By now the Ambassador’s unexplained absence from town was causing comment along Massachusetts Avenue. He was scheduled to attend an evening reception at the home of the British Ambassador, Sir Michael Herbert. Protocol clearly required that he make an appearance, but darkness came, and von Holleben was not seen. Neither were the German military and naval attachés. They had slipped away to join their leader in New York.
From there, before midnight, certain words flashed to Berlin. Roosevelt was not to know exactly how von Holleben transmitted his threat of war, only that the threat got through—on a night when the Atlantic cable was so electric with communications that even The Times of London was denied access.
Once read, von Holleben’s words were probably burned, in approved German-security fashion. His dispatch of record for 16 December 1902 advised only that
now the cannons have spoken, and Germany has shown the world it is willing to assert its fair rights, we would make a good impression on all Americans if our government were to accept arbitration in principle.
The reaction in Berlin was immediate. On 17 December, the Reichstag voted secretly to accept arbitration, in such haste that other encouragements, from Hay in Washington and Metternich in London, were redundant on receipt.
SO THE DEADLINE passed in peace. There could be no end to the blockade until arbitration actually began, but a massive release of tension was felt on both sides of the Atlantic.
Roosevelt’s triumph was von Holleben’s disgrace. The Ambassador remained in New York while arrangements were made to bring him home on permanent disability leave. “I am a sick man,” he told a reporter. “I cannot answer a single question.” He had misjudged a President, misled an Emperor, and nearly started a war. His only consolation was that the Wilhelmstrasse could not cite these as reasons for his recall without making the decision to arbitrate seem forced. To save the Kaiser’s face, it was necessary to save von Holleben’s. Discreet cooperation from the White House made both expedients possible.
On 19 December, Germany and Britain formally invited Roosevelt to arbitrate their claims against Venezuela. He said he would think about it, and left town with his children to spend a day or two in the pinewoods of northern Virginia. Cortelyou announced that the President had been under great strain “both mentally and physically … in the Venezuela crisis.”
This was the nearest Roosevelt got to a public acknowledgment that there had indeed been a “crisis” involving himself. “I suppose,” he wrote privately, “we shall never make public the fact of the vital step.”
Overflowing with goodwill, he went out of his way to praise things Teutonic at a meeting with trade representatives of the Kaiser. For twenty minutes he spoke, in vigorous if ungrammatical German, of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Theodor Körner. “He astounded us,” one of the group said afterward. “He is as well posted on German affairs as on American.… His familiarity with the masterpieces of German literature would amaze even the most exact scholar in the Fatherland.”
ROOSEVELT RESERVED HIS decision on whether to act as arbitrator through the holidays. John Hay felt sure that he would, in the end, resist this chance for easy glory, and refer the case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Feeling a surge of tenderness, he put his rusty poetic talents to work and composed a Christmas Eve ode to the President of the United States.
Be yours—we pray—the dauntless heart of youth,
The Eye to see the humor of the game—
The scorn of lies, the large Batavian mirth;
And—past the happy, fruitful years of fame,
Of sport and work and battle for the truth
A home not all unlike your home on earth.
Snow fell as the Secretary wrote. His poem joined the other presents piling around the White House Christmas tree.
“SNOW FELL AS THE SECRETARY WROTE.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s White House in winter (photo credit 13.1)
CHAPTER 14
A Condition, Not a Theory
We insist that though his happy fellow-citizen may pass us
our vittles, he shall not fork out our stamps.
“THE EQUILIBRIUM OF the world is moving westwards,” a member of the Institut de France told Jean Jules Jusserand early in 1903.
Jusserand, packing his ambassadorial uniform for Washington, did not disagree. An intellectual himself (he was a specialist in medieval culture, and had published several works of literary and social history), he accepted, and mourned, the decline of French power. Yet it coincided excitingly with the rise of his own diplomatic fortunes. At forty-seven, he found himself entrusted with a mission of major importance: to protect France’s entente cordiale with her sister republic from increased competition by foreign monarchies. Tunis and Copenhagen had been nothing next to this. Clearly he had been selected less for experience than for brains and youthfulness—qualities now much in demand on Massachusetts Avenue. In Berlin, fifty-year-old Baron Speck von Sternburg was also packing for transfer. Britain’s forty-five-year-old Sir Michael Herbert had been at his post for three months. All three ambassadors had American wives.
Equally clearly, Jusserand saw that his life as half-scholar, half-envoy was over. Washington had little time for historiographical musings. As his friend at the Institut put it, “You will no longer decipher manuscripts, but men.” Jusserand could write in Latin and read fourteenth-century English with perfect fluency. But could he construe Theodore Roosevelt? The task had been too much for his predecessor, Jules Cambon, who seemed to doubt the President’s sanity.
Speculation about Roosevelt was intense at the Quai d’Orsay. French foreign-policy experts believed him to be the strongest international personality since Bismarck. Yet they could not reconcile the impérialiste who talked about “the proper policing of the world” with the statesman who had just modestly declined to arbitrate the Venezuela matter. Instead, Roosevelt had suggested that all parties to the dispute meet on neutral ground in Washington, in order to negotiate a protocol for referral to The Hague.
“HE FOUND HIMSELF ENTRUSTED WITH A MISSION
OF MAJOR IMPORTANCE.”
Jules Jusserand, anonymous sketch (photo credit 14.1)
Might he be, against original expectations, a man of peace?
THE JANUARY ISSUE of McClure’s disagreeably reminded Roosevelt that he had problems to confront at home, regardless of foreign powermongering. Never before had an American magazine publisher put out so shocking a number. Absent were the pallid love stories and escapist travelogues that most readers looked for. In their place were three long articles on trust abuse, political corruption, and union violence. Each one, Samuel S. McClure noted in his introductory editorial, could be entitled “The American Contempt of Law.”
The frontispiece photograph showed John D. Rockefeller seated, exuding the security of two hundred million dollars. But his trouser leg, hitched too high, revealed a hint of flabby calf, a vulnerable length of sock. This documentary note permeated the subsequent articles, which were remarkable for depth of research, toughness of language, and something fresh to journalism: a sort of tacit moral disdain.
“The Oil War of 1872,” by Ida Tarbell, described the panic that hit Titusville, Pennsylvania, when the Standard Oil Company announced new freight rates crippling to independent producers. Only one supplier, under a hitherto unknown name, was entitled to enjoy special rates: it turned out to be an alias for Standard Oil. A contemporary blacklist of “conspirators,” reproduced in facsimile, prominently featured Rockefeller’s name. The man with the flabby calf had gone on to other, more subtle schemes, inexorably locking an entire industry in his corporate grip. Tarbell was as meticulous in documenting Rockefeller’s acts of philanthropy as she was in analyzing the fine print of his contracts. But she noted that “religious emotion and sentiments of charity … seem to have taken the place in him of notions of justice and regard for the rights of others.”
Elsewhere in McClure’s, Lincoln Steffens contributed “
The Shame of Minneapolis: Rescue and Redemption of a City That Was Sold Out.” The article, plentifully illustrated with bribery lists and police-file photographs, recounted the slide to corruption of a once-honest mayor. Thanks to the efforts of a courageous grand juror, Minneapolis was now purged, but Steffens allowed a cynical question to shadow his last paragraph: “Can a city be governed without any alliance with crime?”
The third story, by Ray Stannard Baker, was an equally harsh and factual survey of conditions in Pennsylvania during the coal strike. Entitled “The Right to Work,” it consisted of interviews with nonunion miners who had braved bullets and beatings to continue working. One was quoted as saying, “I believe that a man should have a right, no matter what his reasons are, to work when and where he pleases.” Baker reported that this miner had been set upon by union vigilantes, and blinded with a rock.
All in all, the January McClure’s made for ugly reading. But palpably, beneath its flotsam of fact, a new kind of reportage—“torrential journalism,” Roosevelt called it—was surging from wellsprings of popular discontent.
THE FIFTY-SEVENTH Congress reconvened for the last time on 5 January, and Roosevelt moved swiftly to push through the legislative program he had been talking about for so long. “From now until the 4th of March my hands will be full,” he wrote Kermit. The American economy had expanded at such a rate in 1902 (oil production alone was up 27 percent) that he knew there was no hope of controlling trust growth by occasional slow prosecutions under the Sherman Act. What was needed was an overall regulatory system calling for the cooperation, rather than the coercion, of businesses engaged in interstate trade.
He wanted three antitrust weapons: a Department of Commerce with an investigatory Bureau of Corporations, a bill banning railroad rebates to large industrial companies, and an “Expedition Act” that would provide special funds to speed up the Justice Department’s prosecution of illegal combinations. (After eleven months, the Northern Securities case was still under judicial review.)
These requests, written in English, were passed to Philander Knox, who translated them into language convoluted enough for Congressmen to understand. Even as “Administration bills,” they were less ambitious than some other antitrust measures already pending in the House. One such, sponsored by Representative Charles E. Littlefield of Maine, sought to give the Interstate Commerce Commission draconian powers over all monopolistic corporations. Inasmuch as it contained some Rooseveltian ideas, the President let Littlefield know that he could count on him for support. “I am prepared to go the whole distance!” He did not add that he doubted the distance would be very long, legislatively speaking.
The “Bureau of Corporations” clause in his own Department of Commerce bill struck Roosevelt as a more realistic proposal. Corporations would not be forced to open their books if they felt disinclined. All that Knox called for was an information exchange between government and industry, for the common good. Wall Street raised no objections, but corporate representatives congregated in Washington to make sure that the bill did not get stronger in committee. The House of Morgan sent an adroit lobbyist, William C. Beer, to monitor Roosevelt’s dealings with Capitol Hill.
“He was jovial—away up,” Beer reported to George Perkins, after his first presidential encounter. “I am sure that he feels the Department of Commerce is his baby, and his alone.”
JUSSERAND AND VON STERNBURG, both still in Europe, were unable to attend the President’s annual Diplomatic Reception on 8 January. But the rest of their Washington colleagues were there, beribboned and bemedaled, clutching swords, checking the precedence list posted outside the Blue Room. (“Germany” was slashed off the top in pencil: so much for the former doyency of Theodor von Holleben.) Secretary Hay, a diminutive, elegant figure in black, stood behind the President as he shook hands. His snowy beard screened all expression. Only the slanting, hemiopic eyes flashed occasionally with what Henry Adams called his “cosmic cynicism.”
One by one the diplomats filed by, bowing at an international variety of angles. Two of the most junior loomed disproportionately large in Roosevelt’s spectacles: Don Gonzalo de Quesada, Minister of Cuba, and Dr. Tomás Herrán, the Colombian chargé d’affaires. They served as walking reminders that the two treaties he wanted most—respectively granting Cuban trade reciprocity and canal rights in Panama—were still nothing but draft protocols.
Roosevelt’s strategy regarding the first measure was simple. Hay assured Quesada that if Congress had not helped his struggling republic by 4 March, the President would call a special session and compel it to sit until “justice was done.” The canal treaty presented a more vexing problem, in that Herrán kept getting conflicting instructions from Bogotá. Depending on the vagaries of sea mail and Colombia’s chronically faulty telegraph system, he was at times ordered not to sign Hay’s protocol, and at others, apparently, authorized to haggle over its monetary terms as if he were negotiating a contract for the sale of coffee.
Downstairs, 1,800 nondiplomatic guests were discovering that the White House’s new spaciousness had been bought at the expense of old coziness. The night was blustery, and as group after group crowded through the swing doors into the East Wing lobby, frigid gusts blew through the basement. Footmen confiscated coats and wraps, in exchange for cold metal tabs that some women stored wincingly en décolletage. Until all the ambassadors and ministers were received above, there could be no movement of the thinly clad throng. Mothers and daughters huddled together for warmth while the gusts rearranged their coiffures and rattled the portraits of the First Ladies.
Upstairs, in contrast, the modernized heating system worked so well that several embassy ladies grew flushed and faint. Etiquette did not permit them to sit while Mrs. Roosevelt remained standing. Tempers rose along with the temperature, until ushers cracked a few windows in the East Room. The resultant convection only increased the flow of fresh air beneath.
Roosevelt (attended, for the first time in White House history, by military aides) felt a corresponding chill in some of the later hands he shook. His last guests, drawn past him with a brisk “Dee-lighted,” proceeded as if catapulted toward the State Dining Room, only to encounter another line for hot punch. At 10:30, a young aide in a cutaway coat shouted that the reception was over, and a band of forty pieces swung into “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” Yet another line jammed the basement as metal tags were redeemed, and the swing doors gave proof that the night was colder than ever. Outside on East Executive Avenue, hundreds of carriages jostled for precedence while porters bawled out names through megaphones.
The President, oblivious, cheerfully entertained a few close friends to a supper of bouillon, champagne, and ice cream.
AT BREAKFAST THE next morning, one of his houseguests, Owen Wister, said, “I don’t believe you should have appointed Dr. Crum.”
Roosevelt looked incredulous. “You don’t?”
William D. Crum was the black Republican he had named as Collector of Charleston nine weeks before. Although thirteen other Negroes had already won Roosevelt’s federal favor, Dr. Crum was the first he had chosen to replace a white incumbent. This alone guaranteed that there would be lively debate in the Senate when the appointment came up for confirmation. Several other factors suggested that the President (for all his air of innocence) was seeking a showdown with Senator Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the chief articulator of race hatred on Capitol Hill. “Pitchfork Ben” was not likely to vote in favor of a high Negro official in the cradle of the Confederacy—particularly one who had once had the temerity to campaign against him.
Roosevelt turned to Mary Wister, who was known for her good works and enlightened interest in Negro education. But she echoed her husband’s criticism.
“Why, Mrs. Wister! Mrs. Wister!” His head swiveled back and forth. “Why don’t you see—why you must see that I can’t close the door of hope upon a whole race!”
The Wisters said that he had, in fact, pushed it farther shut
. Thirteen Negro appointments in sixteen months (compared to three thousand white) amounted to something less than a hill of beans. Moreover, most had been to minor posts or “consultancies”—such as the one exploring the idea of wholesale transportation of blacks to the Philippines. President McKinley had been more generous.
Roosevelt’s argument was that the quality of his Southern appointments mattered more than their quantity. Blacks were better served in the long run by an enlightened coalition of Gold Democrats and Union League Republicans than by the Hanna-McKinley alliance of “Lily White” bosses and purchasable Negro delegates. Before appointing Dr. Crum, he had awarded four of the most important posts in South Carolina to decent white men, three of them Democrats and two the sons of Confederate soldiers. His fifth nominee represented this same philosophy of merit. Objection to Dr. Crum could be based only on race, and “such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong.”
Wister, who had lived in Charleston, tried to explain that white Southerners could not be appealed to on the grounds of logic. “It’s a condition you have to reckon with, not a theory.” The Reconstruction nightmare of a rapacious black majority raised up by Yankee patronage was still vivid enough to make men like Tillman scream. “Your act theoretically ought to do good to the colored race, but actually does them harm by rousing new animosity.”
The argument lasted through two more breakfasts. “Here the Negroes are,” Roosevelt said despairingly, as the Wisters drank his coffee. “Not by their wish but our compulsion; and I cannot shirk the duty.…”
Theodore Rex Page 26
