71 Meanwhile, the United States Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt.”
72 Finally, on 1 Washington Evening Star, 1 Dec. 1902.
CHAPTER 13: THE BIG STICK
1 One good copper “Mr. Dooley” in The Washington Post, 1 Feb. 1903.
2 ON THE MORNING Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt, 224–26, 416; in 1902, the West Wing was seen as providing “temporary quarters” for White House staff, until Congress should take up the question of “a permanent, adequate, and thoroughly dignified office for the Chief Executive.” Gilson Willets, Inside History of the White House (New York, 1906), 69.
3 on his right TR’s Cabinet Room is now the Roosevelt Room. The Oval Office was not built until after he left the White House. The following description is taken from photographs in TRC and from William Bayard Hale, A Week in the White House (New York, 1908), 9–11.
4 The room’s main A famous 1903 photograph of TR shows him with the globe in this position.
5 There was nothing much TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1108; TR to Grover Cleveland, 26 Dec. 1902, ibid., vol. 3, 398.
6 Congress was back Washington Evening Star, 1 Dec. 1902.
7 For two and a Ibid. When the President’s Message was published the following day, its reception was equivocal. The Harrisburg Telegraph, clarion of Old Guard Republicanism, called it “one of the most conservative documents ever issued by the White House,” while The Washington Post (Dem.) rejoiced that every line of the Message was “progressive.”
8 By 4 December New York American, 4 Dec. 1902. The Washington newspapers’ front-page coverage of the maneuvers was as warlike as TR could wish. On 5 Dec. 1902, as the “white” half of Dewey’s fleet prepared to engage the “blue” half, the Washington Evening Star excitedly announced, ENEMY PUTS TO SEA.
9 On 7 December Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 16; TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1102; Henry Clay Taylor to J. B. Coghlan, 8 Dec. 1902 (GD).
10 “We look like” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 389.
11 General Wood Leonard Wood diary, 30 Nov. 1902 (LW).
12 Speak softly and TR first used the proverb publicly on 2 Sept. 1901. TR, Works, vol. 15, 334–35.
13 ON 8 DECEMBER Washington Evening Star, 8 Dec. 1902; Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 419; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 74; TR, Letters, vol. 5, 358.
14 the most dangerous Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 341, 343; Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 19, 158; Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 1, 227–30. Another of TR’s early informants about Wilhelm was Speck von Sternburg.
15 General Wood, just Leonard Wood diary, 10 Sept. 1902 (LW); Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood: A Biography (New York, 1931), vol. 1, 398–99. Wood had been personally received by the Kaiser, and had noted that, like TR in the 1880s, Wilhelm spoke exultantly about his country’s newness and rawness and burgeoning economic power. Wood also saw that he was “somewhat nervous in manner,” and easily put out. All these observations were doubtless relayed to TR, between singlesticks blows.
16 some beguiling Elihu Root teased TR, referring to the Kaiser as “your cousin William.” Speck von Sternburg commented publicly that he had “not seen two men who are as alike.” Wilhelm II himself remarked to von Holleben, “Mr. Roosevelt must in some respects be very like me.” Root to TR, 15 Feb. 1904 (TRP); New York Herald, ca. 21 Jan. 1903; Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, 356–57.
17 Only three months A caricature of TR and the Kaiser as twins (“Kindred Spirits of the Strenuous Life”) appeared in Punch, 16 Nov. 1904, and was suppressed by Berlin police. See also Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 441–43; Jules Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 9 Mar. 1904 (JJ). In youth, both men used to doodle ships and fleet dispositions, and in power, both tended to use the first-person possessive in referring to their respective navies. Wilhelm awarded himself the title of “Admiral of the Atlantic.” Morris, Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, 142; Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 81; Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 58; Leonard Wood diary, 10 Sept. 1902 (LW); TR, Letters, vol. 3, 283.
18 However, as Roosevelt Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 55. “It is absolutely impossible,” Henry Adams wrote, “for anyone to be as big a fool as the Kaiser without being shut up” (Adams, Letters, vol. 5, 353; Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II, 18–19). Röhl quotes an example of the Kaiser’s ranting against Jews: “There are far too many of them in my country. They want stamping out” (129).
19 What made Roosevelt Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (Boston, 1964), 85; Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, 1989), 87–88. Jules Cambon noted how “very sensitive” TR was, “in his political judgments, to questions of prestige.” Geneviève Tabouis, Jules Cambon: par l’un des siens (Paris, 1938), 108, tr. the author. For the Kaiser’s homoerotic inclinations, which included a delight in seeing his courtiers dress as poodles and ballerinas, see Isabel Hull, “Kaiser Wilhelm II and the ‘Liebenberg Circle,’ ” in Röhl, Kaiser Wilhelm II.
20 “to tell the Kaiser” TR, Letters, vol. 5, 358–59. This is TR’s best, fullest, and most nearly contemporary account of the Venezuela crisis. He makes no reference to arbitration. See the chronological analysis in Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days.’ ”
21 The tactfulness TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1102.
22 Again von Holleben Even as TR met with von Holleben, the USS Marietta was en route to La Guiria, Venezuela, for “purposes of observation.” Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt.”
23 The Ambassador William Loeb to Hermann Hagedorn, n.d., and Loeb interviewed by Henry Pringle, 14 Apr. 1930 (HP).
On this same day, TR also had a conversation with George Smalley, Washington correspondent of The Times. His clear purpose was to have the well-connected reporter let London policymakers know just where he stood regarding Germany’s threat to Venezuela. White House appointment book, 8 Dec. 1902, and Smalley to TR, 12 Dec. 1902 (TRP). “I think it desirable that you should know privately what … I intend to do,” he quotes TR as saying, prefatory to a twenty-minute statement of great “lucidity and force” (Smalley, Anglo-American Memories, 350). Smalley might have been less eager to convey presidential messages had he known that TR considered him to be “a copper-riveted idiot.” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 97.
24 THE “PACIFIC” BLOCKADE Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 117; Herbert Bowen, “Roosevelt and Venezuela,” North American Review, Sept. 1919; United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1903 (Washington D.C., annual), 793 (hereafter Foreign Relations).
25 John Hay relayed Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 413; Pierre de Margerie to French Foreign Office, 18 Jan. 1903 (JJ); Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 413; Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 67–69; TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1102. TR’s strategic suspicions were not unfounded. See Grenville and Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy, 306.
26 IN BERLIN, Speck Reporting back to TR on 15 Dec. 1902, von Sternburg sounded more like an American diplomat than a German. “I’ve told them every bit of [the truth]…. Fear I’ve knocked them down rather roughly, but should consider myself a cowardly weakling if I had let things stand as they were” (TRP).
27 Expressionless, self-effacing Cassini, Never a Dull Moment, 108, 197 (“As always, Speck has three faces—one for the Russians, one for the British, and one for whomever he is stationed by”); Speck von Sternburg to TR, 15 Dec. 1902 (TRP).
28 There seemed to Marks, Velvet on Iron, 50; Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 422, 413. See Paul S. Holbo, “Perilous Obscurity: Public Diplomacy and the Press in the Venezuela Crisis, 1902–1903,” The Historian 32.3 (1970), for the barrage of White House publicity during Dewey’s naval maneuvers.
29 Von Bülow Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die vereinigten Staaten in der Weltpolitik (New York, 1935), 1569, tr. the author; Die Grosse Politik, vol. 17, 255–60; Lionel M. Gelber, The Rise of Anglo-American Friendship (New York, 1938), 113.
30 The ink on Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 118.
31 Roosevelt continued TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1102; Platt, “Allied Coercion of Venezuela.�
��
32 Sunday, 14 December The Washington Post, 15 Dec. 1902. For reasons set forth at length in Morris, “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days,’ ” Sunday, 14 Dec., must have been the date of the secret TR-von Holleben meeting. Hay’s arbitration message was sent the previous day, Saturday, and von Holleben left Washington for New York on Sunday evening.
33 If Roosevelt expected Vagts, Deutschland, 1569; profile in Munsey’s, Sept. 1901; Cassini, Never a Dull Moment, 108; Sergei Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte, ed. Sidney Harcave (Armonk, N.Y., 1990), 61, 76–77; Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 422.
34 Today, von Holleben Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 133; TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1103.
35 Controlling himself William Loeb interviewed by Henry Pringle, 14 Apr. 1930 (HP).
36 The President said Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 414.
37 WILLIAM LOEB SAW Marks, Velvet on Iron, argues that TR himself may have been initially responsible, in order not to humiliate the pathologically sensitive Kaiser. “Roosevelt’s penchant for face-saving is the key to much of the mystery surrounding his foreign policy.… In the field of diplomacy he was nearly always tactful and courteous” (58–59).
38 Von Holleben Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 80, 55, 69.
39 Late that evening “At the Hotels,” The New York Times, 15 Dec. 1902.
40 Sometime during TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1104, and vol. 5, 1102; George Dewey diary, 13 Jan. 1903 (GD). Bünz, TR said years later, was “the one man who sized me up right.” When the aging Consul General was arrested on espionage charges in the First World War, TR vowed to help him, “for the really valuable service he did this country as well as his own in the Venezuela matter” (TR to John J. Leary, Leary Notebooks [TRC]). See TR’s exquisitely detailed expositions of the Monroe Doctrine to Bünz in Letters, vol. 3, 98.
41 As von Holleben Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 414; Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 121–22.
42 But Metternich “If President Castro should prematurely perceive that there exists on our part a leaning toward arbitration,” Metternich opined, “he would interpret this as weakness and would certainly make no concessions.” Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 121.
43 It was now TR to A. W. Callisen, 3 May 1916 (TRP); Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 122; Washington Evening Star, 16 Dec. 1902; Henry Clay Taylor to Staff Intelligence Officer, San Juan, P.R., 16 Dec. 1902 (GD). There was a flurry of nervous selling on Wall Street. New York Herald, 17 Dec. 1902.
44 “Such cables,” Henry Clay Taylor to Staff Intelligence Officer, San Juan, P.R., 16 Dec. 1902 (GD).
45 After less than Marks, Velvet on Iron, 41; New York Herald, 17 Dec. 1902. Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt,” notes that the fighting edge of Dewey’s armada moved five hundred miles closer to Venezuela at this “critical” juncture.
46 Throughout the crisis Holbo, “Perilous Obscurity.”
47 By now the The Washington Post, 17 Dec. 1902; “At the Hotels,” The New York Times, 16 Dec. 1902; Marks, Velvet on Iron, 42, is puzzled by German Embassy letters dated 15, 17, and 18 Dec. and signed by von Holleben. There is no question that the Ambassador was out of town from 14 Dec. on: he must simply have taken official stationery with him to New York. See below.
48 From there The New York Times, 17 Dec. 1902; The Times (London), 18 Dec. 1902; Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 69.
49 “now the cannons” Edward B. Parsons, “The German–American Crisis of 1902–1903,” The Historian 33 (May 1971).
50 The reaction in Alfred P. Dennis, Adventures in American Diplomacy, 1896–1906 (New York, 1928), 290; George P. Gooch and Harold Temperley, eds., British Documents on the Origin of the War, 1898–1931 (London, 1928–1931), vol. 2, 153. On 18 Dec., Hay, believing the crisis still to be acute, wasted much hot breath in a strongly worded “ultimatum” to Albert von Quadt, the German chargé d’affaires. Both men were, in a later phrase, out of the loop. The skimpy evidence surviving suggests that TR’s ultimatum was received by Berlin not as a shock, but as a confirmation of repeated warnings from Bünz (June 1902) and von Sternburg (July, Oct., Nov. 1902) that the new President was not to be trifled with (Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 418). Throughout the year, both von Holleben and Quadt had urged Berlin to prepare for possible war with the United States. Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 69, 71.
51 SO THE DEADLINE Von Bülow expressly repeated that Germany had no territorial ambitions in Venezuela. Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 131.
52 “I am a sick man,” New York Herald news clipping, ca. 10 Jan. 1903, John Hay Scrapbook (JH). Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), 437; Herwig, Politics of Frustration, 83. Von Holleben did not return to Washington until 26 Dec. and stayed two weeks to wind up his affairs, still refusing to speak to the press. On 5 Jan. 1903, the Kaiser canceled his credentials. He left town again without saying good-bye to TR or John Hay (New York Tribune, 10 Jan. 1903; Pierre de Margerie to Théophile Delcassé, in Documents diplomatiques français [1871–1914], series 2, vol. 3, 24 [Paris, 1929–1959]). When he sailed home from Hoboken, N.J., on 10 Jan. 1903, “not a single member of the diplomatic corps or German official [with the exception of Karl Bünz] dared to see him off.” TR, Letters, vol. 8, 1104, and Blake, “Ambassadors at the Court.”
53 On 19 December Herbert W. Bowen, Recollections Diplomatic and Undiplomatic (New York, 1926), 261; Gooch and Temperley, British Documents, vol. 2, 163; Washington Evening Star, 20 Dec. 1902; TR, Letters, vol. 3, 396–98.
54 “I suppose,” TR, Letters, vol. 5, 319.
55 Overflowing with Washington Evening Star, 17 Dec. 1902; Baltimore Sun, 13 Feb. 1903. TR also wrote a generous letter to Grover Cleveland on 26 Dec. congratulating him on “the rounding out of your Venezuela policy.” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 398.
56 Be yours—we John Hay to TR, 24 Dec. 1902 (TD).
57 Snow fell James Garfield diary, 24 Dec. 1902 (JRG). Perhaps the brightest glow beneath TR’s tree was shed by a small copper scuttle that Archie and Quentin found on the White House doorstep. It was addressed “To the President of the United States,” and contained a measure of anthracite coal. Ethel Roosevelt Derby interview, 1962 (TRB). The scuttle is now in TR’s library at Sagamore Hill.
Historiographical Note: Few episodes in TR’s career have aroused as much controversy as the first Venezuela crisis of 1902. His secrecy about it as President, the apparent collusion of three governments in obliterating the record, and some inconsistencies in his later accounts have caused historians, beginning with Howard C. Hill in 1927, to accuse TR of faulty memory at best and boastful lies at worst. Alfred Vagts and the American diplomatic historian Dexter Perkins, apologists respectively for Nazi Germany and the New Deal, were particularly virulent in the 1930s, and contributed much to the decline in TR’s reputation. They never succeeded, however, in challenging his basic honesty. Even Henry Pringle, the most iconoclastic of Roosevelt biographers, felt compelled to believe him, after an interview with William Loeb in which the former secretary testified that he was present at the two meetings with von Holleben. Loeb also described them to Hermann Hagedorn. Seward W. Livermore in 1946 and Howard K. Beale in 1956 were the first modern scholars to uncover fresh facts in support of TR’s story. Since then, the historical pendulum has continued to swing his way. Edward Parsons wrote a telling essay in 1971, and Frederick W. Marks III in 1979 almost succeeded in proving an international conspiracy to deny that anything happened—when plainly, something very considerable did. The account given in this chapter is based on the author’s article “ ‘A Few Pregnant Days.’ ” See also Parsons, “German-American Crisis,” and, for an important conflicting view that TR’s ultimatum was delivered in late January/early February 1903, see Serge Ricard, “The Anglo-German Intervention in Venezuela and Theodore Roosevelt’s Ultimatum to the Kaiser: Taking a Fresh Look at an Old Enigma,” in Serge Ricard and Hélène Christol, eds., Anglo-Saxonism in U.S. Foreign Policy: The Diplomacy of Imperialism, 1899–1919 (Aixen-Provence, 1991), 66–77. While allowing for continuing scholarly d
isagreement about dates, William N. Tilchin writes, “By any reasonable standard, this controversy should now be considered resolved [in TR’s favor].” Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt, 32.
CHAPTER 14: A CONDITION, NOT A THEORY
1 We insist that “Mr. Dooley” in The Washington Post, 1 Mar. 1903.
2 “THE EQUILIBRIUM” Georges Picot qu. in Jean Jules Jusserand, What Me Befell: The Reminiscences of J. J. Jusserand (Boston, 1933), 219; see, e.g., Jean Jules Jusserand, The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare (1890), Piers Plowman (London, 1894); and A Literary History of the English People (London, 1895).
3 Equally clearly Jusserand, What Me Befell, 219; whenever TR’s name was mentioned, Cambon would tap his head significantly. Storer, In Memoriam, 38–39.
4 French foreign-policy Paris correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, 19 Oct. 1902. For an overview of the scant French literature on TR, see Serge Ricard, “The French Historiography of Theodore Roosevelt,” Theodore Roosevelt Association Journal, summer 1984.
5 “the proper policing” Hay had cabled TR’s refusal to arbitrate to Herbert Bowen, the American Minister in Caracas, on 27 Dec. 1902. Although tempted, TR had declined on Hay’s advice, partly out of a desire to help out the court, which was atrophying through lack of business. Livermore, “Theodore Roosevelt”; Beale, Theodore Roosevelt.
“A great number of Frenchmen and Europeans are happy to join with me in expressing to you their gratitude for the generous, unyielding firmness you have displayed in support of international justice,” a Hague delegate wrote. “The initiative of the United States, compared with the paralysis of Europe, is a sign of the times” (Baron d’Estournelles de Constant to TR, 27 Dec. 1902 [TRP]). Estournelles de Constant, like TR, was destined to win the Nobel Peace Prize. For international praise of TR, see Literary Digest, 3 Jan. 1903.
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