All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  By prearrangement, the petition was bound in leather and placed by Hay in the archives of the State Department. “What inept asses they are,” Hay said of the Russians in a letter to Roosevelt. “They would have scored by receiving the petition & pigeon-holing it! I think you have scored, as it is. You have done the right thing in the right way, and Jewry seems really grateful. As to our ‘good relations’ with Russia,” he continued, “they will soon come around, and lie to us as volubly as ever.”

  The Kishinev affair was thus closed, but Manchuria was a sore point that would not heal. Roosevelt, who two months earlier had acknowledged that American military action against Russia over Manchuria was unfeasible and insupportable, now entertained second, more Rooseveltian thoughts. “I have not the slightest objection to the Russians knowing that I feel thoroughly aroused and irritated at their conduct in Manchuria,” he replied to Hay, “[and] that I don’t intend to give way and that I am year by year growing more confident that this country would back me in going to an extreme in the matter.”

  Hay wrote back with uncharacteristic fierceness: “Four years of constant conflict with [the Russians] have shown me that you cannot let up a moment on them without danger to your midriff. The bear that talks like a man is more to be watched than Adam Zad”—a reference to Kipling’s Adam-zad, “the bear that walks like a man.” Upon reflection, Hay was now glad that Roosevelt had made his aggressive “reverse of friendly” remark about Russia earlier in the summer. “The statement of July 1 was a notice that our patience was becoming exhausted, and, I have no doubt, it hastened their declaration of ‘honorable intentions’ in Manchuria,” he told the president. “Of course I do not wish to exaggerate the value of their professions. There is a lot of pressure and patience needed yet. But I felt that time has come to take them at their word, and to announce to the world their engagements and our belief in their sincerity. Every such incident makes future treachery more difficult for them.”

  And for once, Hay did not counsel Roosevelt to walk softly. “I am greatly interested in what you say about the country backing you in ‘extremes.’ I have always regarded it as a handicap to us in our negotiations that the country would not stand for an extreme policy. . . . But your judgment in popular currents is better than mine and if you are right, this would be a trump card to play, in some moment of crisis.”

  They both sensed that war over Manchuria was imminent, as animosity between Russia and Japan escalated. And as their exchange of letters revealed, Russia’s fears that the United States might take a stand with Japan were justified. “I am beginning to have scant patience with Adam Zad,” Roosevelt again wrote Hay. “I wish, in Manchuria, to go to the very limit I think our people will stand. If only we were sure that neither France nor Germany would join in [with Russia], I should not in the least mind going to ‘extremes.’ ”

  ON JULY 17, HAY departed for the Fells. “Everything seems in fair trim,” he wrote to Roosevelt, “but I am as stale as a remainder biscuit.” As was his habit, he sagged for the first week or so, but gradually the scenery worked its medicine. “This country is surpassingly beautiful just now; a green so deep and yet so brilliant I find nowhere else,” he told Roosevelt. Ten days later he wrote Whitelaw Reid, “We are enjoying long tramps by day and birchwood fires by night, and dreading the day of return to Washington.”

  On August 17, the arcadian tableau was disturbed by a note from Alvey Adee, who was minding the State Department for the summer: The Colombian Senate had rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty. The Panama canal, which Hay had been digging, diplomatically speaking, for the past three years, now seemed farther away than ever.

  The following day, Adee shared with Hay a memorandum submitted to him by a Mr. John Crawford, a man who evidently grasped the situation in Panama better than most. “If report of rejection of the Hay-Herrán Canal Treaty by Colombia’s Congress be true,” the memo advised, “I believe that State of Panama will secede and declare its independence and offer route to the United States.” Thinking ahead, Adee observed: “Such a scheme could, of course, have no countenance from us—our policy before the world should stand, like Mrs. Caesar, without suspicion. Neither could we undertake to recognize and protect Panama as an independent state, like a second Texas.”

  Crawford was dead right and Adee only half right. Within three months, Panama would declare its independence, and Hay and Roosevelt, working in concert, would countenance secession every step of the way.

  CHAPTER 19

  Color of Right

  Throughout the spring and summer of 1903, the newly appointed American minister to Bogotá, Arthur Beaupré, had warned Washington that popular sentiment toward the Hay-Herrán Treaty was devolving from approbation to suspicion to opposition and finally to “bitter hostility.” On June 20, José Manuel Marroquín, the acting (officially vice) president of Colombia, called a session of congress, after a hiatus of five years, to consider ratification of the treaty. But Marroquín, who had seized power by way of a coup, was now an old man encircled by a spiteful opposition looking for the opportunity to oust him. Originally an advocate of the Panama treaty, he now wavered before the scowls of his detractors.

  Colombians, only just recovering from a ruinous civil war, seized upon the canal as a referendum on national honor. Yet few in Colombia had a full appreciation of the resolve of the American government to build a canal—a canal not necessarily in Colombian territory. “It is entirely impossible to convince these people,” Beaupré advised Hay in May, “that the Nicaragua route was ever seriously considered by the United States; that the negotiations concerning it had any other motive than the squeezing of an advantageous bargain out of Colombia; nor that any other than the Panama route ever will be selected.”

  Without question, Colombians badly desired a canal in Panama. They just wanted a better deal—“less scorn for our sovereignty” and “pecuniary advantages much greater than those offered,” the waffling Marroquín advised Tomás Herrán. Colombia was now insisting upon a hefty chunk—one quarter or even half—of the $40 million the United States had agreed to pay the Compagnie Nouvelle; it was even considering voiding the French company’s concession altogether and taking the entire $40 million for itself. And instead of accepting $10 million from the United States, as stipulated in the treaty, Colombia now wanted $15 million. Nearly every article of Hay-Herrán was challenged anew—from American rights to the Panama Railroad to sanitary regulations in the proposed canal zone.

  Hay had stood about enough. On June 9, he cabled a stern message to Beaupré that he wished passed on to Colombia’s new minister of foreign affairs, Luis Carlos Rico. If Colombia should reject the treaty or unduly delay its ratification, Hay declared, relations with the United States “would be so seriously compromised that action might be taken by Congress next winter which every friend of Colombia would regret.” Beaupré communicated Hay’s ultimatum just as the Colombian Congress convened, and when it was read to the Senate, the effect was incendiary. “Construed by many as a threat of direct retaliation,” Beaupré wired Washington.

  Hay was not the only one who had lost patience with negotiations. On June 13, four days after Hay transmitted his advisory to Bogotá, Philippe Bunau-Varilla sent Marroquín a more reasoned but hardly more subtle warning of his own. “[T]he only party that can now build a Panama Canal is the United States,” he wrote from Paris. Failure to ratify the Hay-Herrán Treaty would lead Colombia over one of two precipices: “construction of Nicaragua Canal and absolute loss to Colombia . . . or construction of Panama Canal after secession and declaration of independence of the Isthmus of Panama under protection of the United States.” Either one of these choices, Bunau-Varilla admonished Marroquín, “would be equivalent to stabbing your country to the heart.”

  Meanwhile, William Nelson Cromwell, counsel for the Compagnie Nouvelle, was applying his own influence. He had informants in Bogotá and Panama and ready access to key members of the Senate, including Mark Hanna, John Spooner, and the chairma
n of the Foreign Relations Committee, Shelby Cullom. He also gained the ear of the State Department. “Secretary Hay honored us with his confidence,” was how Cromwell later put it. One of the ways Cromwell won this confidence was by drafting a lengthy memorandum, transmitted under Hay’s name, that laid out the legal argument for why Colombia was unjustified in exacting tribute for the transfer of the canal company’s concession to the United States. Going further, Cromwell exhorted Hay to keep up the pressure on Marroquín. “The Marroquín Government has become subdued, non-aggressive and apprehensive of dethronement,” he advised the secretary in June, with italic emphasis. “I think Marroquín must be forced to make a definite stand of recommendation in support of the Treaty.”

  Cromwell also had access to the president. The day before writing to Hay about Marroquín, Cromwell and Roosevelt had talked privately for more than two hours, sharing what proved to be compatible views on Panama. A silky propagandist as well as an adroit attorney, Cromwell left the White House and promptly offered a synopsis of the conversation to a reporter from the New York World. The headline in the next morning’s paper said plenty: “New Republic May Arise to Grant Canal . . . The State of Panama Ready to Secede If the Treaty Is Rejected by the Colombian Congress . . . Roosevelt Said to Encourage the Idea . . . Bound to Have Panama Route.”

  Marroquín and the Colombian Congress felt the heat only remotely, thanks to the usual spastic telegraph service between Bogotá and the outside. On July 9, Beaupré informed Hay that Colombia was proposing amendments to the treaty, asking for still more millions. Hay received Beaupré’s message three days later and immediately wrote back, rejecting the changes. This cable inexplicably took twenty-five days to reach Bogotá. While he waited for word from Washington, Beaupré, who did not speak Spanish, acted on his own initiative and informed the Colombian foreign minister that any modification of the treaty was tantamount to rejection. To his relief, Hay eventually backed him to the hilt.

  Even after the Colombian Senate finally voted down the Hay-Herrán Treaty on August 12, Beaupré wired that the Colombians might yet come to their senses. By then, however, the administration was already weighing the alternatives, as evidenced by remarks made by Senator Cullom. Following a visit to Oyster Bay on the day Roosevelt learned of the canal treaty’s rejection, Cullom divulged to the New York Herald: “ ‘Well, we may make another treaty, not with Colombia, but with Panama.’ ” When pressed further, the senator mentioned that there was “ ‘great discontent on the isthmus over the action of the [Colombian] Congress . . . and Panama might break away and set up a government which we could treat with.’ ” Would the United States encourage such a schism? “No, I suppose not,” Cullom replied. “But this country wants to build that canal and build it now.”

  Hay was thinking much the same. Although he had never voiced a strong preference for either route, Panama or Nicaragua, he had invested an enormous amount of time and reputation in the Spooner Act and the Hay-Herrán Treaty. Besides which, the president (not to mention Cromwell) was keen for Panama, and so Hay was now on board as well. Yet, while his disgust for the Colombians was as great as Roosevelt’s—at one point he called them “greedy little anthropoids”—his nature was to counsel circumspection. “I would come at once to Oyster Bay to get your orders,” Hay wrote Roosevelt on the sixteenth, after word of the Colombian Senate’s vote had reached New Hampshire, “but I am sure there is nothing to be done for the moment. You will, before our Congress meets [in December], make up your mind which of the two courses you will take, the simple and easy Nicaragua solution, or the far more difficult and multifurcate scheme, of building the Panama Canal malgré Bogotá.”

  Roosevelt wanted to heed Hay’s advice. “The one thing evident is to do nothing at present,” the president answered from Sagamore Hill. On the other hand, he wondered, “If under the treaty of 1846 we have a color of right to start in and build the canal, my off-hand judgment would favor such proceeding. . . . I do not think that the Bogotá lot of jack rabbits should be allowed permanently to bar one of the future highways of civilization. Of course under the terms of the [Spooner] Act we could now go ahead with Nicaragua and perhaps would technically be required to do so. But what we do now will be of consequence, not merely decades, but centuries hence, and we must be sure we are taking the right step before we act.”

  Roosevelt’s reference to the 1846 treaty and America’s “color of right” to build a canal in Panama came from a memorandum prepared for the State Department by Columbia University professor John Bassett Moore, a highly respected scholar of international law. The 1846 treaty between the United States and Colombia (formerly New Granada) guaranteed, among other things, “that the right of way or transit across the Isthmus of Panama upon any modes of communication that now exist, or that may be hereafter constructed, shall be free and open to the Government and citizens of the United States.” Moore argued that this clause put the United States “in a position to demand that it shall be allowed to construct the great means of transit which the treaty was chiefly designed to assure.” Moore’s memo was a purely legal analysis, making no mention of military recourse or resolution. He did, however, preface the memo with a quotation from former Secretary of State Lewis Cass on the subject of a transoceanic canal. “Sovereignty has its duties as well as its rights,” Cass had asserted, and no government ought to be permitted “to close these gates of intercourse . . . and justify the act by the pretension that these avenues of trade and travel belong to them.”

  Roosevelt forwarded Moore’s memo to Hay, who recognized its strengths as well as its limitations. “It . . . would be useful in case you should decide to build the canal without Colombian leave,” Hay acknowledged. More realistically, “The fact that our position, in that case, would be legal and just, might not greatly impress”—here he borrowed Roosevelt’s epithet—“the jack-rabbit mind. I do not believe we could faire valoir our rights in that way without war—which would, of course be brief and inexpensive. . . . The Spooner law gives you a ‘reasonable time’ to make a treaty with Colombia. It is for you to decide what time is reasonable.”

  Indeed, the United States had not yet received formal notification from the Colombian government that the canal treaty had been rejected. Hay and Roosevelt would wait until then, or until September 22, when the treaty would expire by its own predetermined timetable. “We are in no danger and in no hurry—we can bide our hour,” Hay wrote the president.

  But he did decide to interrupt his vacation, stopping by Oyster Bay for several hours on his way to Washington on August 28. Afterward, either he or Roosevelt talked to the Herald. Under the headline “Canal Troubles May Lead to War,” the paper reported that the treaty was “probably dead” and that Colombia’s demand for more money was “blackmail.” The administration was weighing three options. The first was to invoke the 1846 treaty, “ignore Colombia,” and build the Panama canal, even if the United States had to “fight Colombia, if she objects, and create the independent government of Panama.” Second choice was Nicaragua. Third was to wait until “something inspired to make Colombia see the light” and then negotiate a new treaty. The article also mentioned that “[p]ersons interested in getting the $40,000,000 for the Panama Canal Company”—presumably Cromwell, et al.—“are of course eager that this government shall go ahead and seize the property, even though it leads to war.” The Roosevelt administration, however, pledged to “move with care.”

  IN PANAMA, NEWS OF the treaty’s likely demise brought both despair and urgency: despair that the canal would not be built across the isthmus; urgency to set in motion a plan to cast off Colombian rule and sign a Panamanian version of the treaty. The conspiracy was germinated by José Agustín Arango, who was both an attorney for the Panama Railroad and a senator from the Department of Panama. Arango discussed his scheme with a trusted friend, James Beers, a freight agent for the railroad who was also on good terms with William Nelson Cromwell. Whether Beers went to the United States at Arango’s behe
st or was summoned by Cromwell is subject to debate; either way, he arrived in New York in early June and received assurances from Cromwell that he would “go the limit” in support of the Panama revolution. Cromwell sent Beers home to Panama, armed with a codebook to be used in further communications.

  Back in Panama, Arango put together a junta that included his sons, sons-in-law, and Manuel Amador, a distinguished physician to the Panama Railroad. Late in July, shortly before Beers’s return, Arango arranged a luncheon at which he sounded out a number of Panamanians whose cooperation or, at the very least, acquiescence would be crucial to the success of a revolution. Several Americans were also invited: the assistant superintendent of the Panama Railroad; three officers of the Army Corps of Engineers; the U.S. consul-general for Panama; and, last but not least, J. Gabriel Duque, the influential and mercurial impresario of the Panama Star and Herald. When Beers returned from the United States on August 4, he told Arango of Cromwell’s vow of support; and when word arrived eight days later of the Colombian Senate’s rejection of the treaty, the junta’s course was set.

  How much Hay and Roosevelt knew of the conspiracy will never be determined absolutely. The extent to which they condoned, encouraged, or abetted the plot is a larger question still. What can be said for certain is that over the next three months—between mid-August, when the treaty with Colombia fell apart, and early November, when the revolution erupted—the affair in Panama turned out rather better than Hay and Roosevelt expected, and not too differently from what they hoped for.

  On September 1, Dr. Amador, one of the three leaders of the junta and soon to be the first president of an independent Panama, arrived in the United States to firm up Cromwell’s promise to underwrite the revolution and, if possible, to gain firsthand assurance from Hay and Roosevelt that the United States would follow through on pledges intimated in the press and confirmed by Cromwell. For secrecy’s sake, Cromwell was given the code name “W”; Hay was “X.”