The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  Like two naughty boys, Taft and the president got their stories straight before being asked questions. Roosevelt coached Taft, “I doubt if it calls for any reply at all. If it did, I think that a sufficient answer would be that we neither ask nor give any favor to anyone as a reward for not meddling with any American territory. We are entirely competent to prevent such meddling, and require no guarantee of assistance to preserve our territorial integrity.”5

  Roosevelt then complained to Ambassador Takahira, who in turn had Prime Minister Katsura send him a telegram dutifully denying that the Kokumin article was based on information supplied by the Japanese government, that there was no secret Japanese-Anglo-American alliance, and that Roosevelt’s friendly attitude toward Japan’s Korea problem was entirely spontaneous.6 Roosevelt provided a further distraction for the reading public: that same month, Scribner’s Magazine published the Rough Rider’s latest tale of daring and conquest, “Wolf Hunt in Oklahoma.”

  AFTER SENATOR NEWLANDS BRUSHED him off, Emperor Gojong sent appeals to London, Paris, and Moscow, all of which were intercepted by Japanese agents. Desperate, Gojong again reached out to Elder Brother Roosevelt. The Korean leader still naively believed that if Roosevelt knew the truth—that Japan held a knife to Korea’s throat—he would stay the Japanese hand.

  Gojong charged an American friend named Homer Hulbert with the dangerous and secret mission of reaching out to Roosevelt. Tailed by Japanese agents, Hulbert took a ship to San Francisco, then a train to Washington, and finally on November 15, 1905, made it to the State Department. But no high official in the Roosevelt administration would see him. Teddy was stalling for time, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  As Hulbert had journeyed from Seoul to Washington, Korea’s new dictator traveled from Tokyo to Seoul. He was Hirobumi Ito, the senior founding father and Baron Kaneko’s sponsor. On the evening of November 17, two days after Hulbert’s arrival in Washington, Ito corralled Gojong’s ministers and told them they would now “agree” to a new treaty. The treaty began, “The government of Japan, through the Department of Foreign Affairs at Tokyo, will hereafter have control and direction of the external relations and affairs at Korea, and diplomatic and consular representatives of Japan will have the charge of the subjects and interests of Korea in foreign countries.”7 The Korean ministers saw gleaming Japanese bayonets through the windows, while witnesses outside the room remembered hearing anguished shouting and wailing from those assembled within. In telegrams to Washington, Minister Edwin Morgan described how the Korean cabinet ministers had been coerced into signing and how Gojong had appealed to him for help.

  But it was too late—Korea was no more. A two-thousand-year-old country was now folded into a department within the Japanese Foreign Ministry in Tokyo—the same ministry from which an employee named General LeGendre had written follow-the-sun notes to Emperor Meiji.

  Back in Washington, Roosevelt now considered Homer Hulbert’s plea from Emperor Gojong. Korea’s existence was in the balance. Roosevelt wrote to Secretary of State Root:

  I have carefully read through the letter…. It is the wish of the Emperor that the existence of the letter should be kept secret and nothing said to anyone about it…. These facts render it impossible for us to treat the letter as an official communication, for there is no way in which we could officially act without violating what Mr. Hulbert says is the Emperor’s wish. Moreover, since the letter was written we have been officially notified that the Korean Government has made the very arrangement with Japan which in the letter the Emperor says he does not desire to make. All things considered, I do not see that any practical action on the letter is open to us.8

  Roosevelt had secretly promised his Japanese friends an “alliance in practice as if a treaty had been signed.” There was, of course, no chance that Roosevelt would bring the United States openly into the alliance. At the end of January, however, he had informed British leaders through their ambassador to the United States, Sir Mortimer Durand, that he considered the interests of the two countries identical in the Far East and that he wished Britain and the United States to stand together. But he had cautioned that in order to avoid exciting criticism, they should do so by their actions rather than by an “open evident agreement.”9 Now he ordered the closing of the U.S. legation in Seoul as a signal to London and Tokyo.10

  Americans remember the exact date of Pearl Harbor, but not the day Theodore Roosevelt gave Japan the keys to the kingdom. The date was November 28, 1905, when Roosevelt turned over the U.S. legation building in Seoul. Now the Honorary Aryans had a grand base from which to begin civilizing Asia.

  Theodore Roosevelt stands as the first world leader to endorse with promises and actions Japan’s advancement onto the Asian continent. Like America’s earlier expansion, this westward movement would leave millions dead. But in 1905, Roosevelt had it all worked out: the Japs would respect the Anglo-American Open Door, and the Slavs would friction the Japs’ ambitions.

  The Roosevelt Room in the White House is just across the hall from the Oval Office. Along one wall is a portrait of Rough Rider Teddy on a horse. Along another wall is Roosevelt’s Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee never knew that the Rough Rider had green-lighted Japan onto the Asian continent.

  Roosevelt later defended himself against charges that he betrayed Emperor Gojong by not acting on the “good offices” clause of the 1882 U.S.-Korea Treaty: “The treaty rested on the false assumption that Korea could govern herself well…. [Korea was] utterly impotent either for self-government or self-defense.”11 Willard Straight observed Americans fleeing Seoul “like the stampede of rats from a sinking ship.”12 But to Roosevelt, it was a rising ship, a great progressive experiment whereby one Asian country would civilize another. An American businessman watching the rats observed: “The Japs have got what they have been planning for these many moons and it is clear that Roosevelt played into their hands when he posed as the great peacemaker of the 20th century.”13

  PERHAPS NO EMPIRE’S BEGINNING had been sanctioned as thoroughly by other nations. In 1906, Roosevelt deleted the word Korea from the U.S. government’s Record of Foreign Relations and placed it under the heading “Japan.” Korea would end up providing Japan with most of the two hundred thousand young sex slaves for Japanese troops in World War II. Most of these little Korean girls never benefited from Roosevelt’s plan to have the Japanese inculcate them with Anglo-Saxon values. After being raped hundreds of times, most of the Korean girls died.

  Korea was only the first victim of Japan’s Roosevelt-sanctioned westering. Ba Maw, the president of Burma during the Japanese occupation in World War II, observed, “There was only one way to do a thing, the Japanese way; only one goal and interest, the Japanese interest; only one destiny for the East Asian countries, to become so many… Koreas tied forever to Japan.”14

  * * *

  ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt entered the Capitol building in a wheelchair as a shocked nation awaited his words. The secretary of state, Cordell Hull, had urged FDR to recite the litany of broken Japanese promises over the past decades. Roosevelt instead gave us this eternal narrative:

  Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…. Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us.15

  The U.S. National Park Service is responsible for preserving the day of infamy’s memory at Pearl Harbor. Their official version of why America went to war in the Pacific ignores whole chapters from the historical record:

  The attack on Pearl Harbor was the culmination of a decade of deteriorating relations between Japan and the United States over the status of China and the security of Southeast Asia. The breakdown began in 1931 when Japanese army extremists, in defiance of government policy, invaded and overran the northern-most Chinese province of Manchuria. Japan ignored American protests, and in the summer of 1937 launched a ful
l-scale attack on the rest of China.16

  Even this more detailed explanation has Japan suddenly—jack-in-the-box-like—expanding westward, much to America’s surprise. (Among Japan’s earliest conquests in World War II: Teddy’s beloved U.S. Navy citadel at Subig Bay in the Philippines.) Lost in the telling is General LeGendre, who wrote the script for the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, and Theodore Roosevelt, who anointed Japan as Asia’s civilizer. A new generation of Americans remembered only the photos of the burning hulks at Pearl Harbor. But again, there was a lot that did not appear in the frame.

  ROOSEVELT NEVER KEPT HIS promise to publicly endorse the Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia, as Kaneko explained:

  When President Roosevelt completed his term, he went to shoot big game in Central Africa. Then he re-entered American politics in the movement to form the Progressive Party. The six years between his retirement and the World War were full of striking events in which Colonel Roosevelt played a part, and Japan’s relations with her neighbouring countries in Asia were relatively unimportant. No occasion arose to prompt the publication of the opinion which President Roosevelt had uttered in our talk at Sagamore Hill.17

  Two years after Roosevelt’s death, the former Japanese ambassador to the United States Kikujuiso Ishii told a dinner audience of Americans and Japanese in Tokyo that the United States and Japan would go to war “if Japan attempted to interfere unduly in the Western Hemisphere and if the United States attempted to become dominant in Asia or sought to prevent Japan from her pacific and natural expansion in this part of the world.”18 A decade later, immediately after Japan expanded into Manchuria, the head of the U.S. State Department’s Far East Division wrote the secretary of state, Henry Stimson, “For nearly twenty years, Japanese statesmen and writers have been speaking of a ‘Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia.’ Some years ago they were given to comparing the position of Japan vis-à-vis China with that of the United States vis-à-vis Mexico. More recently they have insisted that Japan’s relationship to Manchuria is essentially that of the United States toward weak countries of the Caribbean.”19 Japanese leaders were not shy about discussing the parallel. In 1932, Time magazine quoted a top member of Japan’s parliament, who explained that their “national policy is that of a Far Eastern Monroe Doctrine.”20 The Japanese minister of war added, “The countries of eastern Asia are objects of oppression by the white people…. The United States loudly professes to champion righteousness and humanity, but what can you think when you review its policy toward Cuba, Panama, Nicaragua and other Latin American nations?”21 Time magazine elaborated that leaders in Japan spoke of a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine claiming the right to protect all Asia… and that the originator to be cited for this idea was none other than the late great Theodore Roosevelt.”22

  That same year, the author Katsuji Inahara—who had studied American history at Stanford and Harvard—wrote, “As long as the United States maintains the Monroe Doctrine—that is, a ‘closed door policy’—and still insists on enforcing the Open Door policy [in China], it is only natural and should not be objectionable at all that Japan, acting on the principle of equality, should establish an Asian Monroe Doctrine—that is, ‘a closed door policy’—and further demand that the Open Door policy be applied to Central and South America.”23

  Also in 1932, Baron Kaneko wrote an article for Contemporary Affairs magazine entitled “A Japanese Monroe Doctrine and Manchuria,” in which he recalled what Roosevelt had told him on the porch at Sagamore Hill on July 8, 1905:

  All the Asiatic nations are now faced with the urgent necessity of adjusting themselves to the present age. Japan should be their natural leader in that process, and their protector during the transition stage, much as the United States assumed the leadership of the American continent many years ago.24

  In the same article, Baron Kaneko lamented that Roosevelt wasn’t alive to defend Japan:

  Now when Japan’s policy in Manchuria is much criticized by foreign Powers, it is a matter of the greatest regret to me and to Japan that he died unexpectedly without having uttered in public speech his views on a “Japanese Monroe Doctrine” in Asia. This opinion, held by one of the greatest statesmen of our time, would have been of high importance, had he lived to announce it himself at the present moment, when Manchuria is once more a burning international question.25

  The next year, the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs summed up the understanding: “The idea of a Monroe Doctrine for Asia arose in Japan shortly after the Russo-Japanese War [and] the intent of the Japanese Government to claim the rights of a Monroe Doctrine for the Far East is perfectly clear.”26

  In 1940, the foreign minister of Japan, Yosuke Matsuoka, coined the phrase “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere,” asking, “If the United States could rely upon the Monroe Doctrine to support its preeminent position in the Western Hemisphere in order to sustain American economic stability and prosperity, why could not Japan do the same with an Asian Monroe Doctrine?”27 The name Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere caught on quickly among the Japanese in the 1940s—no great surprise given the intellectual roots planted so many years before by General LeGendre and Theodore Roosevelt.

  The problem was that when Roosevelt granted Japan a Monroe Doctrine, he assumed they’d be compliant Honorary Aryans and expand westward only as far as he’d allow. Roosevelt had imagined that the Russians would moderate the Japanese expansion, and he had accepted the many promises of his Japanese Harvard buddies to respect the Anglo-American Open Door. But by 1941 the Slav was focused on Hitler’s threat in Europe. The Honorary Aryans had tired of the Anglo-Saxons’ “White Is Right” mentality and thought that Japan could and should be the country to civilize Asia. The Land of the Rising Sun had its own sun-following ideas, which were clear from Japan’s December 7, 1941, note to the U.S.:

  It is impossible not to reach the conclusion that the American Government desires to maintain and strengthen, in coalition with Great Britain and other powers, its dominant position it has hitherto occupied not only in China but in other areas of East Asia. It is a fact of history that the countries of East Asia for the past hundred years or more have been compelled to observe the status quo under the Anglo-American policy of imperialistic exploitation and to sacrifice themselves to the prosperity of the two nations. The Japanese Government cannot tolerate the perpetuation of such a situation.28

  When, thirty-six years earlier, Japan had set out to civilize Asia along Anglo-Saxon lines, Roosevelt had seen it as a grand progressive experiment: because Teddy considered Japan “the only nation in Asia that understands the principles and methods of Western civilization,” he felt that Japan should lead and protect its neighbors. Teddy would not live to see his benevolent intentions lead over thirty million victims to early graves. Roosevelt never imagined that the sun he wanted the United States to follow could also burn.

  Chapter 13

  FOLLOWING THE SUN

  Many good persons seem prone to speak of all wars of conquest as necessarily evil. This is, of course, a shortsighted view. In its after effects a conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples…. The world would have halted had it not been for the Teutonic conquests in alien lands; but the victories of Moslem over Christian have always proved a curse in the end.1

  —THEODORE ROOSEVELT, 1896 THE WINNING OF THE WEST

  Secretary Taft returned to San Francisco on September 27 aboard the Korea—a ship named after a country whose existence he had just terminated. The Roosevelt administration’s most detailed commentary on the imperial cruise was the briefing Taft gave friendly reporters in San Francisco. Big Bill was his usual ebullient self as he artfully employed an array of cheerful words while conveying very little. Taft explained that any Filipino disgruntlement with their American masters was due to “the distressing agricultural situation.” Taft was firm about freedom for Pacific Negroes: “Some of the younger me
n of education have been advocating immediate independence. It therefore became necessary to state with considerable emphasis [that] there was no possible hope for independence short of a generation.” Mostly Taft focused on the sunny side: In some provinces, hemp production was up. American tax dollars were hard at work to “make Manila harbor as convenient as any in the Orient.”2

  There were no questions from the White Christian newsmen as to why Chinese traded freely with all countries in the world except the United States, or why Roosevelt’s daughter had been depicted insultingly in posters plastered on Chinese walls, or why Taft had skulked to Canton under cover of darkness, or why Chinese officials had refused to dine with him. Instead, Taft assured the newspapermen that “the President’s proclamation and assurance that justice would be done to the Chinese had an excellent effect.”3

  With their bumbling diplomacy, Roosevelt and Taft had accomplished the seemingly impossible: they gave Korea to Japan and at the same time turned Japanese sentiment against America. But Taft maintained that there had been no anti-American riots and that the Japanese still loved Roosevelt and all Americans.

  In December of 1905, the president informed Congress that peace reigned in the Muslim southern part of the Philippines. By then, many observers had lost count of the number of times he had declared the end of hostilities. Just three months later, in March of 1906, word came that the U.S. Army had massacred approximately one thousand Muslim men, women, and children who had cowered in the shallow bowl of an extinct volcano. An outraged Mark Twain called it a “slaughter [by] Christian butchers.”4 Roosevelt cabled the commander, “I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.”5