The China Mirage

by James Bradley

  President Roosevelt had hosted Prince Ito at a White House luncheon soon after President McKinley’s assassination in 1901.12 The men had discussed the Russian threat in North China and the czar’s attempts to pressure China into granting Russia special privileges there. Roosevelt had never traveled to Asia and knew few Asians. Indeed, at the time, he had never seen the Pacific Ocean. Raymond Esthus notes in Theodore Roosevelt and the International Rivalries, “Roosevelt was poorly informed about the Far East… [his] personal diplomatic contacts remained almost completely Europe-oriented.”13 He was far from alone in this orientation.

  In 1898, the United States had declared its Open Door policy, which proposed free trade for all countries within China, with no country taking over whole areas and blocking access to other countries. To stateside Americans, the Open Door policy sounded like a high-minded defense of China’s territorial integrity against rapacious European imperialists. In reality, the policy was an attempt to keep the playing field level for American business interests. Great Britain had long benefited from trade with China, and now the expanding United States wanted some of the action. Chinese people were not welcome in America, but Americans had no qualms about demanding a red carpet for themselves in China when it came to commerce.

  In 1898, a secret U.S. Treasury memorandum identified the Philippines as a key stepping-stone to the Chinese marketplace:

  The Philippines [stand] guard at the entrances to trade with the millions of China… the possession of the Philippines by a progressive, commercial power, if the Nicaragua canal project should be completed, would change the course of ocean navigation as it concerns a large percentage of the water-borne traffic of the world.14

  The Panama Canal had not been built yet, but it would complete the long-sought route that would stream China’s riches to ports on America’s East Coast. The United States then fomented the Spanish-American War and took over the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, Cuba, and Puerto Rico to establish an American sea-lane from China.

  By the time Theodore Roosevelt became president, in 1901, China was being squeezed between the Anglo-American and Russian empires. Roosevelt realized that the Russian extension of the Trans-Siberian Railway meant that China’s riches would flow overland to Europe rather than across the Pacific to the United States. Like the Japanese, Roosevelt grasped that Russian control of the warm-water anchorage at Port Arthur on the China Sea would enable the czar to base part of his navy there and dominate the region. Professor Franklin Giddings of Columbia University warned, “The great question of the twentieth century is whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilization to the world.”15 Passenger guidebooks found on the Trans-Siberian Railway saw that battle as won, proclaiming, “The honor of having planted the flag of Christianity and civilization in Asia is due to Russia.”16

  Theodore Roosevelt had entered Harvard College in 1876, at the age of eighteen. Like all American universities at that time, Harvard considered social and historical questions primarily from their race standpoint. Roosevelt learned about the glorious destiny of the “higher races” and how the Aryan had arisen in the Caucasus to found the white race, migrated to Europe to become the Teuton, and then gone on to the British Isles to morph into the most superior race of all, the Anglo-Saxon.17

  After Harvard, Roosevelt studied for a year at Columbia University, where his favorite teacher was the renowned professor of political science John Burgess. Burgess taught that because the white Teuton possessed “superior political genius” and “political endowment,” Teutonic countries like the United States had the right to submit “un-political nations” to “political subjection.” Wrote Burgess, “I do not think that Asia and Africa can ever receive political organization in any other way.”18 Roosevelt echoed Burgess when he later declared that for the teeming millions in Asia, “fitness [for self-government] is not a God-given, natural right, but comes to a race only through the slow growth of centuries.”19

  Theodore Roosevelt had grown up during the peak anti-Chinese years in U.S. history, a period when Americans were ridding their nation of the inferior Chinese. Like many of his fellow citizens, Roosevelt referred to Chinese people as “Chinks” and viewed Chinese men as particularly ludicrous, with their dresses and their hair tied in sissy pigtails, both of which were likely seen as affronts to a masculine man like Teddy Roosevelt.

  When Theodore Roosevelt became president, Terence Powderly, the former leader of the Knights of Labor, the group that had led the race war against the Chinese in the 1880s, was head of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration. Early in the Roosevelt administration, Powderly wrote, “American and Chinese civilizations are antagonistic; they cannot live and thrive and both survive on the same soil. One or the other must perish.”20 In 1902, Roosevelt tightened the Chinese Exclusion Act, requiring the very few Chinese who had somehow managed to enter America to carry ID cards or face arrest and deportation.

  Analyzing Asia through the prism of race, Roosevelt concluded that China was on the verge of collapse, like an old rotted barn. Yet he had no fondness for the Slavs moving in from the west. Teddy took to calling Nicholas the “preposterous little Tsar”21 and wrote about the Russians, “No human beings, black, yellow, or white[,] could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant—in short, as untrustworthy in every way—as the Russians.”22

  But Roosevelt’s opinion of the Japanese was just as Japan had shaped it to be with decades of Yankees of the Far East propaganda in its Leave Asia/Tilt West campaign. Instead of resisting Western incursion, as other Asian countries had done with barbarians, the Japanese feigned cooperation. Instead of criticizing Westerners, Prince Ito told the Yankees what they wanted to hear, that just as the Japanese had earlier in their history adopted and adapted to Chinese ways, now they would Americanize. The new Japanese, in Ito’s telling, were a distinct race separate from the Chinese, just as an ocean separated Japan from the Asian mainland. Americans learned that the new Japanese embraced American manners, dress, and technology and welcomed American teachers, missionaries, and governmental advisers to help modernize their economy.

  “The Progress of Civilization”: American hearts were warmed by the belief that their values were spreading in Asia as the Japanese became the Yankees of the Far East. (Mary Evans Picture Library / Everett Collection)

  Teddy Roosevelt was convinced that the Japanese were indeed different from other Asians. While he was president, Roosevelt wrote that, unlike the Chinese, the Japanese were “a wonderful and civilized people… entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.”23 In particular, he believed that Japan’s military success was a key indicator of the worth of their civilization: “All the great masterful races have been fighting races; and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then… it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best.”24 After observing the Japanese army fighting alongside the allies in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Roosevelt gushed to a friend, “What extraordinary soldiers those little Japs are.”25 Roosevelt likened the Japanese to the Teutons of two thousand years earlier who had risen in Europe and become civilized, just as the Japanese were doing now in Asia.

  Roosevelt divided the world into what he called civilized and uncivilized nations. The civilized were mostly white industrialized nations, the citizens of which used the natural resources of the uncivilized nonwhites, who in turn purchased the industrial products of the civilized. To Roosevelt, it was the duty of the civilized to police the uncivilized, as Britain did in Africa and India.

  In 1821 President James Monroe had announced to the European powers that they must not meddle in South America. Now Teddy upped the ante with his Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring to Congress that the U.S. had “international police” power in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, as well as in China, to enforce the Open Door policy.26

  Looking toward Asia, Roosevelt saw Japan as an America-admiring civilize
d power that could guide uncivilized China. Roosevelt appreciated Japan as a counterweight to the czar’s ambitions; Japan’s fierce army could, he felt, stymie the Russian advance. He also believed that Japan—so accepting of wise Yankee ways—would help the United States Americanize the rest of Asia.

  There was another big piece of the Asian puzzle: the ancient empire of Korea. To Roosevelt, Korea was an insignificant player, an “utterly impotent” country with a nonmartial people who could not defend themselves from either the Russians or the Japanese.27 He saw the small empire wedged between China and Japan as a chip to be played to encourage the Japanese to oppose the Russians in North Asia. Roosevelt’s opinions were at odds with what Americans understood to be their government’s policy. In 1882, the United States and thirty-year-old Emperor Gojong of Korea28 had signed a treaty. The very first article declared that there “shall be perpetual peace and friendship” between Korea and the United States. The U.S. promised to exert its “good offices” to help Gojong if Korea’s independence was ever threatened.29

  To Emperor Gojong, the good-offices clause was much more than a legal phrase. Koreans felt that the agreement meant that Elder Brother Roosevelt had a moral commitment to Korea. Said the emperor, “We have the promise of America; she will be our friend whatever happens.”30 He had no idea that back in 1900, Vice President Roosevelt had secretly written: “I should like to see Japan have Korea. She [Japan] will be a check upon Russia.”31

  On February 6, 1904, Roosevelt learned that Japan had broken off relations with Russia. Roosevelt wrote privately, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side, but we will maintain the strictest neutrality.”32 On February 8, 1904—with no declaration of war—the Japanese navy attacked Russian ships in Korean ports. The Russians denounced the infamous sneak attack as a violation of international law. Roosevelt wrote, “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”33

  Kaneko steamed into San Francisco Bay on March 11, 1904, his fifth journey to the United States. He told the reporters that America “sowed the first seed of Western civilization in our land, and from that seed has developed… a nation which is to-day doing what… [the] great powers long hesitated over—making a defiant stand against the Russian empire.”34 In Chicago and New York, he explained that Japan was fighting Russia to uphold Anglo-Saxon values.

  When Kaneko reached Washington on March 26, 1904, Roosevelt set aside all other matters to give the baron his full attention. As Raymond Esthus wrote in Theodore Roosevelt and Japan, Roosevelt “took the Baron into his confidence completely.”35 Roosevelt maintained publicly that the U.S. was neutral, but he blurted out to Kaneko in their first meeting, “I have wholehearted sympathy for Japan… I have been waiting for an opportunity to tell you the real state of my mind.… I am firmly convinced that Japan will win both on land and at sea.”36

  Over the next nineteen months, Kaneko was almost constantly in the president’s presence or on his mind. When the baron was in town, Roosevelt hosted him in the White House from morning until midnight, in his office, over the dining table, and upstairs in his personal quarters. When Japan scored a battle victory, Roosevelt was quick to dash off a congratulatory “Banzai!” telegram. When one of the baron’s many articles hit the press, Kaneko would receive a complimentary handwritten note on presidential stationery. Roosevelt welcomed the baron into his family. He introduced Kaneko to his children and instructed them to read the books Kaneko recommended; entrusted his wife, Edith, to Kaneko’s care for a cruise down the Potomac; even hosted the baron at Sagamore, the “Summer White House,” located in Oyster Bay, Long Island. For a year and a half, Prince Ito and Emperor Meiji would be privy to the president’s innermost thoughts about the future of Asia, since Kaneko was quickly telegraphing Roosevelt’s views to Tokyo in code.

  Roosevelt swallowed Japan’s Leave Asia/Tilt West pose, telling Kaneko that the Japanese were racially closer to Americans than to Russians, praising Japan for adopting a constitutional government, and agreeing that Japan’s destiny was to be the great civilizer of Asia.37 Roosevelt even suggested using the network of Harvard Clubs as a conduit for Japan’s propaganda: “All members of the Harvard Club throughout the country are sure to have sympathy for Japan.”38

  Four days after Kaneko arrived in Washington, Roosevelt sat his family down for a White House luncheon in the baron’s honor. Lunch with an Asian was quite a novelty for the Roosevelts, and now suddenly at the First Family’s table was a Japanese baron from Roosevelt’s alma mater who spoke excellent English.

  “Edith, do you hear that?” Teddy called across the table at one point. Kaneko had just said that he’d believed that Roosevelt would be president from the moment they’d met, ten years earlier. “Here is a man who has kept a friendly eye on me from away off in Japan,” Roosevelt exclaimed.39 His ego stroked, Roosevelt said to Kaneko, “My love and respect for Japan is second to none.” Roosevelt also sought some information: “I have not yet been able to understand the mentality of the Japanese people. If there are some books which I should read regarding the Japanese character… please tell me their titles.”40

  Kaneko asked if the president had read Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Neither Teddy nor Edith had heard of it, though Roosevelt was a voracious reader. Kaneko now had the opportunity to influence the president, who had just admitted that he was less than informed about things Japanese. Kaneko explained that the word Bushido referred to the samurai’s code of honor, which was similar to the European tradition of chivalry. Kaneko promised to give the president a copy of the English version the next day.

  A long private meeting with Theodore Roosevelt and a family luncheon in the White House within five days of the baron’s arrival were highly visible seals of Teddy’s approval, and soon Washington’s elite vied to meet the president’s Asian friend. Kaneko’s Harvard mentor Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—one of the most respected men in Roosevelt’s Washington—hosted an introductory luncheon. The main topic discussed was Japan’s following of American-style legal norms, but the conversation was almost secondary to the fascination of Holmes and his guests with a Harvardized Asian. Between private events and lobbying, the baron spoke at George Washington University. Within a fortnight, the Japanese legation had become the hottest ticket in town; congressmen and senators stood in line to shake hands with the Japanese baron who spoke English with a Boston accent.

  Then it was on to New York, where Kaneko passed muster with Wall Street’s barons at a gathering on April 14 at the prestigious University Club, just off Fifth Avenue. For many of New York’s powerful financiers, this was their first opportunity to converse with a Japanese person. Once again, Kaneko presented the mirage: America had westernized Japan, the Japanese were grateful, and now they would push back the Russians and help Christianize and Americanize the rest of Asia. Once again, he was successful; within forty days, Wall Street banks had sold millions of dollars of Japanese bonds. Roosevelt wrote Kaneko, “The extent of our sympathy for Japan can be seen in the foreign bonds… they have been subscribed five times over, which can only be because of the passionate sympathy of Americans for Japan.”41

  After conquering Washington and New York, the baron moved on to Boston for a speech at Harvard’s historic Sanders Theater. An overflow crowd of several hundred people stood outside in heavy rain that night to hear the Japanese nobleman’s speech.

  Kaneko’s presentation was a masterstroke of public diplomacy. In a long and impassioned plea to the American public, Kaneko explained, “Japan simply seeks in the present war to maintain the peace of Asia and conserve the influence of the Anglo-American civilization in the East.”42

  The Harvard Club of Japan reprinted six thousand copies of Kaneko’s speech and distributed them to Harvard Clubs across the land as well as to President Roosevelt, his cabinet, Congress, state governors and legislators, newspaper publishers, and libraries. Under the impressive Harvard logo was Kan
eko’s claim: “Japan is really acting as the pioneer of Anglo-American civilization in the East. It is for this which we are fighting, and only this which is the meaning of the war.”43

  Prince Ito was thrilled with the extraordinary access he had to Roosevelt’s thinking. Again and again, Roosevelt welcomed Kaneko into the White House for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, early-morning chats, afternoon meetings, and late-night ruminations. Perhaps only Edith and his children were at Teddy’s side more frequently than Kaneko during this period.

  Roosevelt’s inner circle was well aware of the president’s love affair with the Japanese. At one of the White House luncheons with Edith, Roosevelt gushed to Kaneko about the book Bushido:

  I gained a clear understanding for the first time of the Japanese moral character, and right away I ordered 30 copies from the bookstore to be sent to my friends and acquaintances. I also gave a copy to each of my five children and told them that they should read this book daily.44

  Among those who benefited from Roosevelt’s newfound Asian expertise were the members of his cabinet, to whom the president lectured from Bushido. Roosevelt hired a judo coach to compete against an American wrestling coach and then ordered a group of military officers to come to the White House to observe the East versus West match. (The judo expert triumphed.) Roosevelt peppered his secretary of state with memos explaining why the U.S. should favor Japan: “The Japs have played our game because they have played the game of civilized mankind.”45