Drinking with the men

From The Boys of '98 by Dale L. Walker. Two stories, one illustrating the amateurish expansion of the Army in preparation to go to war in Cuba, the other another curious cameo. The Rough Riders are initially mustered in San Antonio, Roosevelt being second in command.

Two days after he arrived at the camp, Roosevelt gathered the troops of the First and Second Squadrons, commanded by Majors Alex Brodie and Henry Hersey, and led them three miles from camp and back again in the baking sun. On the way back, the ever-solicitous Roosevelt called a halt at a beer garden near Riverside Park and announced that the troop captains "will let their men go in and drink all the beer they want, and I will pay for it."

After the beer-sated troopers filed back to camp, Wood learned of Roosevelt's largesse and notified him sternly in his customary poker-faced manner that it was against army regulations, not to mention common sense, for officers to supply alcoholic beverages to enlisted men, to drink with them or to encourage their drinking while on duty. Roosevelt visited Wood's command tent that evening, stood at attention and announced to the air above the colonel's head, "I wish to tell you that I took the troops out without thinking of this question of officers drinking with their men and gave them all a schooner of beer. I wish to say, sir, that I consider myself the damndest ass within ten miles of this camp. Good night."

Despite such momentary lapses, Roosevelt was having the time of his life. While Wood pored over maps, shuffled papers, and exchanged messages with the War Department and with General Shafter in Tampa, his second-in-command did the routine correspondence, took care of interviews with the newspapermen who made a second home near the camp command tents, supervised horseback and foot drills, made the inspections and parades and morale speeches.

One of Roosevelt's most onerous duties, now that the regiment had swelled to over one thousand men, was to turn down new applicants. A typical handling of this chore was his response to a letter he received on May 19 from a twenty-two-year-old veteran of the Seventh Cavalry who wrote from a remote ranch in Idaho, offering to come to San Antonio to enlist. "I wish I could take you in," Roosevelt wrote, "but I am afraid that the chances of our being over-enlisted forbid my bringing a man from such a distance." He signed the letter "Theodore Roosevelt, First Regt., U.S. Volunteer Cavalry, In Camp near San Antonio, Texas," and sent it to Edgar Rice Burroughs of Pocatello, subsequently world famous as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes.