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THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER 8
 SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

JUST before leaving the police department of New York, Commissioner Roosevelt sent for me to come to his office. He greeted me with these words, "Doctor, I have good news to tell you. It is good for me, and I think you will rejoice with me over it. It is this: President McKinley has appointed me assistant secretary of the navy, and my heart is bounding over the fact, and it goes without saying, I have accepted the position. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, one of the ablest and best men of this country, and one of the best friends I have in the world, an old Harvard chum, and some other influential friends, have secured this appointment from President McKinley." He said, "It looks like the Lord is on my side, to give me an honorable way out of this beastly job, thankless and perplexing to the highest degree. And yet I am not sorry I tackled it and gave two years of my life to it. I believe I have made things better. I have gotten good discipline for anything else that may follow in life." He continued, "My new job is exactly to my liking. From my earliest recollection I have been fed on tales of the sea and of ships. My mother's brother was an admiral in the Confederate navy, and her deep interest in the Southern cause and her brother's calling led her to talk to me as a little shaver about ships, ships, ships, and fighting of ships, till they sank into the depths of my soul. And when I first began to think, in any independent and consecutive order, for record at Harvard, I began to write a history of the Naval War of 1812. And when the professor thought I ought to be on mathematics and the languages, my mind was running to ships that were fighting each other."

Mr. McKinley did not want the war with Spain, and Mr. Long, Secretary of the Navy, was still more opposed to the war, but Theodore Roosevelt's far vision saw that Cuba was oppressed and that there soon would be a just cause for war with Spain. He set himself diligently to repair our navy, to improve its marksmanship and in every way to fit it for the sea war, which he believed would come. What he did in the short time he was in this office is little less than miraculous. In the war he saw impending, he felt that it would be necessary to have the ablest commander in the navy in charge of the Asiatic Squadron. He was convinced that Admiral Dewey was that man, and he went to work to secure his appointment to that position and, with the aid of the senators from Dewey's state and others, he succeeded in securing his appointment.

On Saturday afternoon, February 25, 1898, Roosevelt happened to be acting Secretary of the Navy and sent out the following cablegram, which made history, which made the United States a world-wide nation:
dewey—hongkong.
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 the Philippine Islands.   Keep Olympia, until further orders.
Roosevelt.
This policy was counted so rash by his superiors that it is said that he was never permitted to be acting Secretary of the Navy again, but the telegram had been sent and was not recalled. In two months from that time war was declared, and Dewey, all ready, slipped out of Hongkong and smashed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay.

The assistant secretary, with as high a type of patriotism as any man ever had, felt it to be his duty to go out in the field and fight with the army of his nation for the defense of his flag. On hearing of his determination, I wrote him an earnest letter in which I said, "You have done so much in getting the navy ready, you understand it so well, this is to be a naval war, you can serve the country better by staying in the navy department than in going out with the army." He wrote me back promptly, thanking me for my advice, and said, "I have done more perhaps than any one man in bringing on this war, and I feel it my duty to go out in the field if I have to leave my body there. The question of danger from fevers or bullets does not enter a moment into my calculation. My country is first, and it can have my services, or it can have me.''

He talked the whole difficult matter over with his old Harvard chum, Leonard Wood, and they organized the famous Rough Riders' Regiment which, next to Dewey's fight, was the most spectacular feature of the Spanish-American War. This regiment was a strange combination of Westerners, cowboys and "bloods" from Fifth Avenue; of the rude youth of the plains and the cultured graduate of Harvard but all bound to Theodore Roosevelt as their leader by his unspeakable magnetism and fastened to each other by their lofty patriotism and heroic service on the field. Colonel Wood was promoted and Theodore Roosevelt was made colonel of the regiment. The boys fairly worshipped him. He never called on his men to do a task that he would not be willing to do himself, or to suffer a sacrifice which he would not gladly endure himself. He knew every man in his regiment by name, and the boys say that when food was short he spent as high as five thousand dollars out of his own pocket to get something for them to eat. His story one day of dividing his food and his blanket with the boys and enduring the hardships of the trenches with them brought tears to my eyes-tears of love and pride.

Some of his enemies in his gubernatorial campaign charged that he had shot a Spaniard in the back, which, of course, was a falsehood, although it is no disgrace to shoot the enemy in that part, if he shall turn his back to the bullets. But Reverend Bowman gave me the true version of the story, as Colonel Roosevelt told it to him. The Colonel said to him that in one of the battles two snipers jumped up suddenly out of the high grass just in front of him and aimed their rifles pointblank at him. Neither of the shots touched him, and he, drawing his gun quickly, shot one of the men to death and would have gotten the other if he had not made his escape very rapidly.

The stories of Colonel Roosevelt's personal heroism in battle are among the most priceless legacies of our nation.

Theodore Roosevelt, the ranchman, the cowboy, the rough rider, the Governor, the great man of history, appears at his best in the address which he made at a reunion o£ the Rough Riders at Las Vegas, N. M., in the month of June, 1899. Standing in his Rough Rider's suit with five thousand people enthusiastically cheering him, he waved his hand for silence and said:
Just at this time I would not have left New York State lor any purpose save to attend the reunion of my old regiment, and for that purpose I would have gone to Alaska, or anywhere else, for the bond that unites us together is as close as any bond of human friendship can be.

It was our good fortune to be among those accepted, when the country called to arms a year ago last spring, and when ten men volunteered for every one that could be chosen. I think I may say, without boasting, that the regiment did its duty in every way and with its record is a subject for honorable pride, not only as regards the members themselves, but the country at large. I am proud of you because you never complained and never flinched. When you went to war you knew you would not have an easy time; you expected to encounter hardships, and you took them without a murmur. You were all readiness to learn promptness and obedience, which makes it possible to turn, the American volunteer so soon into a first-class type of fighting man.

Of those who landed for the brief campaign in the tropical midsummer against Santiago, one-fourth were killed or wounded, and three-fourths of the remainder were, at one time or another, stricken down by fever. Many died, but there is not one among you so poor in spirit that he does not count fever, wounds and death itself as nothing, compared with the honor of having been able to serve with the regiment under the flag of the United States in one of the most righteous wars which this country has seen.

This was a typical American regiment. The majority of Its members came from the Southwest, but not all. We had in our ranks Easterners, Westerners, Northerners, Southerners, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Gentiles—men whose parents were born in Germany or Ireland and men whose parents were born on the banks of the James, the Hudson and at Plymouth Kock nearly three centuries ago; and all were Americans in heart and soul, in spirit and purpose—Americans, and nothing else. We knew no distinction of creed, birthplace, or residence. All the creed for us was that a man should do his duty, and show himself alert, patient and enduring, good in camp and on the march, and valiant in battle.

In administering this great country we must know no North, South, East, or West; we must pay no heed to a man's creed; we must be indifferent as to whether he is rich or poor, provided only he is indeed a good man, a good citizen, a good American. In our political and social life alike in order to succeed permanently, we must base our conduct on the Decalogue and the Golden Kule; we must put in practice those holy virtues, for the lack of which no intellectual brilliancy, no material prosperity, can ever atone. It is a good thing for a nation to be rich; but it is a better thing for a nation to be the mother of men who possess the qualities of honesty, of courage and of common sense.

I am proud of the way in which you have taken up the broken threads of your lives, in which you have gone back to the ranch, the mine and the counting-room. In so doing you show yourselves to be typical American citizens, for it has always been the pride of our country that an American, while most earnestly desirous of peace, was ever ready to show himself a hard and dangerous fighter if need should arise, and that, on the other hand, when once the need had passed, he could prove that war had not hurt him for the work of peace, and that he was all the fitter to do this work for having done the other too. We may be called to war but once in a generation, and we most earnestly hope that we shall not have to face war again for many years. The duties of peace are always with us, and these we must perform all our lives long, from year's end to year's end, if we are to prove ourselves in very fact good citizens of the commonwealth. We must work hard for the sake of those dependent upon us; we must see that our children are brought up in a way that will make them worthy of the great inheritance which we, their fathers, have ourselves received from those that went before us. We must do our duty by the State. We must frown upon dishonesty and corruption, and war for honesty and righteousness.

Let me say a word to those to whom our thoughts should return at such a time, to those among the living and among the dead, to our absent living comrades, and especially to our former commander, now Major-General Leonard Wood, whose administration of the Province of Santiago has reflected the utmost credit not merely upon himself, but upon the nation so fortunate as to have him in her service. We send to them the heartiest and most loyal greetings. With these men we hope in no distant future to strike hands again, and as long as we live and they live we wish to be bound together by most indissoluble ties. But when we come to speak of our dead comrades, of the men who gave their lives in the fierce rush to the jungle fight, or who wasted to death in the fever camps, we can only stand with bared heads and pray that we may so live as, at the end, to die as worthily as these, our brothers, died. Allen Oapron, in the sunny prime of youth, in his courage, his strength and his beauty; "Bucky" O'Neill, than whom in all the army there breathed no more dauntless soul—of these and other gallant comrades, the men who carried the rifles in the ranks, all we can say is that they proved their truth by their endeavor, that in the hour of our greatest need these rose level to the need, and gallantly and cheerfully gave to their country the utmost that any man can give—their lives, for we read in the Holy Writ "that greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for a friend."

And these men so loved their country that they gallantly gave their lives for her honor and renown and for the uplifting of the human race. Now their work is over, their eyes are closed forever, their bodies moulder in the dust, but the spirit that was in them cannot die, and it shall live for time everlasting.

We are a great nation. We must show ourselves great, not only in the ways of peace, but in the preparedness for war which best insures peace. We must upbuild our navy and army until they correspond to the new need which the new country will bring. Above all, my comrades and my fellow-countrymen, we must build up in this country that spirit of social and civic honesty and courage which alone can make this nation reach the highest and most lasting greatness.