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The First Breakthrough. At 42, Theodore Roosevelt stood at the pinnacle of the power he had long sought. He understood power; he understood the power of the nation and its parts; he understood the power that the nation had—or ought to have—in the world. But although T.R. controlled the White House, it was National Committee Chairman Hanna who controlled the G.O.P. organization, Mark Hanna who could water down or wreck T.R.'s programs in Congress, Mark Hanna who could ruin T.R.'s influence by blocking his nomination in 1904. So T.R., ruthlessly shrugging off Hanna's loyal promises to cooperate, condemned Hanna to political death. Method of death: rapid-fire dismissal of pro-Hanna Republicans from patronage jobs in Hanna's Midwestern strongholds, installation of pro-T.R. types—"the right sort."
His power base secure, T.R. kicked off a momentous new-century campaign to save his countrymen from "government by plutocracy or by mob." His first milestone breakthroughs: 1) first successful antitrust suit brought by an American President to dissolve a corporate monopoly—the Northern Securities Co.—to safeguard right of free competition; 2) first mediation between management and labor by an American President—in the great anthracite coal strike—to safeguard the public welfare, including the rights of labor. But T.R., conservative, added: "I wish the labor people absolutely to understand that I set my face like flint against violence and lawlessness of any kind on their part, just as much as against arrogant greed by the rich."
Dig the Canal. "More and more," T.R. adjured Congress in 1902, "the increasing interdependence and complexity of international relations render it incumbent on all civilized and orderly powers to insist on the proper policing of the world." T.R. began to keep the peace with a big stick. With a threat of intervention by the Fleet, he effectively warned rampaging German Kaiser Wilhelm II away from Venezuela. He landed U.S. forces in Santo Domingo to forestall European atempts to "collect debts," put U.S. agents backed up by marines to work at the customs houses, collected enough revenue to pay the debts, then withdrew. Roosevelt astonished the world by honoring the U.S.'s Spanish-American War pledge to Cuba not to trespass upon but rather to support Cuban independence.
T.R. moved beyond policing to make one of the great decisions of his life. He sent the U.S.S. Nashville into the port of Colon in Panama to give implicit support to a Panamanian rebellion against Panama's colonial overlord, Colombia. His eventual intention, of course, was to seize or to negotiate possession of a canal zone in Panama, dig the canal, and that way safeguard the defenses of both coasts of the U.S. Said T.R.: "It was imperative ... of vital necessity."
Damn the Malefactors! In March