All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Von Holleben was nonplussed by Roosevelt’s taunt and replied that the consequences of such a strong reaction by the United States would be “so serious to both countries that he dreaded to give them a name.” Roosevelt said he then told von Holleben, “I had thoroughly counted the cost before I decided on the step, and asked him to look at the map, as a glance would show him that there was no spot in the world where Germany in the event of conflict with the United States would be at greater disadvantage than in the Caribbean sea.”

  (Roosevelt’s recollection of this scene, however vivid, may well have been shaded by an entirely different spot on the map. In the summer of 1916, when he put his version of the White House confrontation to paper, British and German troops were slaughtering each other in the Somme and the United States was on the verge of entering the Great War.)

  Whether von Holleben thought Roosevelt was bluffing—never mind whether any such words were actually exchanged—did not alter the course of the British and German navies over the next two days. On December 9, their gunboats captured several Venezuelan ships, with the Germans sinking two. Four days later, a German cruiser bombarded two forts at Puerto Cabello. After a token and hapless flourish of self-defense, Venezuela’s Castro appealed to the United States for arbitration with his marauding creditors.

  On December 13, Hay’s ambassadors in London and Berlin passed along Castro’s proposal for arbitration to good effect, if not immediate response. The English public had been outraged and embarrassed to learn that its navy was in league with Germany. Paying Roosevelt back for his recent White House hospitality, John St. Loe Strachey in the Spectator condemned the partnership as “one of the most amazingly indiscreet alliances ever made with a foreign power.” In Germany the temper for confrontation was tepid at best. Most Germans approved of their navy’s chastisement of Venezuela but were unsettled by the intensity of American anger toward them in the days following the Caribbean offensive. Speck von Sternburg made this point even more directly, assuring German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow that Roosevelt’s pledge to intervene was made in dead earnest.

  Hay may not have known the degree of stridency of Roosevelt’s threat to von Holleben, but according to Roosevelt, he did know that Dewey’s squadron of fifty or more battleships, cruisers, and torpedo boats was loaded with coal, fully armed, and poised to confront the dozen or so ships of the British and German navies threatening Venezuela. Although there was still no evidence that either of the European powers intended to seize territory other than temporarily, Hay, like von Sternburg, did not doubt for a second that Roosevelt was sincere about siccing Dewey on the perceived flouters of the Monroe Doctrine.

  Roosevelt claimed that he held von Holleben’s feet to the fire on one more occasion—this time in a conversation that took place six days after their first confrontation. When von Holleben balked at arbitration yet again, Roosevelt countered by advancing his ten-day deadline by twenty-four hours. Again this is Roosevelt’s memory against nobody else’s.

  On December 16, Hay once more presented Castro’s proposal for arbitration to Great Britain and Germany. That same day, Foreign Secretary Lansdowne met with Paul Metternich, the German ambassador to London, and told him that, given the “storm of public opinion” coming from America, he would urge the British cabinet to accept Hay’s latest offer. Indeed, the cabinet voted to do so a few hours later. The following day, December 17, just hours before Roosevelt’s timetable would have sent Dewey’s armada southward, the German government agreed to arbitration as well. With that, Dewey concluded his “exercises,” and the crisis quieted.

  In the end, the question remains: Who had provoked whom? Germany was genuinely shocked by America’s disapproval of an action that America had plainly condoned in advance. (Germany was also disappointed by how little blame America placed on Great Britain, not to mention by how quickly Britain had “lost its nerve”—the kaiser’s words—under America’s glower.) If Roosevelt is to be believed, he threatened von Holleben over his refusal to accept arbitration and not over the blockade itself, which never did involve the seizure of property.

  Thus the next question: Would the Germans have planted their flag on Venezuelan soil if Roosevelt had not rattled his saber within earshot of von Holleben and von Sternburg? The best guess is, not likely—not then, anyway. “We are not interested in a couple more palm trees,” Metternich insisted. What did matter, however, is that Roosevelt suspected Germany of bad intentions.

  And finally: Would Hay have succeeded in leading Germany and Great Britain to arbitration without Roosevelt’s private chat with von Holleben and Dewey’s presence at Culebra? The most plausible answer to this question is: Of course he would have—sooner or later, by his usual tact and patience, with an additional nudge from an outraged public at home and abroad.

  Yet to hear Roosevelt tell it, he had done all the heavy lifting himself. “I succeeded . . . in getting all the parties in interest to submit their cases to the Hague Tribunal,” he wrote in his autobiography, referring to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, where the terms of the Venezuelan debt were eventually sorted out. Here again Roosevelt steals too much of the spotlight, for even if he threatened Germany, as he averred, or simply asked von Holleben in a kindly way to settle its dispute with Venezuela, the real work of defusing the conflict demanded old-school, on-the-carpet diplomacy. Between the time of von Holleben’s first visit to the White House and the agreement by Germany and Britain to accept arbitration, Henry White in London and Ambassador Charlemagne Tower, whom Hay had transferred from St. Petersburg to Berlin, were in daily contact with Hay and with the foreign ministers in their respective capitals. It was they, supervised by Hay, who brought the Venezuelan crisis to its adequate conclusion.

  But regardless of who did what, and to what degree, Roosevelt wound up a winner. He greatly enhanced the prestige of his navy and added steel to the Monroe Doctrine, effectively fortifying the Panama canal even before it was built. Without letting the world know how near he and Wilhelm had come to war, he convinced himself that he had made the kaiser blink. And shortly after his têtes-à-têtes with Roosevelt in the White House, Ambassador von Holleben was recalled because of “illness” and replaced by Speck von Sternburg. It was even said that this was one of Roosevelt’s reasons for taunting Germany to begin with. At any rate, the president was delighted.

  And ultimately, even though Roosevelt grabbed most of the attention for resolving the Venezuelan affair, Hay received his rightful share of applause. Stuyvesant Fish, whose father had been Grant’s secretary of state, recognized that Hay had “kept the President & our Country from falling into a cunningly laid trap.”

  Andrew Carnegie, who had differed with Hay and the administration over Cuba and the Philippines, now had nothing but praise for Hay’s handling of Venezuela and all other aspects of foreign affairs. “I am so happy (& proud, excuse me) that I have known you John Hay,” the great tycoon extolled. “You make the Republic what its Founders intended—something higher than the governments that preceded its birth.”

  Elbert Baldwin, managing editor of the Outlook and a friend of Roosevelt’s, likewise gave credit where credit was due: “The steadiness with which our present Secretary has adhered to an unselfish policy, the candor, frankness, straightforwardness, above all scrupulous ‘squareness’ of his methods, are in welcome contrast to the selfishness, secrecy, indirection, delay, and, wherever possible, the harshness of other methods. If America has become a World Power, it is largely because of the success of the new American diplomacy. . . . Humanity in general is freer and finer because such diplomacy exists.”

  None of Hay’s letters reveal his own satisfaction on the resolution of the Venezuela affair or his feelings on Roosevelt’s handling of it. But at some point, Hay must have griped to Henry Adams about Roosevelt’s conduct, because Adams later mentioned to Lizzie Cameron, “Our Emperor . . . tells his old stories at every cabinet dinner for two hours running . . . describing his preparations for war with
Germany. . . . The joke is stale,” Adams judged. “We”—he and Hay, presumably—“laugh but shudder.”

  FOR HAY, ONE GOOD turn led to another. On January 23, 1903, two days after the Hay-Herrán Treaty was signed, he and Ambassador Herbert signed the Alaska boundary treaty. There was no direct connection between the Alaska and Venezuela events, but Herbert, because he was new to his post and eager to get off to a positive start, had an extra motivation for bolstering the Anglo-American alliance, which had been scuffed so unnecessarily of late.

  The Alaska treaty was not so much a solution to the boundary dispute as it was an agreement on how to go about a solution. It called for a tribunal of six “impartial jurists of repute”—three from each side—to clarify the old line mapped nearly a century earlier. On the insistence of the United States, the tribunal was not to arbitrate—that is, it would not compromise. Each side would posit a boundary and make its case; a vote would be taken; one side would win, the other lose.

  The Senate ratified the tribunal treaty on February 11, and Roosevelt, who was determined to take the match, stacked his team with Senator George Turner of Washington, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and jingo extraordinaire Cabot Lodge. The press guffawed at this roster, suggesting that Roosevelt had found the three least impartial men in the country. Canadian prime minister Wilfred Laurier protested the choice of Lodge in particular, and Hay had to sympathize. “[T]he presence of Lodge on the tribunal is, from many points of view, regrettable,” he confided to Henry White later in the spring. Yet he did not do anything to intervene. It didn’t really matter who was on the tribunal, anyway. Like Lodge and Roosevelt, Hay was convinced that the American case was unbeatable.

  Great Britain played the game rather more fairly. Its jurists were actual jurists: two Canadian judges and the chief justice of England, Lord Alverstone. It was Alverstone who in October, after careful study of the case, cast his vote in favor of the American interpretation of the boundary, thus avoiding a tie.

  For once Hay allowed himself to crow a bit, if only to his wife. “[W]e give up 30 square miles of our claim, which we don’t want, and the Canadians have to give up 30,000 square miles of their claim, which is of enormous value,” he explained to Clara. “I have a right to feel gratified, because at first I was the only one who believed such a result possible. I persuaded McKinley and Paunceforte and Herbert to adopt the plan and then, the hardest task of all, I got Theodore to accede to it. . . . It is one of the most important transactions of my life, and few more important have been accomplished by our State Department.”

  SUCCESS HAS MANY FRIENDS, and in Hay’s case, success made his friendship with Roosevelt that much stronger. In the months following the Venezuela crisis and the signing of the Panama and Alaska treaties, Hay and Roosevelt were effusive in their compliments of each other. One by one, the president had replaced the cabinet members he had inherited from McKinley with younger men, and the press constantly conjectured that Hay would be the next to go. But Roosevelt stood by him, for Hay was pulling his weight.

  Roosevelt to Hay: “I wonder if you realize how thankful I am to you for having staid with me. I owe you a great debt, old man.”

  Hay to Roosevelt: “It is a comfort to work for a President who, besides being a lot of other things, happened to be born a gentleman.”

  Roosevelt to Hay: “As Secretary of State you stand alone.”

  Hay to Roosevelt: “It is hard for me to answer your kind letter. I know better than any one how far I am from deserving your okay; but I am nonetheless proud and glad of your confidence.”

  Invited to address the Ohio Society of New York, Hay used the occasion to deliver a glowing tribute to “the young, gallant, able, brilliant” president:

  “From the cloistered life of an American college boy, sheltered from the ruder currents of the world by the ramparts of wealth and gentle nurture, he passed still very young into the wide expanse of the hills and plains. In that environment a man grows to his full stature if the original stuff is good. He came back to the East, bringing with him, as Tennyson sang, ‘The wrestling thews that throw the world.’ From that time his career has been onward and upward, for that is the law of his being.

  “It is no distinction to an American President to be honest, nor to be brave, nor to be intelligent, nor to be patriotic—they have all been all of those,” Hay continued. “[B]ut the country is indeed to be congratulated when all these high qualities are heightened and tinged by that ineffable light which for want of a more descriptive term we call genius.”

  Roosevelt was deeply touched. “Edith and I were saying last night that if I died we could wish that others would put on my tomb the words you spoke; I could not direct them to be put on myself—they describe what I wish I were, not what I am; no one else has ever so spoken of me.”

  BESIDES THEIR MUTUAL ADMIRATION, Hay and Roosevelt also shared a portrait painter. In mid-February 1903, John Singer Sargent spent a week at the White House, struggling to capture the president on canvas, although it was Sargent who felt like Roosevelt’s captive—“a rabbit in the presence of a boa constrictor,” the painter confessed after the ordeal. Sargent eventually got the kinetic Roosevelt to pose on the White House stairway, with his meaty right hand grasping the knob of the newel post as if it were the world. Roosevelt’s posture and countenance are virile, direct, unflinching. But even while Sargent succeeded in depicting Roosevelt’s essential strength and learnedness—necktie slightly askew, pince-nez perched above ruddy cheeks—the painting does not penetrate inward. Roosevelt’s portrait, like his psychology, offers very little shadow, as if lit from all sides. When Henry Adams saw the finished picture, he described it to Lizzie Cameron as “Good Sargent and not very bad Roosevelt. It is not Theodore, but a young intellectual idealist with a taste for athletics, which I take to be Theodore’s idea of himself. It is for once less brutal than its subject.”

  Because Roosevelt would not stand still for more than a half-hour at a time, Sargent was able to slip across Lafayette Square and do Hay’s portrait in the interims. Hay and Sargent knew each other from England, and their familiarity helped make Hay’s picture more intimate than the Roosevelt commission; the latter was intended as the official White House portrait, whereas the piece for Hay was personal.

  The painting of Hay is mostly dark. The woodwork of Hay’s library is barely discernible, and his black frock coat, vest, and necktie are absorbed in the umber of his chair. Hay appears not too very old but rather as a man who has not been young for quite some time. His hair and brows are sandy-brown, while the sculpted whiskers that soften his jaw and his mustache—splashed across his face like the bow wave of an oncoming yacht—are the color of ashes. His skin too is pale and seems almost brittle. Perhaps as a gesture of kindness, Sargent allows a single youthful stroke of forelock to fall upon Hay’s wan brow.

  The contrast between the Hay and Roosevelt portraits is in itself a measure of Sargent’s extraordinary talents of perception and rendition. Roosevelt basks in a public glow; with Hay, the light is a lamp radiating from within. Roosevelt is fuel; Hay is spark. Roosevelt is knowledge; Hay is wisdom. The potency of Sargent’s portrait of Hay comes not only from the intensity of the light but also from its economy, for it spends itself in only two places: Hay’s confident, guileless, and persuasive gaze, and his fine-boned right hand—his writing hand—which emerges from the gloom of his tailored sleeve like an Elgin marble.

  Hay felt somewhat vain having his portrait done, and at first he tried to keep it secret from Adams and other friends. He already possessed a magnificent art collection: paintings and drawings by John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, Joshua Reynolds, George Du Maurier, Alfred Pinkham Ryder, Raphael, Rubens, Canaletto, and Correggio; works by his friends Edwin Abbey and John La Farge (including a portrait of a young Henry James by the latter); and his crown jewels: a Madonna attributed to Botticelli, in the front hall, and a smaller but equally stunning piece believed to be by another master of the Italian Quattrocento, Fra F
ilippo Lippi. (He also owned a draft of the Gettysburg Address.) But clearly it was posterity and not merely patronage that prompted him to commission the greatest portrait painter of his day. “Mister Sargent finished my portrait yesterday afternoon, signed and dated it. I think it is very good,” Hay wrote to his daughter Helen, adding, “It [is] an odd thought that the most of my reputation in after years will depend on this picture.”

  The painting, which is now in the John Hay Library at Brown University, has done its job ably, for it preserves the likeness of a handsome, luminescent, yet reserved gentleman, whose pen hand is as graceful as Roosevelt’s scepter hand is firm.

  Hay’s legacy was assured in other ways as well. While he was sitting for Sargent, Helen gave birth to his first grandchild, named not John, which must await a son, but Joan—close enough.

  KEEPING THE GERMANS OUT of the Caribbean was a simple matter compared with containing the Russians in China. Russia had acknowledged the Open Door with a cynical smirk, making it plain that Manchuria was never part of the deal. Since the Boxer Rebellion, Russia had continued to tighten its grip on the region, particularly along the Russian-built and -controlled Chinese Eastern Railway, which now extended southward from Siberia through the cities of Harbin and Mukden, the length of the Liao-tung Peninsula, to the Yellow Sea ports at Dairen and Port Arthur. Through coercion and bribery, Russia was bent on gaining a monopoly in the region—not only of railroads but also of all commercial concessions, along with telegraph, customs, and tax collection.

  In mid-1901, Henry Miller, the American consul in the Manchurian treaty port of Newchwang, a significant point of entry for American cotton, flour, and oil, began warning Hay that, unless Russia was checked by one or more of the powers, it would soon “annihilate” American trade in Manchuria and ultimately annex the region outright. When Hay lodged an official protest, Russia responded with hurt feelings, denying any intention to breech the Open Door or in any way crowd out the interests of its worthy friend, the United States.