The American Future (15 page)

On 11 March 2006, General Montgomery Meigs walked into a briefing room in the White House. It was breakfast time. On a side table were coffee, bagels, the usual. On the long table in the middle of the room was an array of Improvised Explosive Devices. The horrifying casualty rate in Iraq from these bombs and mines was proving a textbook case in asymmetric warfare. On the other side of the table were President Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, all of whom wanted some good news. From Monty Meigs, though, they got the tough truth that so many people didn't want to hear. There was no magic shield that dollars could buy. The answer lay in attacking the insurgent networks from within. Two days later Bush spoke about the problem and put a brave face on it. It was a big problem, no doubt. But “we're putting the best minds in America on it.”

The room where Meigs had briefed the president is called the Theodore Roosevelt Room. On one wall hangs a portrait of the Rough Rider president, who believed a nice little war was just the moxie to revivify an America enervated by its foul cities: filthy lucre, even filthier slums, polluted air, and corrupt plutocrats. Americans needed to restore the national manhood by getting out more and taking potshots at their enemies. In 1906 the president who had declared with his customary candor that “no triumph of peace is quite so great as the triumph of war,” received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo. The immediate reason for this improbable act of recognition was that at a conference in New Hampshire, TR had negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War. Perhaps when the presenting orator, Gunnar Knudsen, said that “the United States of America was among the first to infuse the ideal of peace in political practice,” he was thinking of Thomas Jefferson, who had indeed wanted it to be so (even if he found himself at war with the Barbary States on the Maghreb). But at the moment that he received the prize, Roosevelt's administration was trying to suppress a lengthy and brutal guerrilla insurgency in the Philippines. The president had claimed in 1902 that war was over, but it would not be until 1907 at least, and after 4,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Filipinos died, that the rebellion was pacified. For Mr. Knudsen to have asked the American ambassador to convey to President Roosevelt the gratitude of the Norwegian people for “all he has done in the cause of peace” must have called on all his skills at producing a Scandinavian straight face.

Every chance he got, Teddy Roosevelt sounded off about the tonic invigoration of belligerence. “All the great masterful races” (among which he meant Americans to number), he boomed, “have been fighting races.” If Jefferson and Hamilton had pointed the United States in alternative directions of destiny as a world power, there was no question where Roosevelt's preference lay. Jefferson he despised as a remote intellectual and a weakling in matters of war and peace, one of the very worst of presidents. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, he revered for his frank passion for power, his vision of strong central government, and his unapologetic determination to make the United States a player on the world scene, admired and feared for its military prowess. So it was no accident that it was at the Hamilton Club in Chicago in April 1899, during the first year of the war against
the Filipino resistance and with an election not far away, that the then vice president spoke of “the Strenuous Life.”

Even by TR's standards the speech was an astonishing performance, a warning that if the United States did not wish to become another China “and be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders,” it had better embrace strife and battle. “When men fear work or fear righteous war…they tremble on the brink of doom…thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.” The enemy within was “the timid man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man who has lost the great, fighting, masterful virtues…the man of dull mind whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills ‘stern men with empires in their brains'—all these of course shrink from seeing the nation undertake its new duties; shrink from seeing us do our share of the world's work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great fair tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors have driven the Spanish flag…” What would the enemies of this war have the government do? Deliver the Philippines to people who “are utterly unfit for self-government?” “I have scant patience with those who fear to undertake the task of governing the Philippines…or [who] shrink from it because of the expense and trouble.” But Roosevelt had even less patience for those who “cant about ‘liberty' and ‘the consent of the governed' in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to play the part of men.” Let the naysayers in Congress be warned. Should any disaster befall the troops, it will have been the fault of those weak-kneed, lily-livered legislators!

Playing the part of Man was at the core of Theodore Roosevelt's self-making. Now that the trophies on the walls of his Long Island house, Sagamore Hill, and the reflection he caught in the mirror declared him to be a fine specimen of American manhood, he felt he ought to perform the same invigoration for the American republic. Predictably, Roosevelt had been a child with poor eyesight and sickly frame, who through his bullying father's admonitions and his own formidably precocious will had turned himself into an example of American masculinity. When his first wife, Alice, died, he took his grief
west on to the prairie, farmed cattle, shot at Indians, captured rustlers, so that when the time came to enter politics he could imagine that he personified the authentically American spirit of conquest precisely at the moment when there was no more America to conquer.

Driven by this restless sense of physical self-realization, Teddy Roosevelt was a man of his times as well as a man who imprinted his pugilistic personality upon them. Although he invoked Lincoln and Grant in his Chicago speech as Americans who never shrank from conflict, it was in fact the passing of the Civil War generation and their memories that fed the craving for imperial muscularity. Montgomery Meigs had gone to his rest at Arlington in 1892, by which time more than 300,000 Civil War dead had been interred in seventy-three national cemeteries around the country. After he had demobilized a million and a half men in arms, he remained quartermaster general to a shrunken army of no more than 70,000—the vast majority of whom were finishing off Native Americans as the railroads, mining companies, and cattle ranchers consumed what was left of the open West. So as well as attempting to ensure adequate pensions for the veteran survivors, Meigs reverted to the career that had sustained him before the war: architecture. In particular he designed the astounding Pension Building, a brick-and-terra-cotta galleried temple of immense scale and grandeur. Decorating the facade is a great frieze by the sculptor Caspar Buberl, representing scenes from the war, which include more than tough infantrymen on their march, but also supply wagons and their teamsters, at least one of whom Meigs typically specified must be a liberated slave. Seen in profile cracking a whip over his mule team, it's one of the great images in American public sculpture.

A year after Meigs's death in his grand house on Vermont Avenue (also built by him), the young history professor Frederick Jackson Turner stood up at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in July 1893 and declared that the frontier “has gone and with its going has closed the first period in American history.” It was not a happy moment to be making such a proclamation. Five hundred banks failed in that same year, tens of thousands of businesses went under, millions were thrown out of work, and massive strikes were dealt with roughly, tearing apart any sense of shared national purpose. What might restore it; perhaps a blue-water destiny?

A transoceanic imperial presence as a remedy for American exhaus
tion, saturated domestic markets, and a sudden unwonted sense of territorial claustrophobia, had been promoted before the depression of 1893. Benjamin Harrison, who had got to the White House despite losing the popular vote to Grover Cleveland in 1888, and who had the urge to overcompensate for his dubious victory by exercises of national assertion, beat the drum for the expansion of both the army and the navy. In 1890 the son of Dennis Mahan, the professor who had taught both Meigses at West Point, Alfred Thayer Mahan published
The Influence of Sea Power on World History
, and with its lessons in mind Harrison persuaded Congress to fund the construction of sixteen battleships. In 1893 the fleet sailed into New York Harbor as an iron regatta in an attempt to take the city's mind off economic catastrophe, coming too late to save the election for Harrison. Grover Cleveland, who got his revenge for 1888, was cool to talk of island empires, rejecting the annexation of Hawaii, which under Harrison had seemed a sure thing.

But the sea change was literal, and in the end, unstoppable. What had happened was Herbert Spencer, the kaiser, and Joseph Chamberlain. Charles Darwin had actually taken Spencer's phrase about “the survival of the fittest” for his own evolutionary theories, but Spencer returned the favor by popularizing a theory of bio-social struggle in which the weak were weeded out and the strong inherited the earth. Thus it was with species, thus it was (to the satisfaction of the likes of Andrew Carnegie) in business, and thus it was, thought the young Theodore Roosevelt, with nations and empires. Put Mahan and Social Darwinism together and look hard at the British Empire and the challenge it faced from imperial Germany, whose kaiser was a devoted reader of Mahan, and the conclusion was inescapable: either the United States had to embark boldly on naval and military renewal, and territorial expansion across the sea, or else it was doomed to become, in TR's strange obsession, “China.”

Had he wished, Roosevelt could have invoked Jefferson as well as Hamilton for, as war-averse as the founder of West Point had been, he did make it clear that if the American future was to be commercial as well as agricultural (and thus be able to import manufactures), it had to ensure its shipping was always free to sail the ocean. Should there be any threat to that freedom, it had to be resisted, if necessary, with force. A century later, there was a strongly developing sense that if the Pacific as well as the Atlantic were to be kept free for American trade,
this required staking out a chain of island possessions that could act as the guardians of that liberty. And if China was indeed a sinkhole of power, into the dangerous vacuum would inevitably come competitors: the Japanese, the Russians, the British, and the Germans, who would take the space and leave none for the United States.

The China of the West was Spain: decadent, superstitious, anachronistically monarchical, and sitting on an empire that was in the process of disintegration. The issue for policymakers once Cleveland had been succeeded by William McKinley in 1897 was how far to help push that empire in Cuba and the Philippines into terminal decomposition. And when that happened, how exactly should America profit? As McKinley's assistant secretary of the navy, Roosevelt more or less made his own Mahanian policy, helped by the complaisance of the official head of that department, John Long. And the policy was to make sure, in the event of a Spanish-American War, that there would be American arms in both the Caribbean and the Pacific. Rebellions in both Cuba and the Philippines helped the cause, allowing the yellow press, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst competing with each other in Hispanophobic headlines, to whip up campaigns of indignation against concentration camps and starvation inflicted on helpless natives by the cruel and decadent Don. The USS
Maine
was sent to Havana, where it blew up (probably, but not certainly, by accident), killing hundreds of American sailors and making the hue and cry for war irresistible for McKinley, especially in a year of midterm elections. For the same reason congressmen were not about to stand in the teeth of a gale of patriotic hysteria as the bodies from the
Maine
were brought back to the mainland, the journey filmed by Edison's Vitagraph and watched in thousands of nickelodeons all over the country. War was duly declared, and Teddy Roosevelt resigned from his post at the Department of the Navy to raise a regiment of cavalry for Cuba. The Rough Riders, with Roosevelt's friend Major General Leonard Wood (personal doctor to McKinley and gung-ho imperialist) as commander, were filmed galloping around in training at Tampa, but thereafter only rough-marched, there being no adequate transports to convey their horses to Cuba. No matter, the battle of San Juan, such as it was, and TR's part in it, created a military glamour, an aura of virile zeal, that he could convert into votes.

So when Admiral Dewey annihilated the Spanish fleet in Manila
Harbor, effectively ending the war, and the Philippines suddenly dropped into America's lap, what was to be done with them? The story told by the government and by the newspapers about the war in Cuba was of a benevolent and disinterested liberation. In the spirit of the Founding Fathers who had risen against an imperial power, America had come to Cuba to strike the chains from the island and deliver it to its own people. An act of Congress preempted any thought of annexation and required the government to respect Cuban independence as a nonnegotiable clause in any peace treaty with Spain. And that was how matters unfolded, notwithstanding the insistence of the Americans that they, rather than the victorious Cuban rebels, take the surrender; an act that did not sit well with the new authorities. And then there was the ubiquitous Major General Leonard Wood, who turned himself into a kind of proconsul in Cuba, delivering public health to Havana and sundry other blessings of American civilization.

Respecting, more or less, Cuban rights only made the Filipino rebels—who had been fighting their own war against Spain and might well have succeeded without any help from the Americans—assume that something of the kind would follow for their islands. Had not McKinley himself declared that the annexation of the Philippines would be an “act of criminal aggression?” Yes, he had, but believe it or not there was yet another election coming up before too long, and he was running to keep the White House. And aside from the organs of Pulitzer and Hearst, the
New York Tribune
, the
American Review of Reviews
, and the entertainments in the nickelodeon where audiences saw Admiral Dewey on his battleship and the gallant volunteer lads preparing to sail, there were powerful voices urging him to act: Senators Albert Beveridge of Illinois and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. “God has not been preparing the English-Speaking and Teutonic Peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation,” boomed Beveridge. “No! He has made us the master organisers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.” More encouragement to do the bold thing came from Britain, where Rudyard Kipling wrote “take up the white man's burden” to influence the decision. The “best you breed” had an obligation to civilize “your new-caught sullen peoples / half devil and half child.”