for the United States a “police power” in the Americas.
By then Roosevelt had made a strong start on what he forever considered his greatest accomplishment as President. Since Americans had started traveling to the West Coast in large numbers during the California Gold Rush, weary walkers, armchair strategists, and profit-minded merchants had dreamed of building a canal across Central America. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, showed that such things were possible; by the beginning of the 20th century, politics rather than technology stood in the way of a Central American canal. Roosevelt broke the impasse by engineering the independence of Panama from Colombia; as compensation he received a canal zone across the new country and the right to start digging. Roosevelt’s actions evoked criticism from throughout Latin America (with the exception of Panama) and in several (mostly Democratic) quarters in the United States. Even Roosevelt’s closest advisers, who supported the action, could not resist ribbing their boss. Roosevelt spent one cabinet meeting defending his actions. Turning to Philander Knox, he asked the attorney general to reinforce the legal argument. “No, Mr. President,” said Knox, “if I were you I would not have any taint of legality about it.” Roosevelt sputtered some more, then turned to Secretary of War Elihu Root. “Have 1 answered the charges? Have 1 defended myself?” Roosevelt demanded. “You certainly have, Mr. President,” Root replied. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”14
Roosevelt did not see the humor in his situation, nor did he ever repent. “I took the Isthmus,” he said several years later, “started the canal, and left Congress not to debate the canal but to debate me.”15 Roosevelt’s one foreign trip in office—the first by a sitting U.S. President— was to Panama to observe the progress on the construction of the canal. With youthful glee he took the controls of a steam shovel and did his part in the digging. When Congress under Woodrow Wilson voted reparations to Colombia for Roosevelt’s high-handedness in springing Panama loose, he took this as one more reason for despising Wilson and damning all Democrats. The canal not only would facilitate commerce between the U.S. East and West Coasts, but also would allow the Navy to get from one ocean to the other without circumnavigating South America. His parting advice to William Howard Taft, on leaving the White House for a very active retirement, was never divide the fleet before the canal was finished.
The Navy sent Roosevelt off in style. As President, Roosevelt had continued to press for more and better ships. Congress continued to give him less than he wanted, but by 1907 the fleet included 16 battleships. Roosevelt asked for four more, and to impress the legislature—and the world at large—with what the big ships could do, he sent the battleship fleet on a ’round-the-world cruise.
The concept showed Roosevelt at his most audacious. Tensions with Germany and Japan were rising, and East Coast lawmakers worried that sending the fleet to the Pacific would leave their constituents undefended, while many around the country wondered whether placing the fleet in Japan’s home waters would give the Japanese evil ideas. Roosevelt dismissed the fears and gnashed his teeth at those who raised them. Eugene Hale, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee and the leader of the obstructionists, especially elevated Roosevelt’s blood pressure. “If he were actuated by a sinister desire to bring on trouble with Japan and to impair the efficiency of the United States Navy, he would be following exactly the course he is now following,” Roosevelt said of Hale.16
Hale and Congress naively thought that since they controlled the purse strings of government, they could control Roosevelt. Roosevelt quickly proved them wrong. “I shall tolerate no control by an individual Senator or Congressman of the movements of the fleet,” he growled. “I decline for one moment to consider any protest against sending our entire battle fleet to any part of our dominions to which it seems advisable the fleet should visit.” Anyway, he added, “I think a cruise from one ocean to the other, or around the world, is mighty good practice for a fleet.”17
Lacking funds for the whole trip, Roosevelt sent the fleet to the Pacific with money on hand. Then he dared Congress to leave the ships there. The Californians in the legislature might have been happy to do so, but Mainer Hale and the Eastern majority shuddered at the thought. Cursing Roosevelt for his arrogance—and cleverness—they appropriated the funds for the rest of the voyage.
The fleet arrived home just days before Roosevelt left office. An armada of sightseers met the vessels at Hampton Roads. Roosevelt reviewed the ships from the presidential yacht Mayflower. They stretched seven miles in a line, and as they passed beside the President’s vessel each fired a 21-gun salute.
Roosevelt could not contain his pride in the ships and in the officers and men on board them. “This is the first battle fleet that has ever circumnavigated the globe,” he declared. “Those who perform the feat again can but follow in your footsteps.” Newspapers had been forbidden from reporting the details of the voyage, but now that the fleet was safely home the embargo was lifted. One journalist watching the President pronounced the return of the fleet “the apotheosis of Roosevelt”—the “one, supreme, magnificent moment” of his career.18
Roosevelt would not have disagreed in the slightest. He had not built those ships by himself, but during the previous quarter century no one had worked harder or accomplished more toward getting them built and preparing them for action. At first he had simply exhorted, in his books and reviews. Then he conspired and connived, with Lodge and Mahan and at the Navy Department. Finally he commanded, positioning Dewey in the Caribbean, sending the battleship fleet around the world, and carving a canal that shrunk the Navy’s world by 10,000 miles.
And on that last day, standing on the deck of the Mayflower and watching the fleet steam by, did he think of King Olaf and his intrepid Norsemen? He probably did, for the saga was never far from his mind. And if he did, he must have recalled the challenge of Thor that serves as prologue to the tale.
Force rules the world still,
Has ruled it, shall rule it;
Meakness is weakness,
Strength is triumphant.
Over the whole earth
Still it is Thor’s day.19
And as long as it remained Thor’s day, the United States needed a Navy—which was why Roosevelt was so proud of the one he had helped his country build.
1. The Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Albert Glover (Ware, England: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994), pp-383-85.
2. H. W. Brands, TR: The Last Romantic (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 20.
3. The Naval War of 1812, from The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, 24 vols. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1923-26), vol. 7, pp. 34, 126, 226, 417.
4. Atlantic Monthly, October 1890, reprinted in Works, vol. 14, pp. 306-16.
5. Roosevelt to Lodge, 6 April 1897, Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1884'1918, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge and Charles F. Redmond (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925).
6. Roosevelt to Mahan, 3 May 1897, The Selected Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. H. W. Brands (New York: Cooper Square, 2001), pp. 132-33.
7. Works, vol. 15, pp. 240-59.
8. Brands, TR, pp. 320-21.
9. Roosevelt to B. Diblee, 16 February 1898, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting E. Morison and John M. Blum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951-54).
10. Roosevelt to Dewey, 25 February 1898, Brands, Selected Letters, pp. 170-71.
11. Leonard Wood, “Roosevelt: Soldier, Statesman, and Friend,” introduction to Roosevelt, The Rough Riders and Men of Action (New York: Scribner, 1926), pp. xvii-xviii.
12. Roosevelt to Lodge, 23 September 1901, Brands, Selected Letters, pp. 269-70.
13. Roosevelt to William Thayer, 21 August 1916, Brands, Selected Letters, pp. 609-12.
14. Brands, TR, p. 488.
15. Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 373.
16. Brands, TR, p. 609.
17. Roosevelt to Root, 31 July 1907; Roosevelt to Sternberg, 16 July 1907; both in Morison and Blum, Letters of Roosevelt.
18. Brands, TR, p. 637.
19. Works of Longfellow, p. 365.
