Sublime

Roosevelt was just getting started. In 1903 the Dominican Republic’s finances collapsed. Its president, Carlos Morales, intimated that he would welcome annexation by the United States—the second time that country had offered itself up. A decade earlier, Roosevelt would have jumped at Morales’s offer. But now, exhausted by the Philippine War, he was

“Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article,” Fillmore said, that he regarded it as the “duty of the Government” to secure it at a “reasonable price.” “Nothing will be omitted on my part,” he promised the nation, in the quest for cheap guano.

Trinidad Oliva era un hombre que picaba alto. Se sentía injustamente postergado por el gobierno. Había estado preso en tiempos de Jacobo Árbenz por conspirar contra el régimen y no tenía la menor simpatía por Castillo Armas, de modo que podía ser una pieza clave para el proyecto.

Shortly before the Hammonds’ arrival the building’s East Portico had been the scene of an assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson. The assailant was named Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be England’s long-dead King Richard III and claimed that Jackson had interfered with the delivery of payments long owed to him by the colo