Louis S. Warren (78 page)

PART THREE

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Empire of the Home

TOURING ACROSS the United States, the Rough Rider spectacle expressed gathering public sentiment for an American empire during this decade of unprecedented overseas expansion that saw U.S. military engagements from Cuba to the Philippines. The American thrust for empire began in domestic strife, a decade of which shaped William Cody's show and his offstage life in profound ways. In 1893, as the world's fair wowed the public, the nation was gradually overwhelmed by the worst economic depression in memory. Before it was over, some 8,000 businesses and 360 banks failed. Crop prices were already down, and farmers anguished as they fell even further. Wages plummeted. Jobs disappeared. In the winter of 1893–94, one in five American workers, perhaps as many as three million people (100,000 in Chicago alone) had no work. In the spring of 1894, Ohioan Jacob Coxey led the nation's first march on Washington, a group of about 100 jobless men demanding unemployment relief. “Coxey's Army” inspired many followers. In the Far West, large gangs of unemployed men organized themselves into “industrial armies” which intimidated or overpowered guards and rode the rails for free.
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Manufacturers and others blamed the crisis on “overproduction” of goods, on the absence of markets for the abundant sewing machines, bicycles, soap, clothing, and other products pouring from American factories and fields (and so abundantly on display at the Chicago world's fair). As Americans staggered through the downturn, the clamor for overseas markets began to grow. The frontier was closed. New horizons beckoned, if only America could be strong enough to stave off European empires that threatened to close her out of lucrative commerce in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. This expansionist surge peaked in 1898, when the United States won a lightning victory in the Spanish-American War, seizing the remnants of the Spanish empire in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, the Philippines in the Pacific, and annexing Guam, Samoa, and Hawaii in the process.

The spectacle of the Congress of Rough Riders of the World kept America's increasingly imperial stance in the minds of Americans throughout the decade and after. At no point was the flow between entertainment and expansionist politics more obvious than in 1898. Many assume Cody's Rough Riders took their name from Roosevelt's. The reverse is true. Theodore Roosevelt's First Volunteers adopted the Rough Rider name from Cody's show and took it to the top of San Juan Hill and into American history. Some of Cody's troupers joined Roosevelt's troops, and after the war, in 1899, a genuine detachment of Roosevelt's Rough Riders appeared in the Congress of Rough Riders to reenact their famous charge into the Spanish guns.
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Although Cody and Roosevelt became passing friends, in the beginning the gauzy overlap between real history and public entertainment masked tensions between them. The aspiring politician staked a claim not only to the charge up San Juan Hill, which practically guaranteed his election to the governorship of New York, but also to the history of the campaign, which he published in
The Rough Riders,
a lively, self-aggrandizing account that appeared in 1899. In the book, Roosevelt distanced himself from Cody's show, insisting the Rough Rider name was bestowed by the public “for some reason or other.” He claimed to have resisted it, “but to no purpose,” and when commanding generals began to refer to them by that name “we adopted the term ourselves.”
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These disingenuous denials reflect the antitheatrical leanings of the era's most theatrical politician (dubbed
Theater
Roosevelt by some wags). Whether or not he saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, he imbibed freely of its manly regionalism. His regiment's ideological premise was that a volunteer force of western cowboys, sheriffs, outlaws, Indians, and even some “half-breeds,” combined with a smattering of easterners who were “western” in spirit (including Roosevelt himself), could, through their hardy warrior virtues and their natural self-reliance, perform at least as well as a regular army regiment. Roosevelt's Rough Riders were as heavy on “real western men” as Cody's Wild West show, and included their share of frontier army veterans, too (including the aging Chris Madsen, who had been at Warbonnet Creek when Cody scalped Yellow Hair).
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In reenacting the history of a regiment that drew its name from the show itself, the “Battle of San Juan Hill” to a degree reprised Cody's fusion of historical action and representation in the scalping of Yellow Hair over two decades before. But the gesture to Roosevelt, in deflecting attention onto the blustering politician and away from Buffalo Bill, came with a risk. Roosevelt's refusal to acknowledge the show as an inspiration was itself a challenge to Cody's authenticity. Cody's press agents fired back at TR's demurrals. If the “manner in which Colonel Roosevelt” introduced the Rough Rider name to the Spanish had “made it historically immortal,” Buffalo Bill's Wild West had been the first to introduce it to the world. Through Cody's labors, not Roosevelt's, audiences had “grown to understand, fully appreciate, and unboundedly admire” the Rough Rider title.
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The spat with Roosevelt may have originated in Cody's earlier ambivalence about the man, which TR could have read as hostility. When and where they first met is not clear, but the two men circled each other warily after Roosevelt returned from Dakota Territory and ascended to New York political command in the mid-1880s. In 1887, Chauncey Depew told a raucous, pro-Roosevelt meeting of the New York Republican Club, “Buffalo Bill said to me in the utmost confidence, ‘Theodore Roosevelt is the only New York dude that has got the making of a man in him.' ”
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If Cody actually said such a thing, the compliment was decidedly double-edged. TR might possess the “making of a man,” but if so, it was only “the making.” He was still a New York dude.

There was a greater danger, too, in making the celebration of Roosevelt's victory so central to the show. The charge up San Juan Hill marked the high-water mark of America's overseas enthusiasm. Roosevelt's victory was popular. But unlike George Custer, the only other military leader to become the subject of a Buffalo Bill's Wild West scene, Roosevelt returned from his battles a living hero. He was also a political figure; he became governor of New York in 1898, then vice president to William McKinley in 1900, then president of the United States after McKinley's assassination in 1901.

The Congress of Rough Riders threatened to become a political advertisement for the Rough Rider Republican. Cody had reasons for preferring Roosevelt to his Democratic rivals, as we shall see. Even so, many in his audience did not. Populists and many Democrats also favored American expansion, but they reviled the professional army and saw McKinley's acquisition of the Philippines as a disaster. In 1900, Democrat William Jennings Bryan vigorously denounced McKinley's imperialism for placing white American men in the steamy, sensual tropics, on a mudslide to miscegenation and the decline of the white race. He lost the election, but he still won over 45 percent of the popular vote.
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Bryan had his supporters even then, and he remained a powerhouse in the Democratic Party for many years. For Cody, there was a very real possibility that the mythologizing of Roosevelt would disenchant a large part of the mass audience he needed to fill the bleachers.

The political limitations of the San Juan Hill reenactment help to explain why Cody shelved it about the time McKinley was killed and Roosevelt began swinging his big stick around the White House. In 1901, Cody replaced Roosevelt's legendary charge with the “Battle of Tsien-Tsin,” a scene from China's Boxer Rebellion in which “the allied armies of the world” rescued the besieged foreign legations and raised the triumphant “Banners of Civilization” in the place of the “Royal Standard of Paganism.”
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Various historians have argued that Cody's freewheeling incorporation of recent events into his frontier narrative allowed him to tap popular sentiment for expansion. As the new century began, his show included “Strange People from Our New Possessions,” a group of “families” representing “the strange and interesting aboriginals”—Hawaiians, Filipinos, and Guamanians—from places “now grouped by the fate of war, the hand of progress and the conquering march of civilization under Old Glory's protecting folds.” The new members of the show “keep step with the marvelous, potential and gigantic expansion of the nation.”
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Some of these, notably the Hawaiian cowboys, or “paniolos,” even qualified as Rough Riders. By placing America's expansion into its spectacle, Cody's show implied a direct connection between frontier history and American victory on the world stage. By mingling cowboys and Indians with his professional military detachments, he incorporated symbols of amateur soldiers and volunteers, the kinds of military organization still preferred by a large segment of the populace.
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But close inspection of the show and its critics suggests these vague, ambiguous gestures to overseas expansion were politically risky for Cody. Westward expansion itself had been divisive, haunted by fears of racial decay, political disunion, and moral (and financial) bankruptcy. Ultimately, the economic success and overwhelming military victories of western annexation pushed those arguments into the mists of history, where they were easily forgotten. The Wild West show, for all its authentic western Indians, scouts, and cowboys, was by and large devoted to showing the settlement of the Far West that had already happened. The likelihood of any further military action against Indians was small when the show began in 1883, and grew smaller with each passing year. The Ghost Dance troubles erupted so suddenly, then receded into history so quickly, that Cody merely had to strike his usual ambivalent pose, urge the Nebraska state militia to remain calm, and wait for it to end. A popular sense that conquest of the Indians was inevitable limited other questions about the morality of that conquest.

The new expansion (as Roosevelt and his Republicans preferred to call it) or empire (as Bryan and the Democrats termed it) was either a glorious ascendance of democracy and capitalism or a turn from America's virtuous, agrarian past into the halls of imperial corruption. This argument was rarely settled by a sense of inevitability. There were American victories in overseas battles. But underlying factors that facilitated American success in the Far West were largely absent outside North America. The demographic collapse of indigenous peoples through disease had been pivotal to American success in Kansas, Nebraska, and the entire continent, as it was in Hawaii. But disease would play much less of a role in subjugating indigenous people in the Philippines, where enduring connections to Asia ensured long exposure to Eurasian maladies and higher rates of native survival from epidemics.

Also, Europeans contested American power in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific in ways they seldom had in the post-1848 Far West. Isolationists and anti-imperialists could point over and over again to the cost of overseas deployments and the absence of compelling victories to urge the end to overseas adventures. American expansionists would have to articulate and rearticulate a convincing case for sacrificing lives and resources, because in no other way would American power be secured on distant shores.
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In some ways, the fear of racial degeneration and undemocratic consequences that flowed from governing imperial subjects loomed largest of all. A primary threat of continuing the Philippines occupation, according to many of its opponents, was the dissolution of soldiers' marriages as they were tempted by polygamous native life. White women sickened in the Philippines, said press accounts. American men, debilitated by the malarial tropics and the temptations of naked primitives, were losing their manhood. Prone to violent excess, horrendous atrocities, and indolence, they were becoming more like the “weak and impotent” British who struggled against the Boers in South Africa, and more like the corrupted Spanish whom they had so recently expelled.
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Buffalo Bill's Wild West had always presented Indian conquest in an ambivalent light. Perhaps having Indians play Spanish soldiers in the San Juan Hill reenactment, and Chinese soldiers in the “Battle of Tsien-Tsin” in 1901, was meant to complicate these historical moments, by infusing recent U.S. enemies with the honor of the noble savage.

If so, the gesture failed. The politics of empire were harder to contain in the past. The Indians masquerading as foreigners potentially rewrote the conquest of the American West as an imperial maneuver, upending the older narrative of inevitable, sometimes unfortunate progress across a unified continent. To many, the Chinese who fought the combined American, European, and Japanese forces in the Boxer Rebellion were not rebels, but brave patriots defending their native land. For these observers, Cody's celebration of the Chinese defeat was more propaganda than entertainment. Mark Twain, the great fan of the original Wild West show, had become a major critic of America's overseas engagements. The author who urged Cody to take the Wild West show to Europe in 1884 was less pleased when the show imported foreign entanglements into its drama. Twain was in the audience at Madison Square Garden on opening night, 1901. But he stormed out of the stands in protest at the jingoistic “Battle of Tsien-Tsin.”
¹³

Cody himself had doubts about American expansion, especially the Spanish-American War. At the onset of hostilities, he offered to take up arms for the United States and to lend four hundred horses to the army for the campaign. Nelson Miles, now general of the army, appointed Cody to his staff. In April 1898, as the Wild West show began touring, Cody announced he would stay with the show until he was called to service. The 1898 show included a detachment of Cuban insurgents, the fighters for freedom on whose behalf the United States was ostensibly entering the conflict.