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.The martyred President Lincoln wasmade a man for all reasons.Roosevelt used Taft s and Root s reports on the conductof the army in the Philippines in his annual message to theCongress on December 2, 1902.He declared that therewere individual instances of wrong-doing, and that theculprits were found and punished. He had discharged of-fenders and had installed new military leadership.The for-mer brave soldier would not allow the army to disgraceitself and behave in un-American and unmanly ways.Roosevelt did not, in any way, defend the cruel behaviorof American troops.Good historian that he was, however,he noted that Americans had done worse in the past in In-dian wars in the West.All of this Roosevelt put on recordin a letter to Elihu Root, the secretary of war:153 0465010240-Donald.qxd:Layout 1 8/25/08 5:36 PM Page 154lion in the white houseThe accusation that there had been anything resembling sys-tematic or widespread cruelty by our troops was false.In thePhilippine Islands the task had been a thousand times moredifficult and the provocation to our soldiers a hundred timesgreater, and yet nothing had occurred as bad as.[the] mas-sacre.at Wounded Knee.At that massacre twelve years before, Roosevelt recalled, squaws, children, unarmed Indians, and armed Indianswho had surrendered were killed, sometimes cold-blood-edly, and with circumstances of marked brutality. It wasno consolation, of course, that the army was behaving anotch above its worst recorded behavior in warfare.Roose-velt, however, thought it important to mention its slightlymore civilized way of war.On becoming president, Roosevelt ordered that allcivilian appointments to the Philippines were to be madewithout any political consideration of any kind.The is-lands were to be made ready for self-government, withsanitation improved, railroads and roads built, and a pub-lic school system put into place.His greatest problem,however, and a great cause for the Filipino war, was landownership.Roosevelt tackled the tricky issue with inge-nuity, while holding back complaining AmericanCatholics with patience.The Spanish Catholic Churchcontrolled immense amounts of land, about four hundredthousand acres, on which sixty thousand peasants toiled.The workers claimed their rents were too high.TheCatholic priests, or friars, had also taken it upon them-selves to establish local governments, and reputedly theywere notoriously corrupt and frequently immoral.Aguinaldo warred against the church, the friars, the land-154 0465010240-Donald.qxd:Layout 1 8/25/08 5:36 PM Page 155The Accidental Presidentholders, the miserable local government, and the im-morality of the padrones.Roosevelt charged Taft to broker a deal with the pope,who, as head of the Roman Catholic Church, owned allthe friars lands in the Philippines.It was not until 1903that the difficult problem of landholding was settled.Thepope sold the church land held by the friars to the UnitedStates for fewer dollars than the president originally of-fered the stubborn Vatican.The Spanish friars were al-lowed to stay in the Philippines, although most left.Roosevelt saw that the land was then distributed to Fil-ipinos, beginning the creation of a small-farmer nation.By1908, Roosevelt turned over to Taft, his successor, the mostprogressively governed colonial territory in the world.Henever got much credit for his Philippine victory, however,because it was overshadowed by the atrocities committedby the American army.During 1902, Roosevelt was under intense fire by po-litical opponents of all kinds, but especially from Demo-crats on the Philippine question.He struck back bytrying to change the subject.He made a deliberately in-flammatory public statement about lynching by fire,which was more abhorrent than what the American armywas accused by Democrats of doing in the Philippines.He bellowed, Whoever in any part of the country hasever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal bythe dreadful torture of fire must forever have the awfulspectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain andsoul.He can never be the same man again. The Southwas experiencing an orgy of lynching in recent years, andwhite southerners were furious with Roosevelt for callingattention to their horrific crimes.155 0465010240-Donald.qxd:Layout 1 8/25/08 5:36 PM Page 156lion in the white houseOf course the South did not take this attack lyingdown.Southern editors and politicos responded.One jour-nalist wrote:He.condemns lynching negroes who outrage our woman-hood.He is a narrow-minded bigot.[a] modern Judas.[a] prostitutor who smites the South.Burning and hangingnegro rapists is a terrible crime in the eyes of this would-be Cae-sar.This is the low estimate President Roosevelt places on thevirtue of our women.During 1902, several more foreign policy questions re-ceived Roosevelt s attention.The Alaska boundary issuewith Canada was settled within a year, as England noddedtoward the American position.Then Roosevelt turned tothe Monroe Doctrine when troubles brewed in LatinAmerica.He wrote:I regard the Monroe Doctrine as being equivalent to the opendoor in South America.That is, I do not want the UnitedStates or any European power to get territorial possessions inSouth America but to let South America gradually developon its own lines, with an open door to all outside nations, saveas individual countries enter into individual treaties with oneanother.Roosevelt could foresee transitory intervention on thepart of any state outside of South America when there wasa row.But he was wary of German intervention and keptan eye on England s powerful and roving naval fleet.His-torically, England had been the covert enforcer of the156 0465010240-Donald.qxd:Layout 1 8/25/08 5:36 PM Page 157The Accidental PresidentMonroe Doctrine because it also did not want Europeansplaying in Latin America.But an instance arose in whichEngland was involved in a Latin American crisis, arousingRoosevelt s interest.Venezuela could not pay its debts toforeign powers, mostly Germany and England
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