The War Lovers

By Evan Thomas
Roosevelt's rallying cry to the Anglo-Saxon women of Amer-ica was to get busy and have more babies. He called this compe-tition with the immigrant classes "the warfare of the cradle."44 Lodge's solution was to try to keep out the lesser races through tighter immigration laws. For many years Lodge sponsored leg-islation in Congress to exclude immigrants who could not read or write. He offered up all sorts of dubious arguments for this, including a reference to a chart of "the distribution of ability" by race in the United States, showing that, according to the Encyclopedia of American Biography, the "English Race" had produced more "statesmen, soldiers, and clergy" (1,542, 1,260, and 1,520, respectively) than, say, the Irish (9, 18, and 28).John F. Kennedy's grandfather, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, once a congress-man from Boston, liked to tell the story of being accosted by Lodge in January 1897 after the House had voted down Lodge's bill to restrict immigration. "You are an impudent young man," Lodge sneered. "Do you think the Jews or the Italians have any right in this country?" Fitzgerald responded, "As much right as your father or mine. It was only the difference of a few ships."
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At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 one of the most popular attractions was Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. The spectacle marked the somewhat tawdry end of an era. The range wars and guerrilla skirmishes between cavalrymen and Indians were over, and in Cody's extravaganza the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee was reduced to theater, its brave veterans to bit-part actors in a carnival show.2° The truly enduring note at the exposition was struck by a young college professor lecturing to the American Historical Association, which held its annual meeting in the White City from July 11 to 13. In "The Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner argued that American exceptionalism was rooted in the individualism and self-reliance of the frontier settler. Jackson pointed to a little-known U.S. Census Bureau pamphlet that had declared in 1891 that the frontier was now "closed"—there was no more land to conquer and settle. What would happen to the best and most distinctive qualities of the American spirit, Turner asked, if there was nowhere left for Americans to go? Turner's address, though factually a stretch (open space still abounded), would become during the first half of the twentieth century one of the most important and oft-quoted speeches ever made by a historian. At the time, however, it got little attention. The night of July 12 was hot; most historians tried boating or the giant Ferris wheel, or went in search of ice cream. Even Turner's parents failed to show up at his lecture.21 But Theodore Roosevelt was paying attention. He wrote Turner, "I have been greatly interested in your pamphlet on the Frontier....I think you have struck some first class ideas, and have put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely."22 Roosevelt had been thinking about American expansionism. He was writing the third volume of his treatise on the American frontier spirit, The Winning of the West. But he also had a more personal agenda. With conquest comes conflict, and the closing of the American frontier suggested peace upon the land. Roosevelt yearned for conflict—for the ultimate conflict of war. But where? Mexico, perhaps? That war had already been fought once, in the war to annex Texas and California in 1846-48. In a border incident in August 1886 an American army captain was killed by some Mexican troops. Staying at his ranch at Medora, in the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt immediately wrote his friend Lodge, then a congressman: "I have written Secretary [of War William] Endicott offering to raise some companies of horse riflemen out here in the event of trouble with Mexico. Will you telegraph me at once if war becomes inevitable? ... I think there is some good fighting stuff among these harum-scarum rough riders out here." Thus did Roosevelt first dream of the fighting unit that would make him famous, but it remained a dream: the border dispute with Mexico was soon settled. Roosevelt continued to chafe. In his more bellicose moods it sometimes seemed that just about any war would do. In 1889 he wrote his British friend the diplomat (later ambassador to the United States) Cecil ("Springy") Spring Rice: "Frankly, I don't know that I should be sorry to see a bit of a spar with Germany; the burning of New York and a few other seacoast cities would be a good object lesson on the need of an adequate system of coastal defenses." Roosevelt loved hyperbole, but he was apparently serious.