All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Hay had made the Open Door as strong as he could, but he conceded from the start that in order to secure even lukewarm acquiescence from the Russians, the United States had little choice but to allow Russia special standing in Manchuria. “We are not in any attitude of hostility towards Russia in Manchuria,” he counseled Roosevelt in May 1902. “On the contrary, we recognized her exceptional position in northern China.” America’s dispute with Russia had always been strictly over commercial interests; no American lives were at stake in Manchuria. Moreover, the Yellow Sea was not in America’s backyard, and the Russian navy was far more formidable than the leaky Spanish flotilla that Dewey had pounced upon at Manila in 1898.

  This time, Great Britain and Japan took the initiative. On January 30, 1902, the two powers signed a treaty recognizing, and promising to fight for, each other’s Far Eastern interests—Britain’s in China and Japan’s in both China and Korea. Japan had no particular designs on Manchuria, but it feared that if Russia were allowed to gain sovereignty there, the next target would be Korea, which Japan coveted for its natural resources and as an outlet for exports and emigrants. Nowhere did the Anglo-Japanese treaty single out Russia specifically, but the message was sent—and received—nonetheless. Two months after the alliance was made public, Russia announced that it would withdraw its troops from Manchuria in three stages over the next eighteen months.

  Hay was reserved in his approval of the treaty. For one thing, he was opposed to any of the powers cutting side deals over China; for another, he had his doubts that Russia would live up to its pledge to pull its troops. From Newchwang, Consul Miller expressed a similar skepticism. “The alliance between Japan and Great Britain will not seriously alter the intentions of Russia in Manchuria,” Miller predicted. “[S]he will be more modest in appearance and more circumspect in methods, but will determine to press all of her enterprises here and nurse her desire to cultivate her determination to become the perfect master of the country.”

  As promised, the first Russian troops left Manchuria in October 1902, but in all other regards, Russia continued to consolidate its commercial and administrative control, collecting taxes and duties and expanding its railroad and ports. Again, Hay had little diplomatic leverage. Russia’s agreements in Manchuria were with China, not with the United States, and until Russia stepped on American toes—for example, by demanding higher tariffs on American goods than those levied at other treaty ports—Hay had no basis for complaint.

  The situation grew more frustrating in April 1903, when Russia informed China that it would not honor its second deadline for troop withdrawal from Manchuria—unless the Chinese granted a list of seven concessions that perpetuated Russian authority and severely limited the access and privileges of (non-Russian) foreigners in Manchuria. When Hay asked Russia’s ambassador to Washington, his neighbor and not-quite-friend Count Cassini, to explain Russia’s latest effrontery, Cassini denied any knowledge of the “convention of seven points” between his country and China. Hay knew Cassini was lying but could only suggest to the president that Russia’s demands, if indeed real, were “inadmissible, and in the highest degree disadvantageous.”

  In a letter to Roosevelt, who was away on another hunting trip, Hay grumbled over his predicament: “I take it for granted that Russia knows as well as we do that we will not fight over Manchuria, for the simple reason that we cannot. . . . If our rights and our interests in opposition to Russia in the far East were as clear as noonday, we could never get a treaty through the Senate the object of which was to check Russian aggression.”

  Through his minister in Peking, Hay urged the Chinese to resist Russian demands, and since the Russians continued to deny the existence of any such demands, he told them that the United States expected to conduct trade and maintain consuls in Manchuria. The coy game continued throughout the spring. Russia still gave no sign of withdrawing troops from Manchuria; meanwhile it insisted that the Open Door was still wide open, even though the seven-point convention—a verbatim copy of which Hay had on his desk—made a case for near-total exclusion of the other powers. “Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult and delicate matter,” Hay confided to Roosevelt. “It will take a little time for us to ascertain which of two courses the Russian Government is pursuing. We know that they are making these demands of China, and we know they have absolutely denied making them.”

  Preoccupied with other prey, Roosevelt was content to leave “our Manchurian affair” to Hay’s judgment. “[T]here does not seem to be anything for me to say at present, or any need of my saying anything,” the normally verbose Roosevelt wrote his secretary of state from California. A week later, he merely echoed what Hay had been saying from the beginning: “The bad feature of the situation from our standpoint is that as yet it seems that we cannot fight to keep Manchuria open. . . . When I get back I shall have to go over the whole China situation with you. That you have handled it in a most masterly manner I need hardly say; now I would like to get some idea what we are to do in the future.”

  Hay, though, had already seen the future. Although the United States was not willing to go to war with Russia over Manchuria, Japan clearly was. “[I]t would require the very least encouragement on the part of the United States or England to induce Japan to seek a violent solution to the question,” Hay advised Roosevelt in April, and a month later he was even more sure of Japan’s sanguinity. “[I]f we gave them a wink, [they] would fly at the throat of Russia in a moment.”

  Hay was not recommending war, but he bore a private desire to see Russia get the thrashing he felt it deserved—and he was gladder still to have someone else do the dirty work. “We are not charged with the cure of the Russian soul,” he told Roosevelt. But, he added, “We may let them go to the devil at their own sweet will.”

  HIS BRIEF AGAINST RUSSIA had been building for some time, and Manchuria was not the only aggravation. On Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903, a Russian mob in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev killed forty-seven Jews, injured hundreds more, and destroyed seven hundred of their houses. Jews in the United States, led by the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, immediately set about raising a relief fund and beseeching the Roosevelt administration to file a protest with the Russian government. Large rallies took place in major cities across the country; newspapers ran angry editorials.

  American Jewry had a proven ally in Hay, who a year earlier had circulated a letter (actually drafted by Alvey Adee) to the European powers, voicing his outrage at the persecution of Jews in Romania and protesting discrimination against American Jews traveling abroad. “[T]he Hebrews—poor dears! all over the country think we are bully boys,” Hay congratulated Adee afterward.

  As a Gentile, an Anglo-Saxon, and a patrician, Hay was not without prejudice and condescension. He used pejoratives such as “chink,” “dago,” and “darky” with little compunction, as did most of his friends. Yet he seems seldom to have uttered these slurs in public, and they crop up infrequently in his correspondence. He was even less inclined to disparage Jews categorically—in contrast to Henry Adams, who was rabid and broad-gauged in his disdain. (“I want to put every money-lender to death,” Adams once wrote an English friend.) Since Hay’s eye-opening foray through the Jewish ghetto of Vienna as a young chargé d’affaires, he had come to know a number of well-to-do Jews in England and the United States, most notably Baron Ferdinand James de Rothschild, the banker Jacob Schiff, and the New York attorney Oscar Straus, who had twice served as ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. While Hay may have still been prone to Semitic stereotyping, he was not anti-Semitic.

  Upon receiving word of the Kishinev massacre, and with some coaxing by Simon Wolf of B’nai B’rith, Hay instructed his ambassador in St. Petersburg to inquire whether the Russians would permit aid to reach the victims. Russia responded that there was no need for intervention because no atrocities had been committed at Kishinev. Later, when credible accounts of the attack appeared in newspapers, Czar Nichola
s II changed his tune, placing blame for the violence squarely on the Jews. In Washington, Ambassador Cassini backed up his emperor, telling the Associated Press that “Jews continue to do the very things which have been responsible for the troubles which involve them.”

  Hay was genuinely outraged by the brutality at Kishinev, yet he was worried about jeopardizing his ongoing deliberations with Russia over Manchuria. When Jacob Schiff chastised him for not reacting swiftly or strongly enough to Russia’s refutation, Hay wrote back in frustration. “There could be only two motives which would induce this Government to take any positive action in such a case; one is some advantage to itself, and the other is some advantage to the oppressed and persecuted and outraged Jews of Russia,” he reasoned with Schiff. “What possible advantage would it be to the United States, and what possible advantage to the Jews of Russia, if we should make a protest against these fiendish cruelties and be told that it was none of our business?”

  Keeping in mind that lynchings were still common in America, he asked: “What would we do if the Government of Russia should protest against mob violence in this country, of which you can hardly open a newspaper in this country without seeing examples? I readily admit that nothing so bad as these Kisheneff horrors has ever taken place in America; but the cases would not be unlike in principle.”

  He was not making excuses; nor was he asking to be let off the hook. “I should have hoped that I would not be required to defend myself against any accusation of neglect of duty in such a matter,” he said to Schiff in closing, “but I have no reason to complain. I have received unmerited credit so often that I ought not to object occasionally to unmerited blame.” He then wrote a personal check to the Kishinev relief fund for $500.

  Hay did not stop there. Recognizing that he had little formal diplomatic recourse—no Americans had been harmed at Kishinev; the incident was entirely internal—he continued to meet with Jewish leaders to come up with a plan that, if nothing else, would demonstrate that America and American Jewry had not turned the other cheek. On June 15, he staged a carefully choreographed and highly publicized meeting at the White House between Roosevelt and a delegation from B’nai B’rith. The Jewish contingent presented a draft of a petition it intended to transmit to the czar, protesting the atrocities at Kishinev and the ongoing acts of prejudice and hostility that had driven tens of thousands of Jews from their homelands in Russia and Eastern Europe.

  Hay’s remarks to the Jewish delegation that day were also directed at the Russian authorities, however indirectly. “No person of ordinary humanity can have heard without deep emotion the story of the cruel outrages inflicted upon the Jews of Kishineff,” he began. “Nobody can ever make the Americans think ill of the Jews as a class or as a race—we know them too well. In the painful crisis through which we are now passing the Jews of the United States have given evidence of the highest qualities—generosity, love of justice, and power of self-restraint.”

  Roosevelt wrapped up the meeting with a long-winded and considerably clumsier speech, in which he said kind things about various Jews he had served with or appointed and then pledged that his concern for the afflicted Jews of Kishinev was every bit as deep as his sympathy for “any tragedy that had happened to any Christian people.”

  With that, the delegation departed and began circulating the petition and in no time collected more than twelve thousand signatures. “[T]his is not a Jewish petition, but one emanating from American citizens,” Simon Wolf stressed. It bore the names of senators, congressmen, governors, mayors, judges, and members of nearly every profession, including, inevitably, more than a few moneylenders.

  By the end of June, two weeks before the petition was completed, newspapers carried reports, uncorroborated, that the Russian government would refuse to receive the document and instead would offer an official explanation or possibly even an apology for Kishinev. Cassini was obliged to issue a statement, again through the press instead of through diplomatic channels, denying the existence of any such apology.

  At the time Cassini made his remarks, Hay was away from Washington, visiting Helen and Payne Whitney and his granddaughter Joan in Newport. (Clara, meanwhile, was in Geneseo, New York, awaiting the birth of Alice’s first child.) Roosevelt was also out of town, at Oyster Bay. Without Hay on hand to temper his reaction, the president fired off a reply to be released anonymously to the newspapers. “[I]t seemed somewhat strange,” an “unnamed” official was quoted, “that the Russian government should choose this particular method of making a statement to the American people [denying apology for Kishinev] at the very time when, by methods which are certainly the reverse of friendly to the United States, it has sought to make China join in breaking the plighted faith of all the powers as to the open door in Manchuria and has endeavored to bar our people from access to the Manchuria trade.”

  Linking Kishinev to Manchuria was precisely what Hay had been trying to avoid, and now Roosevelt, without checking with him beforehand, had impetuously tied them in a bow and shoved the bundle under the czar’s nose.

  Hay winced, but he did not fly off the handle, as some newspapers surmised he had done. When it was learned that Hay would stop at Oyster Bay on his way back to Washington, the papers reported “on good authority” that the president’s latest outburst had rendered the secretary of state’s position in the cabinet untenable and that he intended to resign. Hay denied the rumors vociferously. “There is no reason in the world why people should talk of my resigning,” he wrote George Smalley of The Times. “My personal relations with the President are still those of friendship which he inherited from his father, and we agree on all points of foreign policy.”

  But to Clara he confided, “It is a comfort to think I can get out whenever I want to.”

  Though Hay seemed to harbor no hard feelings toward Roosevelt over the Kishinev indiscretion, still he did not look forward to going to Oyster Bay. “When McKinley sent for me he gave me all his time till we got through,” he grumbled to Clara, “but I always find T.R. engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.” Sure enough, when he arrived at Sagamore Hill on July 7—his first visit there—he had to share the president with three senators, a shipping magnate, a promising poet, and the New York socialite Winthrop Chanler.

  In the afternoon, Hay bided his time while Roosevelt and Chanler played tennis. A telegram announcing the birth of his second grandchild, Evelyn Wadsworth, lifted his spirits, and he felt guilty for feeling so cross about making the trip. Not until after dinner did he get a chance to talk with Roosevelt at length, and he was obliged to stay the night. Detraining in Washington the following afternoon, he was deluged by reporters eager to learn of his resignation. “I could not resign now if I wanted to,” he joked to Clara. “I have denied it so energetically.”

  In fact, divorce was never discussed. Instead, Roosevelt had regaled Hay with his recent hunting adventures, and in due time they got around to plotting the next chess moves on Kishinev. Rather than send the petition to St. Petersburg without ceremony, as Roosevelt had initially proposed, Hay suggested that they proceed more gingerly—and diplomatically—by first asking the Russian Foreign Ministry if Czar Nicholas were willing to receive it. “If they answer in the negative—which is virtually certain—we have complied with our engagement to the Jews of this country, and the international incident is thereby closed,” he explained to Roosevelt. Roosevelt consented to this tactic, and afterward Hay was able to inform the press that “there was not a shade of difference” between their views on the matter.

  Two days later, he notified Roosevelt that Russian authorities were proceeding “with apparent sincerity and certainly with most energetic severity” to punish the perpetrators of the Kishinev violence. “It is evident,” he told the president, “that the protests from the United States, even if they never reach the Czar, have had a very great effect on the minds of the bureaucracy, just a
s we told our Jewish friends a month ago,” adding, “The less we do and say now, and the sooner we get through with it, the better.” (In the end, however, most charges were dropped.)

  Hay and Roosevelt may have gained only symbolic ground on Kishinev, but their approach—and perhaps the president’s anonymous scolding of the Russian government—produced a more concrete result on another front. The day the petition was completed, the Russian Embassy in Washington officially notified Hay that it had no objection to American use and development of two key trading cities, Mukden and Ta-tung-kou, in Manchuria. “It seems like a surrender,” Hay wrote Roosevelt, “but they are a strange race, and you may expect anything of them except straightforwardness. If we get Mukden and Ta-tung-kou we win a great victory. . . . Perhaps they thought if they shoved in their memorandum today we would drop the [Kishinev] Petition.” Hay was highly dubious of Russia’s earnestness, especially once he learned that Russia had not yet informed China of its intent to open Mukden and Ta-tung-kou. But he made sure to publicize the offer, anyway.

  The Kishinev petition was delivered to Hay the following day. As anticipated, Russia officially informed the State Department that it would not receive the document if presented to St. Petersburg. The B’nai B’rith and other leaders of the protest were already reconciled to this outcome and were highly appreciative of Hay and Roosevelt for going to the lengths they did. “In every part of the world where Jews are to be found,” B’nai B’rith president Leo Levi wrote Hay, “there is thanksgiving because the President and you and the entire American people have championed the cause of the oppressed.”