64 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTIONbranch had fled to their summer homes. Theodore Roosevelt
was strenuously relaxing at Oyster Bay; Secretary of War
William Howard Taft was fishing in Quebec; Assistant Secre
tary of State Robert Bacon was vacationing in Maine; and
Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte was taking the
breezes at Lenox, Massachusetts. Only Elihu Root, the Secre
tary of State, was hard at work, speech-making and banqueting
his way home from the Third Pan American Conference at
Rio de Janiero. In Washington Alvey A. Adee was watching
the cables at the State Department, and Generals Fred C.
Ainsworth and J. Franklin Bell were moving the papers at
the War Department. The legation in Havana was just as
relaxed (until the revolt), for the minister, Edward V. Morgan,
an able career diplomat, was vacationing in Europe.
At the time of the Cuban insurrection, Roosevelt's Caribbean
policy was in the delicate process of readjustment. After five
years of tension and conflict, years that saw the Canal Zone
seized, a customs receivership established in the Dominican
Republic, Venezuela protected, and American diplomats and
vessels involved in minor conflicts throughout Central America,
Roosevelt and Root in 1906 embarked on a general reinterpre
tation of the American presence in the Caribbean. Their
principal aim was to reassure the Latin Americans that the
Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt's Corollary did not make
their countries protectorates of the United States.^19 At the
opening session of the Rio Conference on July 31, Root had
stirred the audience with a firm statement of the United
States friendship and respect for the Latin American republics:
We wish for no victories but those of peace; for no territory except
our own; for no sovereignty except sovereignty over ourselves. We deem
the independence and equal rights of the smallest and weakest member
of the family of nations entitled to as much respect as those of the
greatest empire; and we deem the observance of that respect the chief
guaranty of the weak against oppression of the strong. We neither claim
nor desire any rights or privileges or powers that we do not freely con
cede to every American republic. We wish to increase our prosperity,
to expand our trade, to grow in wealth, in wisdom and in spirit; but
our conception of the true way to accomplish this is not to pull down