Theodore Roosevelt Read Online Free PDF

he had no particular sympathy, won him respect in the state.
    In the fall of 1896 TR campaigned hard for William McKinley. The preceding decade had been marked by violent labor disturbances that had put much of the public in an anti-labor mood: the Haymarket Square bombing in Chicago, the riots in the Homestead plant of the Carnegie Steel Company, the attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick, and the Pullman strike. TR inveighed against agitators in his campaign speeches in a manner that must have satisfied the most conservative of his party. He said of the more radical advocates of the Democratic candidate, William Jennings Bryan, that they “have not the power to rival the deeds of Marat, Barrère, and Robespierre but that they are strikingly like the leaders of the Terror in France in mental and moral attitude.”
    How was he to be rewarded on McKinley’s election? Senator Thomas Platt, the so-called easy boss of New York State politics and the undisputed master of the Republican machine there, had had some trouble with Roosevelt over his opposition to favoritism in the police department and opined that “he would probably do less damage to the organization as Assistant Secretary of the Navy than in any other office that could be named.” But the president-elect was concerned with Roosevelt’s reputation for hyperactivity. “I hope he has no preconceived plans that he would wish to drive through the moment he got in,” he said. Lodge now intervened successfully, and McKinley was persuaded. Roosevelt became the assistant secretary under John Long, an easygoing gentleman with periods of ill health who was delighted to let his more forceful inferior handle most of the job.
    It was the perfect one for TR. He had been a devoted student of the navy ever since his exhaustive work on the War of 1812, and he had hailed Admiral Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, as the most important military document of the era. He flew to work to increase the number of our warships and make the existing ones more efficient, and his eyes must have gleamed as he saw in our deteriorating relations with Spain over Cuba the coming opportunity to prove our superiority at sea in both oceans by sinking the whole Spanish fleet.
    As the crisis sharpened, and in one of Long’s extended absences from Washington, TR took upon himself the responsibility of cabling Commodore George Dewey, the commander of the American Asiatic Squadron based in Japan: “Order the squadron … to Hong Kong. Keep full of coal. In the event of war with Spain your duty will be to see that the Spanish squadron does not leave the Asiatic coast.”
    TR justified such action in one of his letters saying: “He [Long] has wanted me to act entirely independently while he was away, and to decide all things myself, even where I had written him that I was going to decide them in a way that I doubted whether he would altogether like.” The returning secretary, however, in this case was indignant at his junior’s usurpation of authority, but war did come, and TR’s instructions facilitated Dewey’s dramatic victory in Manila Bay.
    TR had already told the president that in the event of war, he would resign his post and join the fighting forces, and no one could dissuade him from the resolution. Others may have doubted the culpability of Spain in the blowing up of the battleship Maine, visiting Havana on a peaceful mission, which triggered the American declaration of war; some doubt it even to this day, but no such reservations were harbored in the mind of the assistant secretary of the navy, who welcomed hostilities and wrote: “The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards.”
    With the outbreak of war Congress authorized the formation of three regiments of volunteer cavalry to be raised among men in the Rockies and Great Plains who knew how to ride and