by Ian W. Toll
Roosevelt was a brilliant, vociferous, combustible man, not the type who ordinarily reaches the presidency. In his whirlwind career, which had taken him from college to the White House in less than twenty years, he had been many things: a historian, lawyer, ornithologist, minority leader of the New York State Assembly, boxer, ranchman, New York City police commissioner, naturalist, hunter, civil service reformer, prolific author, devoted husband and father, voracious reader, assistant secretary of the navy, war hero, empire builder, advocate of vigorous physical exercise, governor of New York, and vice president of the United States. He was a big, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with tan, rough-textured skin. His hair was close-cropped and reddish-brown in color, with bristles around the temples beginning to show gray, and his almost impossibly muscular neck looked as if it was on the verge of bursting his collar-stays. He wore pince-nez spectacles with a ribbon that hung down the left side of his face. When he smiled or spoke, he revealed two very straight rows of teeth, plainly visible from incisor to incisor, their gleaming whiteness sharply accented by his ruddy complexion.
No president since John Adams had campaigned so vigorously to expand the American navy. In 1903, he had shouted to an audience of 5,000 Chicagoans: “There is a homely old adage which runs, ‘Speak softly and carry a big stick,’ you will go far. If the American nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.” That doctrine, a promise to ward off new European encroachments in the western hemisphere, was “as strong as the United States Navy, and no stronger.” The United States had once faced one great ocean; now it faced two, and its long, sparsely populated Pacific coastline presented both opportunities and dangers. “In the century that is opening,” he told an audience of San Franciscans that year, “the commerce and the command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history.” The president was determined to cut a canal through the Central American isthmus, and did not flinch from fomenting a revolution to detach Panama from Colombia. In Roosevelt’s mind, the Panama Canal was above all a military necessity, for it would make possible a rapid transfer of naval power between the Atlantic and the Pacific. By 1906, digging on a vast scale was underway.
The Spanish-American War had left the United States with a far-flung assortment of overseas territories. That was not a development relished by all Americans, who had been steeped in an anti-imperialist, revolutionary heritage since 1776. But the immediate practical problem could not be ignored—Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and the other islands of the Caribbean and Pacific that had fallen into the American lap could not be defended except by a navy. “The enemies we may have to face will come from over sea,” Roosevelt told an audience of naval officers; “they may come from Europe, or they may come from Asia.” Roosevelt saw Germany, with its territorial ambitions in South America, as a dangerous rival in the Atlantic and Caribbean. Yet the German threat was kept in check by the Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world, and in the foreseeable future the Anglo-German face-off would maintain a favorable balance of power on the Atlantic flank. But Japan, recent victor of the Russo-Japanese War, was a formidable naval power with great geostrategic advantages in the western Pacific. “In a dozen years,” Roosevelt predicted in 1905, “the English, Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than they do any other nation.”
During his first term in office, using the “bully pulpit” of the presidency (a term he coined), President Roosevelt convinced Congress to build ten battleships, four armored cruisers, and seventeen smaller vessels. Naval spending rose nearly 40 percent, surpassing $100 million. It was the largest peacetime naval expansion in American history. By 1906, the United States had more battleships afloat than any other naval power except Britain.
The expanded fleet had to be manned, and thousands of new officers were urgently needed to man it. The Naval Academy at Annapolis held the key to the future of Roosevelt’s navy, and he lavished his presidential attentions on the institution. Under his impetus, the academy was undergoing a spectacular makeover, and the campus was a sprawling construction site. Hammers, saws, and shouting workmen disturbed the peace six days a week. Old dilapidated wooden and redbrick buildings were being pulled down to make way for new Beaux-Arts edifices constructed of granite, marble, and gray brick. A new chapel, with an imposing terra-cotta dome and massive bronze doors, would be completed in 1908. President Roosevelt often caught the morning train from Washington to deliver speeches, cut ribbons, or cheer the football team. The president also turned up at the academy for commencement ceremonies, where he would look each graduating midshipman in the eye, crush his right hand in his vicelike grip, and hand him his diploma.
To the academy’s reigning brass, Roosevelt’s close interest was a mixed blessing. The commander in chief was a meddler. When the Naval Academy football team was abolished because the players were neglecting their studies, the president intervened to restore the team, and also insisted that the annual Army-Navy Game be played. “I greatly admire football,” he explained. “I believe in rough, manly sports.” In February 1906, Roosevelt pardoned a midshipman who had been convicted of hazing, dismissing the practice as “some exuberance of animal spirits.” He arranged to have judo (Japanese wrestling) taught at the academy, remarking that it was “not physical exercise so much as it is an extraordinarily successful means of self-defense and training in dexterity and decision.” When the program was subsequently cancelled, Roosevelt blamed the decision on the academy fathers, those “elderly men of a routine habit of mind.”
The admirals and captains at the top of the naval hierarchy in those years had begun their careers before the Civil War. They had ascended the ranks through the slow grind of clocklike promotions, and in their last few halcyon years before retirement they were in no mood to be disturbed by changes foisted upon them by younger and more energetic men down the chain of command. The navy bureaus in Washington were bastions of conservative opinion, top-heavy with time-serving officers. Technological progress met with their prolonged interference simply because it was new and unfamiliar. Innovators, reformers, and iconoclasts were exiled to isolated billets until they resigned in frustration. Proposals to force the early retirement of older officers, a practice decried as “plucking,” brought their fierce opposition. Even by 1906, when the expansion of the service was well underway, the U.S. Navy was still an older man’s navy. The youngest captain in the service was twenty years older than his British counterpart. The British navy could hold up several examples of officers who had been promoted out of the enlisted ranks, but in the putatively more egalitarian United States there was not one such man.
Contemptuous of the “old-style naval officers of the kind who drift into positions at Washington,” President Roosevelt announced his intention to “encourage the best among them by sharply discriminating against the worst.” Since its founding the navy had been governed by a principle of seniority, and officers of every rank remonstrated bitterly against promoting younger men over their heads. But in Roosevelt’s navy, men would advance according to merit, allowing for the early and rapid promotion of deserving younger officers. Lazy, complacent, or incompetent men would no longer be permitted to languish in the middle ranks for decades on end—an “up or out” principle would require that they win promotion on the merits or face compulsory retirement. Line officers had always looked down on engineers as an inferior caste—but now all were merged into one integrated corps, with equivalent ranks, uniforms, wardroom privileges, and berthing facilities.
To the chagrin of the brass and even his own secretary of the navy, the commander in chief carried on a direct correspondence with the “young Turks,” mid-level officers who campaigned for reform from within the ranks of the service. With Roosevelt in power, that type of officer, who had not thrived in the navy perhaps since the days of the War o
f 1812, could dare to believe that his ideas would be implemented, that his talent would be rewarded with early promotion. The president was only too happy to short-circuit the chain of command, to intervene in the normal course of naval business to encourage innovation and new technology, as when he ordered that men engaged in testing submarines be given additional pay to compensate them for the extreme hazards involved. Aboard battleships, emphasis on “spit and polish”—pomp, pageantry, and the outward appearance of the ship—was curtailed, and the time thus saved was devoted to gunnery drills. Gun crews practiced hitting targets, with the results carefully recorded. One ship was pitted against another in gunnery competitions, and officers whose ships did not make the grade had to answer for the deficiency. On the qualities required of naval officers, Roosevelt was outspoken: “They must have skill in handling the ships, skill in tactics, skill in strategy . . . the dogged ability to bear punishment, the power and desire to inflict it, the daring, the resolution, the willingness to take risks and incur responsibilities which have been possessed by the great captains of all ages, and without which no man can ever hope to stand in the front rank of fighting men.”
ON THE AFTERNOON and evening of May 27, 1905, in the gray, gloomy waters of Tsushima Strait in the Sea of Japan, the main battle force of the Imperial Japanese Navy met and annihilated a Russian fleet under the command of Admiral Zinovy Rozhestvensky. The Battle of Tsushima, as it came to be known in the West, was one of the most lopsided in the history of naval warfare. It drew comparison to the Battle of Trafalgar, the great British victory over Napoleon’s navy that had been fought almost exactly a century earlier. Of the twelve battleships brought into action by the Russians, none escaped; four were captured and eight sent to the bottom. More than 4,000 Russian officers and seamen lost their lives; nearly 6,000 were taken prisoner. The Japanese fleet, under the command of the great Admiral Heihachiro Togo (crowned as “Japan’s Nelson” in the Western press), lost only three small torpedo boats and suffered casualties of just 117 killed and 583 wounded.
The wipeout at Tsushima was the closing act of the Russo-Japanese War, a vast and bloody conflict that had raged for two years across Korea and Manchuria and on the adjoining seas. At the time, it was one of the largest and most destructive wars that had ever been fought, involving the clash of armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands. It was the first major war of the twentieth century, the first to be fought by armies equipped with advanced machine guns and modern artillery, dug into long trench lines and supplied by rail transportation on a large scale. In all those respects it foreshadowed the First World War.
It was a war no one had expected Japan to win. Tsar Nicholas’s Russia was a major imperial power with three times Japan’s population and fifty times its territory. Japan was a remote and enigmatic East Asian island-state that had remained aloof from the rest of the world until the 1850s. The Japanese infantryman was physically smaller than his Russian counterpart and not as well equipped, but he fought with skill and tenacity, had greater self-sufficiency and initiative, marched faster, showed greater endurance in unforgiving conditions, and appeared to possess an almost preternatural lack of fear. At the great battle for Mukden in February and March 1905, the Japanese troops stormed the Russian trenches in unrelenting waves, and the Russians were aghast at the sight of their foes charging across the field with bayonets fixed and beatific smiles on their faces, as if elated by the chance of a noble death. For the first time in the modern era, an Eastern power had triumphed over a Western one.
Japan’s two-generation rise from feudal and pre-industrial origins to the status of a major economic and military power was more than remarkable—it was (and remains) unprecedented in the entire course of human history. The Meiji Restoration was always a bit of a misnomer, in that there had been an unbroken line of emperors prior to their “restoration,” and even after the fact the emperor did not wield supreme power. But there was something appealing in the notion that the Japanese were reaching back to find something essential in their national headwaters, rather than merely conforming to the ways of the West. The real shift in political power was to an urban merchant class and to a handful of powerful samurai clans from the Satsuma and Choshu provinces of southwest Japan. They provided the governing elites, who recognized (with impressive foresight) that Japan would fumble away its independence unless it could build up national institutions and industries capable of resisting the encroaching power of the West. The samurai leaders of the Meiji period hung up their swords and stepped comfortably into the roles of administrators, bureaucrats, political leaders, and visionaries; they instituted reforms from the top down, using strong, centralized government institutions to carry out their program. They bought off the feudal grandees with rich pensions and left the traditional hierarchies largely intact. Political parties emerged but often ran up against countermeasures aimed at curbing their power and influence. The Japanese people cast votes to elect representatives of the Diet, or parliament—but the legislature never grew powerful enough to confront the supreme power of the bureaucracy. There was never, in any sense, civilian control of the military, which remained supreme in both name and fact, and enjoyed a special direct advisory relationship with the throne.
Most striking to Western observers of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan’s armed forces on both land and sea had behaved with qualities of grace and humanity that put the Russians to shame. The “Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors,” issued by the Meiji emperor in 1882, had peremptorily forbidden atrocities against civilians or prisoners. “If you affect valor and act with violence,” Meiji had warned, “the world will in the end detest you and look upon you as wild beasts. Of this you should take heed.” Twenty years later, Japanese soldiers and sailors were still taking heed. Western war correspondents’ reports were replete with examples of the kindness shown by Japanese soldiers and sailors to prisoners of war, who were given plenty of good food, medical care, clean clothes, cigarettes, Russian books and newspapers, even wine. At sea, the Japanese fleet flew their ensigns at half-mast to observe the death of a Russian admiral. Admiral Togo personally visited wounded Russian prisoners, and General Maresuke Nogi paid his respects in person to a memorial to Russian dead in Port Arthur. Only about 1 percent of Russian prisoners died in Japanese captivity, and all were buried with painstaking attention to military honors. The Japanese Red Cross mounted a relief effort that fed and cared for tens of thousands of displaced Korean and Chinese civilians in the war zone. Many had fled from territory occupied by the Russian army, where looting, rape, murder, and mayhem had gone largely unpunished. By contrast, the Japanese army did not tolerate such crimes and punished offenders in its ranks with the utmost severity.
That Japan had beaten a European army in the field was surprising. That it had crushed a European navy at sea was astounding. That it had behaved with greater chivalry than Russia was dumbfounding, because it upended the Western premise that the East was a barbarous place populated by barbarous people. As the editors of the Illustrated London News put it on January 14, 1905: “Europe has not recovered from the shock of finding out that the Japanese are a great people.”
Roosevelt was pleased by the Japanese triumph. For years he had been personally fascinated with Japan and all things Japanese. “The Japs interest me and I like them,” he told Cecil Spring-Rice, a British diplomat who was the president’s close friend. In his autobiography he wrote, “I believe in them; I respect their great qualities; I wish that our American people had many of these qualities.” During his presidency, Roosevelt read deeply in Japanese history, literature, and philosophy. He especially admired Bushido: The Soul of Japan, a book written by Inazo Nitobe, a Japanese educator and diplomat: the president purchased sixty copies and distributed them to friends and colleagues. When he read Admiral Togo’s message to the Japanese fleet after its victory at Tsushima, Roosevelt was moved to tears and ordered that it be distributed to every ship and station in the American navy. He maintained a close fr
iendship and correspondence with his old Harvard schoolmate, Kentaro Kaneko, who spoke English fluently and had made it his life’s work to promote Japanese culture in America and American culture in Japan. In 1904, Roosevelt began training in judo under the grandmaster sensei Yoshiaki Yamashita. The president enlisted a dozen members of his entourage as fellow students, and during twice-weekly training sessions the White House hallways rang with the sounds of men grunting and hurling each other to the floor. “My right ankle and left wrist and one thumb and both great toes are swollen sufficiently to more or less impair their usefulness, and I am well mottled with bruises elsewhere,” Roosevelt wrote his son in March 1905. “Still I have made good progress, and since you have left [Yamashita] has taught me three new throws that are perfect corkers.”
As a historian, Roosevelt saw in Japan a vindication of one of his favorite theories: that certain “races” were endowed with superior “fighting stock.” Such peoples were destined to dominate their neighbors, vanquish their enemies, spread their language, religion, and culture beyond their borders, and advance the cause of civilization through achievements in commerce, science, and the arts. It had been true of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and later the Goths. It had been true in subsequent centuries of the Spanish, the French, the Dutch, and the British. More recently it was true of the Germans, the Americans, and the Japanese. But no other nation, Roosevelt believed, had ascended as rapidly or as dramatically as Japan. Since Commodore Perry’s black ships had sailed into Tokyo Bay half a century earlier, he said, “the growth of Japan has been literally astounding. There is not only nothing to parallel it, but nothing to approach it in the history of civilized mankind.”