The War Lovers

 Lodge was some-times scornful of bankers and had little regard for Hanna, but he saw Bryan as a Robespierre. The Massachusetts senator had been fighting to keep undesirable immigrants out of the United States by imposing a literacy test (the measure passed Congress but was vetoed by President Cleveland). Now he worried about the enemy within, fed by an alien ideology. Lodge, who dreaded class warfare, described Bryan's call to pit mass against class "as a mean cry." "Bryanism," he exhorted in a campaign speech, was an alien menace, an evil import from the people who had cursed France with the Terror and the guillotine. Bryan's plot to appropriate wealth, he declared, had been borrowed "from across the ocean ....The man who uses it is not fit to be trusted. It was the cry heard in Paris and resulted in the horrors of the Commune."22 Lodge was not just mouthing campaign rhetoric. He was truly worried about the fate of the Republic. One day during the campaign he visited New York to have lunch with Roosevelt and Owen Wister. The talk took a gloomy turn. How long would the American form of government endure? After a pause to con-sider, they agreed: about fifty years. This may seem surprisingly pessimistic. The three men were at the pinnacle of a seemingly secure, indeed dominant social class—the "Wasp Ascendancy," as another Porcellian man, Joseph Alsop, Roosevelt's great-nephew and a leading newspaper columnist of the Cold War era, would rather longingly look back upon it almost a century later. Yet the fear of Bryanism was real. Some in the upper crust made light of it: at a ball in Bar Harbor, the Maine resort of the very rich, a pageant featuring a man carrying a cross and sixteen debutantes wearing crowns of
thorns was performed to mock Bryan's famous speech. But Theodore Roosevelt worried that the lower classes would soon be responding to the cry of Aux barricades! "What a Witches Sabbath they did hold in Chicago!" he wrote Lodge after Bryan's speech at the Democratic convention in July. A week later he wrote Barrie, "Not since the Civil War has there been a Presidential election fraught with so much consequence to the country. The silver craze surpasses belief." Roosevelt saw the nation at the edge of a moral and social abyss. To his friend the British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice he wrote, "If Bryan wins, we have before us some years of social misery, not markedly different from that of any South American Republic." Roosevelt went on to worry that the Americans were becoming "effete" and losing their "moral spring," and—worked up enough to indulge loopy racial theories of inherited characteristics — wondering why Germans, despite their martial history, made worse New York City policemen than the Irish. Writing Lodge, who was recovering from nervous and physical exhaustion on a small island near Nantucket, Roosevelt confessed that he was feeling "a little knocked up" by his work with the New York police. "Oh! How I do long for a chance to see you and to talk with you. I'd like to see a white man now and then." (Lodge struck the last sentence from the published correspondence.)  The two friends reunited on the campaign trail, touring' upstate New York and making a pilgrimage to Canton, Ohio, where McKinley was campaigning from his front porch (so much more dignified, they felt, than Bryan's careening about at the back of a train).
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A puppet government in Honolulu, installed by the sugar interests, was to turn the islands into an official American territory, but a treaty of annexation signed in 1897 lacked the required two-thirds vote in the Senate. Now, with Japan emerging as a Pacific naval power, Roosevelt was too impatient to wait for the politicians. He was looking for an excuse to take Hawaii. Furiously scribbling his note to Mahan, Roosevelt turned his attention to the Caribbean, to Cuba and Puerto Rico: "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."' He concluded, "I need not say that this letter must be strictly private ... to no one else excepting Lodge do I talk like this." Meanwhile he was working navy back channels to be ready for the hour when war would come. Every day he took the short walk from his office in the old State, War, and Navy Building, across Pennsylvania Avenue and one block up Seventeenth Street, to the Metropolitan Club. His stride was always brisk, hastened by the prospect of vigorous debate and his lunchtime favorite, double lamb chops. The men's club, a Victorian brick structure with high-ceilinged rooms and heavy, dark paneling, served as a kind of White House mess hall before there was such a thing. Founded during the Civil War by financial men who had come from Wall Street and Philadelphia to sell war bonds and wanted a proper city club, the Metropolitan was a government unto itself. Its members included cabinet members, diplomats, and senior military officers. Roosevelt, often in the company of Lodge, dined often with Mahan, the nervous, weedy-looking, recently retired captain who was by now regarded as the most
influential naval thinker in history. Roosevelt frequently helped Mahan spread his secular religion of navalism, the ideology that sea power is the key to global power. (In 1890, in a more consequential meeting than Roosevelt could possibly have realized, he had introduced Mahan to a Harvard friend, Baron Kaneko Ken-taro, whose translation of Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on History would directly lead to the buildup of the Japanese Imperial Navy.) Roosevelt was not planning war on the back of an envelope; he had professional help. He was in close communication with Mahan's old base of operations, the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.
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 "The Maine Was Destroyed by Treachery," the Journal screamed. Promoting "the journalism that acts," Hearst offered a $50,000 reward "for the detection of the perpetrator of the Maine outrage" and found three senators and two congressmen willing to go to Havana as "Journal commissioners" aboard a Hearst yacht, the Anita. Hearst tried to hire some divers to inspect the wreck of the Maine, but they were turned away by Spanish authorities. The Journal instead printed a rumor: "War! Sure! Maine Destroyed by Spanish ... This Proved Absolutely by Discovery of the Torpedo Hole! "
In Washington an uneasy quiet prevailed. Silent crowds stood outside the White House and gathered in the lobby of the secretary of the navy's office, where a scale model of the Maine was dis-played, the tiny naval ensign on the fantail lowered to half mast. President McKinley told Senator Charles Fairbanks of Indiana, "I don't propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe." Long, who had been awakened at 1:00 a.m. on the morning of February 16 by a messenger bearing news of the Maine, complained in his journal of losing a night's sleep, tentatively concluding: "My own judgment is, so far any information has been received, that it was the result of an accident."' Roosevelt took the contrary view. "Assistant Secretary Roosevelt Convinced the Explosion of the Warship Maine Was Not an Accident" read the headline just below the banner in the, February 17 Journal. There was no elaboration in the article.
Roosevelt was very anxious that the sinking of the Maine not go down as an accident. He had good reason to believe in fact the Maine had been destroyed because of a design flaw - and a powerful motive to cover up any such finding, not just because he wanted war with Spain, but because he feared a backlash against the navy's backbone, the modern battleship.
By coincidence, he had before him on his desk that day a letter from Lieutenant Commander Richard Wainwright officer aboard the Maine. The letter suggested that the secretary of the navy appoint a board of officers to look at the precautionary measures taken by the navies of England, France, Germany, and Italy—to insulate magazines from incendiary heat, including the heat produced by  fire in a coal bunker. Roosevelt was well aware of the pattern of coal fires in other battleships.
Some senators were fretting that the modern battleship was inherently vulnerable to disaster.
Roosevelt thought a moratorium on the building of battleships was "the last pitch of cowardice and baseness"
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One Oklahoma trooper recalled that the men were suspicious. Roosevelt was said to be a rich cop from New York- worse he wore glasses- but Roosevelt had heard it all before. In the Dakota territory he had been mocked as "four eyes" and for shouting "Come hither!" to ranch hands.
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 Aboard the Brooklyn, Associated Press correspondent George Graham watched with appalled awe as the Spanish fleet—the flagship Infanta Maria Teresa, followed by the battleships Vizcaya, Cristobal Colon, and Almirante Oquendo and the destroyers Pluton and Furor— emerged from the harbor channel by Morro Castle at roughly ten-minute intervals. The parade was at once solemn and gaudy. While the American warships had been daubed in dull gray, the hulls of the Spanish warships were painted glossy black, the superstructures buff white. The brightwork was varnished and painted, and gold figureheads were freshly gilded. Enormous silk battle flags streamed boldly. Brightly colored awnings shaded the decks as if for a garden party, and the men stood at attention on the yardarms.14 Aboard the USS Texas, Captain Jack Philip marveled at the ships sailing out to their doom "as gaily as brides to the altar." Then he gave the order to open fire. The heavily varnished paneling in Admiral Cervera's state-room quickly ignited when the American salvos began crashing in. On the bridge the stoical Captain Concas recalled "shells were bursting all around us." He fell, badly wounded, along with two aides — the only men still alive outside the armored conning
tower. The Maria Teresa began to belch black smoke. Slowly the burning vessel turned toward shore and made for a small cove, where she beached before she could sink. Rocked by explosions, theVizc, gya also ground onto a sandbar. The men on the Texas cheering, but Philip called out, "Don't cheer, boys, the poor devils are dying." One by one the ships of His Imperial Majesty were burned, sunk, grounded, scuttled.
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 the little boy who had worshipped the glo_ rious victims of the Civil War was born again. "I have always been unhappy, most unhappy, that I was not severely wounded in Cuba in some striking and disfiguring way," he declared in his old age. He abhorred weakness, in himself or anyone else, In 1912, as he was on his way to give a speech, Roosevelt was shot in the chest at point-blank range by a madman. The bullet's impact was diffused by Roosevelt's glasses case and the pages of the speech he was holding, but it left a dime-size hole in his rib cage. Roosevelt insisted on giving the speech nonetheless, and talked for over an hour, his teeth gritted, his face whitening as the bloodstain on his shirt spread. Roosevelt craved dangerous adventure in an almost pathological way. On a recklessly daring expedition into the Amazon jungle in 1913 he cut his leg, and the wound became infected. Delirious at times, he asked to be left to die, and agreed to come along only when his son Kermit refused to leave him behind. With the advent of World War I, Roosevelt ranted that President Wilson was a coward for trying to keep the country out of war, and he attacked pacifists as less than men while demanding their persecution." Though overweight and increasingly infirm, he proposed to Wilson that he be given command of a division to fight in France. Not wanting to make Roosevelt either a hero or a martyr, Wilson declined. "I don't understand," Roosevelt complained to Wilson's aide, Colonel E. M. House. "After all, I'm only asking to die." House, who was fed up with Roosevelt by this time, paused and replied, "Oh? Did you make that point quite clear to the President?"" Roosevelt felt blessed to be able to send his sons to war. He would rather have his own children "die than have them grow up weaklings," he once said. He need not have worried. The boys all saw combat, which in the Great War was vaster and grimmer than anything Roosevelt witnessed in Cuba. Archie recalled the sensation of shooting a German and then, in a rage, stomping on his face, staining his boot with blood up to the ankle. He felt, he later wrote, like a creature "of the Stone Age." When Archie was wounded by a German artillery barrage, there were toasts all around at Sagamore Hill. Roosevelt wrote Archie that "Mother, her eyes shining and her cheeks flushed... dashed her glass to the floor." The rest followed suit. Outsiders would have found this celebration perverse, and even Roosevelt's friends might have