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Stewart Myrent
Just finished my most recent new release, "The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century", by Clay Risen, historian & deputy op-ed editor at The NYT. Some notable excerpts, from the "Introduction", "...two facts about America's place in the world stood clear. First, global economic power required comparable military power to protect it - from pirates, from hostile states - and to persuade difficult trading partners to come around...But power, many Americans felt, could not be simply a matter of protecting material interests. This was the second fact: Theirs had never been just a country, in the eyes of its citizens and its admirers abroad; it was an idea, too. Every country likes to think it stands for something, but especially in the nineteenth-century era of realpolitik, that something was usually itself. America, by contrast, stood in the eyes of many for the universal values written into its founding documents, ideas about liberty and equality. These weren't vague notions bandied about in afternoon salons, either - millions of men had fought, and hundreds of thousands had died, over them during the Civil War. If America was going to be a world power, one that thrust itself and its armies into world affairs, how could it do so in a way that spoke to its values? Or, in a more cynical but no less realistic view, how could those values be used to justify the aggressive assertion of American interests onto the world? Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders offered an answer to both of those questions." And from Chapter 2, "One Does Not Make War with Bonbons", in talking about the lead-up to the Spanish-American War, "The businees community feared that an American conquest of Cuba could be used to justify larger armies and state bureaucracies. And anti-imperialists worried that expansion would alter America's identity as a beacon for individual freedom and self-government. For decades, these competing cultural and intellectual strands - a minority in favor of continued expansion, with a majority opposed - had prevented America from venturing abroad. But the particulars of the Cuban crisis - starvation and death on a massive scale, combined with threats to American investments and the opportunity to profitably control the island's future, without having to conquer it outright - created a new and lasting justification for an activist American foreign policy. People referred to it in different ways, but most grouped it under the term 'humanitarianism'. It spoke to America's best ideas about itself..." From Chapter 5, "This Untailor-Made Roughness", talking about Roosevelt's friend, Col. Leonard Wood (I was at Ft. Leonard Wood, in the Ozarks of MO, for my basic training) choosing San Antonio, TX, to train their regiment of Rough Riders, "In 1821 Mexico gained its independence from Spanish rule, and 14 years later Texas revolted against Mexican rule - a short but bloody fight punctuated by the siege at the Alamo, in central San Antonio. Once Texas split from Mexico and joined the United States, a new wave of immigrants arrived, this time from Germany, so many that by the eve of the American Civil War, German had superseded Spanish as San Antonio's lingua franca (English being a distant third)." And from Chapter 8, "No Country on the Earth More Beautiful", discussing a meeting between American Gen. William Rufus Shafter & his staff, & Gen. Calixto Garcia, the rebel leader in eastern Cuba, & his staff, "The American officers were stunned to see that Garcia's second in command, Gen. Jesus Sablon Moreno, known by his nickname, Rabi, was a full-blooded Carib Indian, and that many of Garcia's trusted inner circle were black. A segregated army from a segregated nation had come to Cuba to fight alongside an integrated, multiracial rebel army to free the island's people." And from Chapter 10, "The Monotony of Continuous Bacon", in case you have been wondering what life was like for the Rough Riders & all other U.S. soldiers & sailors in Cuba, according to Thomas J. Vivian, a journalist for Hearst, "The sultry air grew still sultrier. From the trampled, beaten, crushed, tropical undergrowth rose sickening odors and heavy miasmatic mists. As the heat grew fiercer, the odors and mists grew heavier. Every life-giving quality of the air seemed to be squeezed out of it, and even the myriad insects and crawling reptiles were quieted. Then, just as the sizzling heat reached a spot where it apparently could go no further and be bearable, a zigzag flash, a thunderclap, and a cataract of ice-cold rain came simultaneously, and every man was soaked and shivering. If the men were marching, they found themselves suddenly wading through swift running streams of cold muddy water...Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the storm would come to an end, the sun came out hotter than ever, the wet ground steamed; horrible crawling, flying things filled the muggy air, and from shivering the men passed to gasping." Sounds great, doesn't it? And from Chapter 13, "They Look Just Like Other Men": "The Rough Riders had been in Cuba forty-five days. Of the 600 men who landed at Daiquiri, 23 had been killed in action, another 11 died of disease, and 104 were wounded. Scores more were stricken by malaria. 'No other regiment in the Spanish-American War suffered as heavy a loss as the First United States Volunteer Cavalry', Roosevelt wrote." And talking about when the first Rough Riders were arriving home from Cuba, "News had spread fast. Within days of the Battle of San Juan Heights, wounded men were coming back home. The first arrived on July 5 in Key West, where they were to be quarantined. A crowd had gathered to greet them. But rather than seeing triumphant flag-waving soldiers emerge from the ship, they saw hollow-cheeked, weather-beaten faces, the men practically crawling down the gangplank. The crowd 'received them in absolute silence as they limped by, clothed in the remnants of their ragged, blood-stained uniforms', 'Leslie's Weekly' reported. And finally, with Roosevelt talking about the diversity of the Rough Riders, after their return to the U.S., "This was not true. There were no black men in the regiment, or any regiment, save the specially designated, segregated units. Roosevelt's impromptu speech revealed what passed for national unity in 1898, with its diversity rooted in shades of whiteness, and what would increasingly come to define 'America' in the eyes of its white citizens." And, further, "...an emissary from Sen. Thomas Platt, the most powerful man in NY State politics, came to Montauk (to see Roosevelt) with a peace offering, and a proposal. Not two years earlier, Platt had engineered Roosevelt's ouster as head of the police board in New York City, a move that sent him to Washington, the Department of the Navy, and the Rough Riders. Now, recognizing that the colonel might be the Republicans' only chance to win the governor's mansion that fall, Platt was willing to set past differences aside - though he saw full well the consequences of his action. 'If he becomes Governor of New York, sooner or later, with his personality, he will have to be President of the United States.' Platt wrote. 'I am afraid to start that thing going.'"
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