The Imperial Cruise Page 2
Wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Edmund Morris of Alice’s stepmother: “Edith struck most strangers as snobbish…. ‘If they had our brains,’ she was wont to say of servants, ‘they’d have our place.’ ”10
Theodore Roosevelt left to Edith the emotionally challenging job of dealing with the rebellious child. Edith responded by bluntly telling Alice that if she did not stop being so selfish, the family would stop caring for her.
Teddy and Edith had five children of their own: Theodore III, Kermit, Ethel, Archibald, and Quentin. Young Alice often felt like an outcast as her brothers teased her about not having the same mother. Her brother Ted told Alice that Edith said that it was good that Alice Lee had died, because she would have been a boring wife for Teddy. Alice later said of Edith, “I think she always resented being the second choice and she never really forgave him his first marriage.”11
Edith Roosevelt. She said of the servants, “If they had our brains, they’d have our place.” (Stringer/MPI/Getty Images)
Alice was frequently shunted off to relatives, with whom she often spent more time than with her father and stepmother. Carol Felsenthal writes in Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth: “Theodore Roosevelt gave few signs that he cared much about his oldest child.”12 In one letter to Edith, Teddy wrote affectionately about all the children except Alice. And, as Alice confided to her diary, “Father doesn’t care for me…. We are not in the least congenial, and if I don’t care overmuch for him and don’t take any interest in the things he likes, why should he pay any attention to me or the things that I live for, except to look on them with disapproval.”13
The Roosevelt family. Quentin, Theodore, Theodore III, Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel. (Library of Congress)
Among the things Alice rejected was her father’s devout faith. As a little girl Alice informed her father that his Christian beliefs were “sheer voodoo” and that she was “a pagan and meant it.”14 She would be the only one of his six children not to be confirmed.
Alice’s rebellious nature was far from private. She violated White House etiquette by eating asparagus with gloved fingers at an official dinner. She daringly used makeup, bet on horse races, and dangled her legs from grand pianos. Alice once appeared in public with a boa constrictor curled around her neck, and to one “dry” dinner party Alice smuggled small whiskey bottles in her gloves. At a time when automobiles were rare, Alice drove her car unchaperoned around Washington and was ticketed at least once for speeding. Alice wrote that Edith and Teddy requested “that I should not smoke ‘under their roof,’ [so] I smoked on the roof, up the chimney, out of doors and in other houses.”15 (She was even “asked to leave Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel for smoking in the lobby.”16) A friend called Alice “a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.”17 Roosevelt once exclaimed to a visitor, “I can be President of the United States, or I can attend to Alice. I can’t do both!”18
Yet Roosevelt—who became president after a twenty-year career as a best-selling author and student of public relations—could not help but notice how the media loved this presidential wild child and how useful that might be. He asked his seventeen-year-old daughter to christen Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm’s American-made yacht “in the glare of international flashbulbs,” and the French ambassador noted it “was a means by which to reduce the hostility in the public sentiment between the two countries.”19 Pleased with her performance, Teddy then dispatched her to America’s newly acquired Caribbean possessions, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Although the teenager had once written, “I care for nothing except to amuse myself in a charmingly expensive way,”20 she took a serious interest in what she was shown: “As the daughter of the President, I was supposed to have an intelligent interest in such things as training schools, sugar plantations and the experiments with yellow fever mosquitoes.”21 Teddy wrote her, “You were of real service down there because you made those people feel that you liked them and took an interest in them and your presence was accepted as a great compliment.”22
Alice Roosevelt as a debutante, 1902. A friend called Alice “a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” (Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Having proved useful, Alice was asked by her father to serve as the hostess on Secretary Taft’s Pacific voyage. She would not only be a convenient distraction, but an ocean away. After leaving Washington, Alice wrote, “My parting from my family… was really delicious, a casual peck on the cheek and a handshake, as if I was going to be gone six days. I wonder if they really care for me or I for them.”23
Among those on the trip was Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. At thirty-four years of age, Nick was thirteen years Alice’s senior and only eleven years younger than her father. He had qualified for the trip because of his seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and because of his particular interest in Hawaii and the Philippines.
Nick was the fourth generation of Longworths in Cincinnati, a rich aristocrat who grew up on an estate, toured Europe, learned French and the classics, and summered in Newport, Rhode Island. He’d won election to Congress in 1902 and, being wealthy and dashing, was a big attraction for Alice.
The elder Roosevelts did not know the details of Alice and Nick’s romance, but if they had, it is likely they would have strongly disapproved. Edith warned Alice, “Your friend from Ohio drinks too much.”24 He was also a gambler and womanizer, known to frequent Washington brothels and enjoy the prostitutes of K Street. Yet here the two were, setting off on a voyage that would take months and remove them both from Teddy’s supervision.
Congressman Nicholas Longworth aboard the Manchuria, 1905. (Collection of the New-York Historical Society)
THE ARRIVAL OF THE train to the three-day stay in and the subsequent sailing from the city by the bay was perhaps San Francisco’s biggest news story since the gold rush. “It was San Francisco before the fire,” Alice later wrote. “I shall never forget those days. There was an exhilarating quality in the air, the place, the people, that kept me on my toes every moment of the time there.”25
The San Francisco Chronicle’s page-one headline on July 5, 1905, was “San Francisco Welcomes President’s Daughter.”26 At the time, there were no bridges connecting San Francisco to the mainland, so Alice detrained at the Oakland railroad terminus and took the ferryboat Berkeley across the bay to San Francisco’s Ferry Building. The press was surprised: the sophisticated Alice they’d known only from pictures looked like a schoolgirl in person. When reporters on the ferry tried to get close to her, Nick told them she did not wish to be interviewed, but eventually she relented, stating, “I am simply on a pleasure trip and I must refer all questions to Mr. Taft.”27
“There was a great curiosity to see Alice Roosevelt,” Big Bill noted in an understatement.28 Indeed, the public couldn’t get enough. Eager San Franciscans lined the streets for hours just to glimpse their Princess. Alice was followed everywhere, from the Palace Hotel, where she and Taft dined, to the University of California–Berkeley campus, where she was briefly overcome: “The wildest rumors were at once afloat,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle, “one story being to the effect that the President’s daughter had a sunstroke. The truth is that she was not unwilling to find an excuse to snatch a few hours of quiet.”29 One photo caption read “Miss Alice Roosevelt and Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, Who Is Very Attentive to the President’s Daughter.”30
THE PRESS TREATED TAFT with great respect, one local paper commenting, “Secretary Taft has certainly made a great many friends since his arrival, and in the hotel corridors one now hears him frequently spoken of as a Presidential possibility.”31 Taft had first come to national attention as governor of the Philippines. As ruler of America’s largest colony, he had been in charge of America’s first attempt at nation building far from home. But recent reports from Manila had Taft “alarmed that the political edifice he had left behind was collapsing.”32 The cruise would be a good chance for him to che
ck on things personally in the Philippines. In consultation with Roosevelt, Taft also took on presidential assignments in Japan, China, and Korea.
The official highlight of Big Bill’s San Francisco visit was an elaborate all-male banquet thrown in his honor at the Palace Hotel. The San Francisco Chronicle reported, “Three hundred and seventy-six guests sat down to the repast, among them being representatives of the leading interests of the Pacific Coast.”33 When it came his turn to address the tuxedoed banqueters, Taft first praised those traveling with him to the Philippines:
I consider it a great triumph, that we have been able to enlist the interest and the sympathy of seven distinguished United States senators and twenty-three representatives of the House of Representatives of the United States, who have been willing at a very considerable cost to each person and also at a very considerable cost of time to devote a hundred days to going out into those islands in a season when we must expect storm and rain, in order that they may know the facts concerning them. I think it is an exceptional instance of the degree of self-sacrifice to which our legislators and those who are responsible to us for government are willing to make.34
Taft referred to the Filipinos as “those wards of ours ten thousand miles away from here,” declaring that America had “a desire to do the best for those people.”35 (The term wards was laden with meaning: former judge Taft and his audience knew that the United States Supreme Court had defined American Indians as “wards” of the federal government.) The problem—which he did not mention—was that the Filipino “wards” didn’t agree with the American sense of what was “best” for them.
In 1898, Filipino freedom fighters had expected that America would come to their aid in their patriotic revolution against their Spanish colonial masters. Instead, the Americans short-circuited the revolution and took the country for themselves. Related American military actions left more than two hundred fifty thousand Filipinos dead. Over the next seven years, many Filipinos came to associate Americans with torture, concentration camps, rape and murder of civilians, and destruction of their villages. But in San Francisco’s Palace Hotel, Taft assured his audience that the real problem was the Filipinos themselves:
The problem in the Philippines is the problem of making the people whom we are to govern in those islands for their benefit believe that we are sincere when we tell them that we are there for their benefit, and make them patient while we are instructing them in self-government. You cannot make them patient unless you convince them of your good intentions. I am confronted with the repeated question, Shall we grant them independence at once or are we right to show them that they cannot be made fit for independence at once? They are not yet ready for independence and if they talk of independence at the present time it is mere wind.36
When Big Bill said that Filipinos were not “fit for independence,” he could be confident that those in attendance understood why. A majority of Americans—young and old, the unschooled and the highly educated—believed that, over the millennia, succeeding generations of Whites had inherited the instincts of the superior man. The day before his Palace Hotel speech, Taft had told a Berkeley university audience, “Filipinos are not capable of self-government and cannot be for at least a generation to come.”37 The young men listening understood that this was not a political judgment, but an organic truth, as Taft reminded the students, “it takes a thousand years to build up… an Anglo-Saxon frame of liberty.”38
Teddy Roosevelt had built a dual career as a best-selling author and wildly popular president upon his image as a muscular White Christian man ready to civilize lesser races with the rifle. Like many Americans, Roosevelt held dearly to a powerful myth that proclaimed the White Christian male as the highest rung on the evolutionary ladder. It was the myth that “civilization follows the sun.” The roots of this belief could be found in a concoction of history, fable, and fantasy.
ONCE UPON A TIME, the story went, an “Aryan race” sprang up in the Caucasus Mountains north of what is now Iran. (The word Iran derives from the word Aryan.) The Aryan was a beautiful human specimen: white-skinned, big-boned, sturdily built, blue-eyed, and unusually intelligent. He was a doer, a creator, a wanderer, a superior man with superior instincts, and, above all, a natural Civilizer. In time, the Aryan migrated north, south, east, and west. The ancient glories of China, India, and Egypt—indeed, all the world’s great civilizations—were the product of his genius.
During this era of great enlightenment and prosperity, the bright light of White Civilization blazed throughout the world. But over time came a fatal error: the pure White Aryan mixed his blood with non-White Chinese, Indian, and Egyptian females. The sad result of this miscegenation was plain to see: dirt and deterioration. History then recorded the long decline of those mongrelized civilizations.
Not all was lost, though. A group of Aryans had followed the sun westward from the Caucasus to the area of northern Europe we now call Germany. This Aryan tribe did not make the mistake of their brethren. Rather than mate with lesser-blooded peoples, these Aryans killed them. By eradicating the Others, the Aryans maintained the purity of their blood.
Through many mist-shrouded centuries in the dark German forests, the myth continued and the pure Aryan evolved into an even higher being: the Teuton. The clever Teuton demonstrated a unique genius for political organization. He paid no homage to kings or emperors. Instead, the Teuton consulted democratically among his own kind and slowly birthed embryonic institutions of liberty that would later manifest themselves elsewhere.
The original documentation of the Teuton was the book Germania (circa AD 98) by the Roman historian Caius Cornelius Tacitus. In Germania, Tacitus wrote that long ago “the peoples of Germany [were] a race untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves [with] a high moral code and a profound love of freedom and individual rights; important decisions were made by the whole community.”39
Eventually the Teuton—with his Aryan-inherited civilizing instinct—spread out from the German forests. Those who ventured south invigorated Greece, Italy, and Spain. But these Teuton tribes made the same mistake as the earlier Aryans who founded China, India, and Egypt: instead of annihilating the non-White women, they slept with them, and the inferior blood of the darker Mediterranean races polluted the superior blood of the White Teuton. Thus the history of the Mediterranean countries is one of dissolution and nondemocratic impulses.
The Teutons that furthered the spread of pure Aryan civilization were the ones who continued to follow the sun to the west. They marched out of Germany’s forests and ventured to Europe’s western coast. Then they sailed across what would later be called the English Channel and landed in what would become the British Isles.
Lesser races already populated those islands, and had the Teuton bred with these non-Aryans, their pure blood would have been sullied and the great flow of civilization would have come to a halt.* But luckily for world civilization, these Teutons obeyed their instincts. By methodical slaughter of native men, women, and children, they kept themselves pure. As these Germanic tribes spread westward and northerly, they gradually became known as Anglo-Saxons (a compound of two Germanic tribal names).
The Anglo-Saxon myth of White superiority hardened in the 1500s when King Henry VIII broke with the pope to create the Church of England. Royal propagandists blitzed the king’s subjects with the idea that the new Anglican Church was not a break with tradition, but a return to a better time: Henry promoted the Church of England to his subjects as a reconnection to a purer Anglo-Saxon tradition that had existed before the Norman conquest of 1066. The success of the king’s argument is revealed by an English pamphleteer writing in 1689 that those seeking wisdom in government should look “to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English constitution.”41 Henry was long gone, but the myth had been reinforced and reinvigorated.
Thus, centuries of Aryan and Teuton history revealed the three Laws of Civilization:
&n
bsp; 1. The White race founded all civilizations.
2. When the White race maintains its Whiteness, civilization is maintained.
3. When the White race loses its Whiteness, civilization is lost.
A glance revealed the truth of these declarations: The Anglo-Saxons were a liberty-loving people who spawned the Magna Carta, debated laws in Parliament, produced exemplars like Shakespeare, and tinkered the Industrial Revolution to life. But woe to those who ignored civilization’s rules and went south to Africa or east to Egypt, India, and China. The Anglo-Saxon in those benighted countries were but small rays of light overwhelmed by the more populous dark races. There were just too many Africans, Indians, and Chinese to slaughter in order to establish superior civilizations. The best that could be hoped for was an archipelago of White settlement and the exploitation of local primitives in order to produce greater European riches.
Given such constraints, civilization and democracy could reach the next level of evolution only if the Anglo-Saxon moved westward. Progress sailed across the Atlantic with the White Christians who followed the sun west to North America. And once again—emulating their successful Aryan and Teuton forebears—the American Aryans eliminated the native population. From Plymouth Rock to San Francisco Bay, the settlers slaughtered Indian men, women, and children so democracy could take root and civilization as they understood it could sparkle from sea to shining sea.