American Experiment (212 page)

The agreement was not greeted by universal acclaim in the United States. The head of the American Bar Association denounced America’s role in the insurrection as a “crime”; the
New York Times
termed it an “act
of sordid conquest.” In the Senate, John Morgan led a concerted assault on the treaty, calling it a “caesarian operation” midwived by Roosevelt. But the country at large rallied behind the President; Morgan’s forces went down to defeat, and the senator himself reluctantly voted for the treaty in the end. Better a stolen canal than no canal at all, he and others reasoned. The 1904 Republican platform, however, expressed no shame at the outcome: “The great work of connecting the Pacific and Atlantic by a canal is at last begun, and it is due to the Republican Party.” Touting Roosevelt for a presidential term in his own right, it proclaimed that “foreign policy under his administration has not only been able, vigorous, and dignified, but in the highest degree successful.”

Roosevelt’s own account of the Panama Canal’s beginnings harked back to his days in the Badlands. Colombia was a “road agent” who had tried to hold the President up, but Roosevelt had been “quick enough” and had “nerve enough to wrest his gun from him.” In his analogy the Colombians’ gun was Panama, and TR refused to heed the protests of any “hysterical sentimentalist” who wanted him to return it.

Other observers, then and since, have also seen Panama as highway robbery—but with Roosevelt as the bandit. Nor was Roosevelt’s willingness to risk conflict confined to this one affair. He convinced Britain that he would use force to settle Alaska’s disputed boundary, thus causing the British to accept the line claimed by America. He sent gunboats to Morocco to secure the release of a person who turned out not to be a U.S. citizen. In the Caribbean, the President pressured the Germans over Venezuela, took control of the Dominican Republic’s customhouses, and sent troops to occupy revolution-torn Cuba. To the Monroe Doctrine he added the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, a warning that “flagrant cases of … wrongdoing or impotence” in the Western Hemisphere would be checked by the United States acting as an “international police power.” Once again TR painted himself as fighting outlaws as well as European powers who might take over weak Latin American states unable to pay debts or protect foreign nationals.

Roosevelt quite clearly relished conflict, confrontation, even the risk of war. “No merchant,” he declared, “no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men. No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph over malice domestic or foreign levy.” He was much influenced by the idea of the “competition of races,” preached by Josiah Strong and others who saw America as engaged in a tremendous struggle
for the dominance of the fittest among nations. In effect, Strong’s doctrine was Social Darwinism applied to international relations—and Roosevelt subscribed to it heartily.

In the hands of Strong, Roosevelt, and other expansionists, Manifest Destiny became practically indistinguishable, as a concept, from the imperialism being practiced by the nations of Europe. The contrast with the dominant ideas of a century earlier was striking. In the early days of the American republic, with France setting all Europe aflame with revolution, men like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson could well hope that democracy was destined to spread throughout the world. Theirs was a belief in the power of ideas—particularly in the idea of liberty. Theodore Roosevelt, President in an era when Europeans were using force to subjugate much of the globe, was wedded instead to the idea of power.

If Roosevelt, in his self-proclaimed role as policeman among nations, was open to the charge of imperialism, then other actions of his require a very different explanation. One strand in Rooseveltian diplomacy was composed of force and conflict, yet an opposing strand consisted of conciliation and quiet diplomacy. Behind the scenes, the blustering Rough Rider often acted as a force for moderation.

The most dramatic display of the “other” Roosevelt came in 1905, when he moved to end the Russo-Japanese War. Fighting had broken out a year earlier, when the two powers clashed over their rival interests in Manchuria and Korea. Japan won a series of naval victories and most of the land battles, only to find her economy in critical condition as the war dragged on. The Russians, meanwhile, were bedeviled with internal turmoil, terrible incompetence in their army, and the disastrous loss of their Baltic fleet at Tsushima Straits, after its epic voyage around the world. Neither side could afford to continue the struggle, yet neither would sue for peace. In desperation over the stalemate, Japan turned to Roosevelt in April of 1905.

Initially TR had favored Japan. “You must not breathe it to anyone,” he wrote TR, Jr., after the battle of Port Arthur; “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory.” The Japanese seemed able and intelligent, while the Russians annoyed him with their “supine carelessness” and “contemptuous effrontery.” Throughout the war, Japan’s diplomats courted Roosevelt’s further goodwill by joining him for hikes and tennis games, arranging wrestling lessons for him, and deluging him with books on the island kingdom. Roosevelt was responsive to this kind of personal approach. He tended to draw advice from his “Tennis Cabinet,” a loose group of friends and sports cronies that already included several foreign diplomats. But apparently the Japanese miscalculated the effect of their efforts. Educated by his crash course of readings—and by the string of
Japanese military successes—Roosevelt began to wonder aloud whether the Japanese “did not lump Russians, English, Americans, Germans, all of us, simply as white devils inferior to themselves” and were planning to “beat us in turn.”

Aware of the big stakes involved, Roosevelt brought to the peace-making process both his vigor and his finesse. While bombarding Czar Nicholas with plans and suggestions for a peace conference, he worked on the Japanese diplomats, urging them to moderate their terms. Notes and telegrams flowed between the President and officials in London, Paris, and Berlin as Roosevelt sought for every opening to influence the belligerents. In June, convinced that at last he would receive a favorable response, he formally invited Japan and Russia to come together for direct negotiations. The two powers consented, designating the United States as the site of their conference.

At the U.S. naval base in Kittery, Maine, just across the river from Portsmouth, the two sides confronted each other. From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt followed every nuance of the negotiations. It soon became clear that the talks would deadlock; Russia refused to concede defeat or pay an indemnity, while Japan would give up none of its military gains. “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese peace negotiators,” TR fumed to his son Kermit. “The Japanese ask too much, but the Russians … are so stupid and won’t tell the truth.” Again the telegraph wires to St. Petersburg burned with new arguments and proposals. First the Japanese and then the Russians were invited down to Oyster Bay for a private talk with the President. From Japan’s representative, he secured a compromise on two of the four points still at issue. Then, returning from a cruise beneath Long Island Sound in an experimental submarine, Roosevelt offered the Russians a change of wording that helped put a better face on their concessions. His skillful interventions helped to produce a treaty of peace.

Roosevelt displayed the same firm but gentle touch that made the Treaty of Portsmouth possible in other controversies between the major powers. When war threatened to break out between France and Germany over Morocco in 1905, the President again provided his good offices for settling the dispute. America’s participation in the ensuing Algeciras Conference was greeted with skepticism in Congress, but Roosevelt took considerable pride in the peaceful outcome. He also was the moving force behind the 1907 Hague Conference, which denounced the use of military force to collect foreign debts and tried to establish limits of civilized conduct in war. Watching the emergence of Roosevelt as a “diplomatist of high rank,” the London
Morning Post
professed to be amazed. “He has
displayed … great tact, great foresight, and finesse really extraordinary. Alone ... he met every situation as it arose, shaped events to suit his purpose, and showed remarkable patience, caution, and moderation.”

Roosevelt, notes biographer Elting Morison, had a “horror of anarchy, disorder, and … wanton bloodshed.” His experiences with the chaos of modern life were intensely personal: he lost a cherished wife in childbirth and a beloved younger brother to alcoholism, witnessed frontier violence, ascended to the presidency through the whim of an assassin, and watched his friend John Hay die as the Portsmouth negotiations commenced. Roosevelt courted strife because he could not seem to avoid it, yet he also was able to rise above the battle, to convert struggle into a personal and political source of power. “TR’s supporters focused on his ability to master seemingly uncontrollable forces and, in so doing, advance the cause of moral order,” according to Robert Dallek. The need to control events underlay Roosevelt’s words and beliefs as well as his actions; it was the thread that united TR the imperialist with TR the peacemaker.

Solid accomplishments were the only adequate response to life’s natural disorder. “The chief pleasure really worth having,” Roosevelt confided to a friend, “… is the doing well of some work that ought to be done.” Thus no prospect delighted him more than the actual construction of the isthmian canal. Although no President had ever before left the country while in office, Roosevelt could not keep away from Panama.

The President sailed to the Canal Zone on a battleship, purposely timing his arrival to coincide with the height of the rainy season so as to see the site at its most daunting. The weather pelted him as he rode through the streets of Panama City with Amador, wilted his white suit as he climbed aboard a huge steam shovel to do a little digging on his own, and threatened to derail his train as he inspected the locks. Everything had to be explained to him: engineers’ salaries, the crews’ kitchens, the controls of the various equipment.

“This is one of the great works of the world,” he assured the assembled diggers. “It is a greater work than you, yourselves, at the moment realize.”

On his return from Panama, Roosevelt had to take hold of a more prickly situation. The San Francisco Board of Education, under pressure to stem the flow of Japanese immigrants to California, had passed in 1906 an order that segregated all oriental students in the city’s public schools. Labeling the segregation order a “wicked absurdity,” the President tried to bring pressure to bear on the westerners, only to find himself stymied by the constraints of federalism. As Japanese indignation
and Californian defiance mounted, TR turned on the charm instead. The mayor of San Francisco and seven school board members accepted his invitation to come to the White House, and in a series of meetings refereed by Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, Roosevelt and the local officials reached an understanding. San Francisco repealed the segregation order, and the President undertook to persuade the Japanese to limit their immigration to America.

The same mix of finesse and force was evident in Roosevelt’s negotiations with Japan. To fulfill his promise to the San Franciscans, Roosevelt sent another friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Tokyo. The genial Taft quickly found a face-saving formula for the Japanese: both sides would enter into a Gentlemen’s Agreement to reduce immigration to the other’s country. Roosevelt continued his efforts to assuage the Japanese and, in 1908, Root and Japan’s ambassador, Baron Kogoro Takahira, reached an agreement to maintain the status quo in the Pacific and uphold the continued independence of China. Both Taft’s and Root’s understandings were embodied in executive agreements rather than formal treaties; Roosevelt was not going to stake the fragile détente he had built in the Pacific on the uncertain outcome of a Senate ratification fight.

Yet while TR wooed Japan, he also sought to show the Tokyo government that he was not negotiating out of fear. In the summer of 1907, he conceived of a grand gesture of American might—a triumphant procession of the U.S. fleet around the world, with its first stops to include Japan. The sixteen sleek white battleships, many of them launched during his term, were other tangible proofs to TR of his success in wielding the power of the United States. In sending them to what the fleet commander thought might be a “feast, a frolic, or a fight,” Roosevelt was putting to the test the prestige of his personal leadership.

In its fourteen-month tour the fleet encountered much feasting, in Tokyo and elsewhere, some frolic—and a number of disturbing technical failures. The tremendous diplomatic success of the cruise tended to hide the fact that America could not fuel or repair a globe-circling navy, and that the ships themselves had distinct mechanical problems—ruptured boiler tubes, cracked armor plates, defective shell hoists. Nor did Roosevelt anticipate that his show of force would encourage navalists in Tokyo to speed up the expansion of the Japanese fleet, undermining the balance of power in the Orient.

Ironically, the cruise of the “Great White Fleet” pointed out the limits to Roosevelt’s reliance on the force of personality. Even as vigorous an executive as TR was unable to control all the factors at work on the disorderly world scene, or to judge correctly the consequences of all his
actions. At home, too, there were forces for change at work, forces that also threatened to evade Roosevelt’s controlling hand.

At the time Roosevelt entered the White House, a new and intoxicating feeling of reform and change was pervading the nation. People were still reading George and Bellamy and Norris and the rest; an older generation could remember the exhortations of Phillips, Garrison, and Douglass, of Anthony, Stanton, and the Grimké sisters. But a different breed of reform leaders was now pushing forward and gaining public attention. The single-taxer Tom L. Johnson gained election as mayor of Cleveland, and the reform mayor of Toledo was winning reelection as “Golden Rule” Jones. A young reporter named Josiah Flynt, who had lived with tramps and pictured tramping as just another way of living, was starting a series on graft for
McClure’s.
The same journal was publishing Lincoln Steffens on bossism in St. Louis and Ida Tarbell on the Standard Oil Company.