Theodore Rex (99 page)

ON FRIDAY
, 25 August, Roosevelt shocked most of his countrymen by dropping to the floor of Long Island Sound in one of the Navy’s six new submarines, appropriately named the
Plunger
. He remained beneath the surface (lashed with heavy rain) long enough to watch fish swim past his window. Then, taking the controls, he essayed a few movements himself, including one which brought the ship to the surface rear end up.

Once again, he seemed to be miming, albeit unconsciously, the progress of negotiations at Portsmouth, where the issue of the indemnity had become a dead weight. The afternoon following his dive marked the low point of the conference, with Witte and Komura staring at each other in silence, smoking
cigarette after cigarette, for eight minutes.
Rumors spread over the weekend that the Russians were asking for their hotel bills. On Monday, Roosevelt concluded that he could do nothing more. According to Meyer, Japan’s fanatic
insistence on compensation—at a scarcely conceivable 1.2 billion yen—had so enraged the Russian people that “even the peasants” supported their sovereign’s refusal to pay.

On Tuesday, 29 August, Witte suddenly placed a sheet of paper on the table. He said it contained Russia’s final concessions. They were less, not more, generous than the concessions Japan could have accepted a week before, from the hands of the Tsar. Russia would pay no indemnity. Japan might have south Sakhalin, but only if she gave up the north,
“sans aucune compensation.”

Komura sat impassive. Silence grew in the room. Witte took up another piece of paper and began to tear bits off it—a habit, intolerable to Japanese sensibilities, that he had indulged throughout the conference. Eventually, Komura said in a tight voice that the Japanese government wanted to restore peace, and bring the current negotiations to an end. He consented to the division of Sakhalin and withdrew the claim for an indemnity.

Witte accepted this acceptance, and said that the island would be cut at the fiftieth degree of latitude north. The Russo-Japanese War was over.

HENRY J. FORMAN
, the young reporter whom Roosevelt had permitted on board the
Mayflower
, had accompanied the President on a quick trip to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, earlier in the summer of 1905. The occasion had been a routine appearance before coal miners, in a parklike square cut across by ropes, like a giant spider’s web. For some extraordinary reason, as John Mitchell addressed the crowd, bound around by the ropes, it had begun to sway from side to side, in an almost hydraulic movement that gathered force frighteningly. Mitchell, sweating, begged the crowd to keep still, lest the ropes break and people be trampled to death. But the swaying continued. Alarm was visible on the faces of those in front of the speaker stand, as if they could not help themselves.

Then Roosevelt was announced. Holding up his arms to a roar of acclaim, he began to speak. Forman could not remember what he said, only that the crowd all at once “froze to attention.”

The peace the President had made possible at Portsmouth was the result of just such an inexplicable ability to impose his singular charge upon plural power. By sheer force of moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery of detail and benign manipulation of men, he had become, as Henry Adams admiringly wrote him, “
the best herder of Emperors since Napoleon.”

After the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on 5 September, he allowed himself a characteristic moment of self-congratulation. “
It’s a mighty good thing for Russia,” he allowed, “and a mighty good thing for Japan.” And, with a thump of his chest, “a mighty good thing for
me
, too!”

CROWNED HEADS AND
columnists around the world hastened to praise Theodore Roosevelt in September 1905. “
Accept my congratulations and warmest thanks,” Nicholas II cabled, adding, “My country will gratefully recognize the great part you have played in the Portsmouth peace conference.” An overjoyed Wilhelm II declared, “The whole of mankind must unite and will do so in thanking you for the great boon you have given it.” Emperor Mutsuhito wrote in the careful language of the Japanese court, “To your disinterested and unremitting efforts in the interests of peace and humanity, I attach the high value which is their due.”

Roosevelt was pleased enough with these pro forma expressions to copy them into a posterity letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. He did not notice, or bother to notice, the subtler signals they sent forth: the Tsar’s unconscious separation of himself from his subjects, the Kaiser’s readiness to speak for every person on the planet,
the Mikado’s enigmatic formality. But neither did he let the praise go to his head. As he wrote to Alice (still touring the Far East with Nick):

Alice had returned to Japan after visiting China and the Philippines and had been taken aback by the sudden coolness of the Japanese people toward her. Evidently, Komura’s agreement with Witte was seen as a humiliating retreat after one and a half years of military triumph. She heard that there had been riots in Tokyo when news of the treaty signing came in.

This did not mean that high officials in the Katsura government were not secretly satisfied with the treaty. It gave Japan peace at just the moment she would have had to stop fighting anyway, through sheer exhaustion of resources. Nor was Roosevelt under any illusion as to what Portsmouth meant in terms of future Pacific strategy.
After Tsu Shima, he had seen the war as “the triumph of Asia over Europe,” and mused, almost with complacency, on
America’s geopolitical position between the belligerents. Now, as he studied a report he had commissioned on the immigration scare in California, he again began to worry about what agitators there called “the Yellow Peril.” He admired the Japanese too much to use such language himself, but saw that for the rest of his presidency he was going to have to monitor with extreme caution the ambitions of these “wonderful people.” While he did so, Secretary of State Root (even now immersed in a major re-examination of Canadian and Latin American policy) would have to be relied on to maintain the security of the Western Hemisphere.

“SHE HEARD THAT THERE HAD BEEN RIOTS IN TOKYO.”
Alice in the Far East, late summer 1905
(photo credit 25.1)

So could
a new recruit to the Administration, whom Roosevelt had long wanted to woo away from the House of Morgan: his old Harvard classmate Robert Bacon. As First Assistant Secretary of State, replacing Francis B. Loomis, the handsome and athletic Bacon also rated inclusion in the presidential “tennis crowd”—more and more jealously dubbed “Teddy’s Tennis Cabinet” by unsuccessful aspirants to it.

FOR ALL THE CONSENSUS
that Roosevelt had proved himself a master diplomat, he could not boast, or even agree, that the world was demonstrably safer as a result of his efforts.
Socialism was spreading like dry rot in Russia, even through the ranks of the army, with consequent weakening of authority and strengthening of authoritarianism. Morocco remained a potential flash point of war among the European powers. At least the commitments that Wilhelm II had managed to coax from Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and a reluctant United States to address the problem in conference had tamped down on the fuse for a few more months: talks were scheduled to begin in Algeciras, Spain, early in the new year. Roosevelt took further comfort in the fact that Nicholas II, no longer troubled by Japanese ambitions, could now look west again, and help curb those of the Kaiser.

Freed from global responsibility himself, for the first time in eight months, he was able to start preparing for what promised to be the biggest legislative season of his presidency. Indeed—sobering thought—it would effectively be his last.
The “odd year” and “even year” disequilibrium of congressional sessions meant that only the first and third of any presidential term were long enough for the passage of major bills. And, inevitably, the third tended to be wary of anything radical, because it preceded another general election. So Roosevelt had until early December to write the defining Message of his second term.

One issue above all others that he was determined to fight for “as a matter of principle” was that of railroad rate regulation. Ever since his election, he had sensed a rising, almost populist rage against the power of trusts (uninhibited, apparently, by the Elkins Anti-Rebate Law of 1903) to fix interstate shipping charges. The rage was not
entirely
populist, in that it rose
above white collars rather than blue, and expressed itself, articulately and persuasively, in the pages of middle-class magazines such as
McClure’s
and
Everybody’s
. And it had persisted since the articles by Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker that had caught Roosevelt’s eye in January 1903—articles that had made
McClure’s
the most influential magazine in the country.

Roosevelt had been warned during the summer, by S. S. McClure himself, that the fall of 1905 would be a time of renewed journalistic calls for—what? McClure could only write, rather clumsily, “
law-abidingness and uprightness in political matters.”
Doubtless somebody with less money and more style would find a compact term for the new movement, inchoate as yet but definitely gathering force: a social current that sooner or later must politicize itself—if it had not done so already in the “Iowa Idea” and Roosevelt’s own huge electoral mandate.