Read Online Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss - Free Book Online Page A

for American engineers to start their huge and totally successful project of uniting the two oceans.
    TR would again and again seek to justify his role in the whole business, not always to everybody’s satisfaction. At the outset he wrote to his son Kermit: “Any interference that I undertake now will be in the interest of the United States and of the people of the Panama Isthmus themselves. There will be some lively times in carrying out this policy.” In 1911 he stated: “While I was president I kept my foot down on these revolutions [the sporadic Panamanian riots], so that when the revolution referred to did occur, I simply lifted my foot.” And in the usual fashion of his defense he lambasted the Colombians morally: “Panama revolted from Colombia because Colombia, for corrupt and evil purposes, or else from complete governmental incompetency, declined to permit the building of the great work which meant everything to Panama. By every law, human and divine, Panama was right in her position.” His action, he asserted, was only opposed by “a small body of shrill eunuchs who consistently oppose the action of this government whenever that action is to its own interests. Even though at the same time it may be immensely to the interest of the world.” His final blast was this: “To the worst characteristics of seventeenth-century Spain, and of Spain at its worst under Philip II, Colombia has added a squalid savagery of its own, and it has combined with exquisite nicety the worst forms of despotism and of anarchy, of violence and of fatuous weakness, of dismal ignorance, cruelty, treachery, greed, and utter vanity.”
    Yet again in the year 1911, speaking in Berkeley, California, he made what some critics have deemed the ultimate confession. Referring to his having recognized the new government of Panama without waiting for Congress to be in session, he stated: “I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate.”
    Perhaps Elihu Root, his brilliant secretary of war at the time, had the last word at a cabinet meeting in which TR undertook to explain just what he had done and why. Root, whose dry wit and acidity were appreciated by a chief who, despite his strong opinions, understood the importance of candor in his staff and could even laugh at it, concluded that before hearing the president’s defense he had deemed him guilty only of seduction but he now saw him guilty of rape!
    One of the several things that TR never forgave Woodrow Wilson for was the latter’s action as president in apologizing to Colombia for our role in acquiring the Canal Zone and in persuading Congress to make a compensating grant.
    How do we think of TR’s action today? Should he have waited for further negotiations with Colombia? But even had Colombia agreed on a price for the concession, would it have been feasible to construct the canal in the teeth of Panamanian intransigence? Might they not have seen the waterway as enhancing their tyrant’s power and prestige and sought to sabotage the work? TR saw his chance to improve world trade and render our fleet more formidable against an already menacing Japan at the price of giving independence to a small oppressed nation that passionately desired its liberty. And all at the price of a single life! When one thinks of what the United States has done in our time all over the globe to foment resistance to dictators, sometimes at a questionable gain either to us or to the people we aimed to help, it seems to me that one must think twice before calling TR an irresponsible imperialist.
    The president took a broad view of his powers during the actual construction of the canal. If, as he once explained to his secretary of war, he should deem it best to place the three locks on the Pacific side at Miraflores instead of Sosa and dispense with the lake at Sosa by means of a broad sea-level channel, he would not hesitate to do so. But perhaps, he added with