American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The scholarly Secretary of State had been an aide to Abraham Lincoln when Roosevelt was still a toddler. Of frail health and a morbid cast of mind. Hay presented a sharp contrast to the new President, but the two men became good friends and made a working team. Under Roosevelt’s prodding and Hay’s gentle suasions, the British made further concessions. By the end of 1901, the two sides concluded a second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which this time did survive the Senate.

  The next step was to choose a site for the canal. Most congressmen—including Alabama’s Senator John T. Morgan, longtime leader of the pro-canal forces—favored a route through Nicaragua. But Roosevelt, at the advice of engineers and naval officers sent to inspect the possibilities, leaned toward the Isthmus of Panama, where a French company had dug about a third of a canal before collapsing in bankruptcy. Two members of the successor of the defunct company, lobbyist William Cromwell and engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla, joined the President in trying to bring Congress around to the Panama route. Cromwell’s sizable cash contributions to GOP war chests won him a favorable hearing from Mark Hanna and other Republican leaders, but it was Bunau-Varilla who pulled off the flashiest coup of the campaign. When a volcano erupted in the West Indies, destroying a city of 30,000 people, the Frenchman bought ninety sets of Nicaraguan postage stamps that pictured one of that country’s volcanoes and sent one to each senator with the inscription, “An official witness of the volcanic activity of Nicaragua.” In June of 1902, after a long but futile fight by Morgan, Congress authorized Roosevelt to explore the Panamanian alternative.

  Bunau-Varilla’s company avidly agreed to sell its assets in Panama to the United States for $40 million. Now all Roosevelt needed to do was to persuade Colombia, which after all owned the isthmus, to let the United States begin construction. The President offered the Colombians a cash payment of $10 million and a rent of $250,000 per year in exchange for control of the canal and a zone six miles around it. The Colombian government resisted, hoping to gain more money and a firmer guarantee of its sovereignty over the canal zone. Despite warnings from the U.S. envoy in Bogotá that his terms were unacceptable, TR kept up the pressure through the fall and winter of 1902. One Colombian ambassador resigned in disgust. The next, Tomás Herrán, fearing that the “impetuous and violent” President might seize Panama by force, signed the treaty despite instructions from Bogotá.

  By unanimous vote, the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán pact on August 12, 1903. Roosevelt fulminated, sending letters and expletives flying in every direction. Evidently the Colombians hoped to wait until October of 1904, when the lease of the French company would expire and the $40 million could be paid to Colombia instead. The obvious difficulty with waiting, for Roosevelt, was the approach of the 1904 election. If he was to get the canal started before he faced the voters, the President would either have to make a much better offer to Bogotá, open an entirely new set of negotiations with Nicaragua—or hope for some change in Panama itself. The Panamanians had revolted against Colombia a number of times in the past; would they do so again when faced with the prospect of losing the canal project forever?

  “Privately,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “... I should be delighted if Panama were an independent State, or if it made itself so at this moment; but for me to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and therefore I cannot say it.”

  The President’s reticence about encouraging the Panamanians was not shared by other Americans, however. In Panama City, a group of U.S. Army engineers, railroad employees, and even the American consul general became involved in the incipient plan for a revolt. In New York, in Room 1162 of the Waldorf, an emissary from the would-be insurgents, Dr. Manuel Amador, met with Cromwell—who promised $100,000 to speed up the revolt—and Bunau-Varilla. It was Bunau-Varilla who sounded out Roosevelt and the State Department as to the government’s attitude toward a revolt. Apparently satisfied with their responses, and with the news that a U.S. cruiser was on its way to the isthmus, the Frenchman urged the plotters to proceed.

  Amador returned to Panama with a flag, a constitution, and a battle plan—all thoughtfully provided by Bunau-Varilla—and on November 3, 1903, the Republic of Panama was proclaimed. Acting on secret orders wired from Washington the day before, the captain of the U.S.S. Nashville prevented the Colombians from landing troops to stamp out the revolt. After more American naval forces arrived, the United States formally recognized the new nation.

  Bunau-Varilla had stayed in New York to act as “Envoy Extraordinary” for the revolution. The French engineer opened negotiations with Hay and quickly struck a deal: Panama would receive the $10 million and $250,000 rent originally offered to Colombia, plus an explicit American guarantee of its independence. In return, the United States was granted absolute sovereignty over an enlarged canal zone. Bunau-Varilla signed the agreement for Panama on the evening of November 18. Just hours later, Acting President Amador arrived in Washington, only to find his new nation committed to a treaty that he had never seen. Realizing that Panama was totally dependent on the protection of the U.S. fleet, Amador and his government had little choice but to accept the deal.

  The agreement was not greeted by universal acclaim in the United States. The head of the American Bar Association denounced America’s role in the insurrection as a “crime”; the New York Times termed it an “act of sordid conquest.” In the Senate, John Morgan led a concerted assault on the treaty, calling it a “caesarian operation” midwived by Roosevelt. But the country at large rallied behind the President; Morgan’s forces went down to defeat, and the senator himself reluctantly voted for the treaty in the end. Better a stolen canal than no canal at all, he and others reasoned. The 1904 Republican platform, however, expressed no shame at the outcome: “The great work of connecting the Pacific and Atlantic by a canal is at last begun, and it is due to the Republican Party.” Touting Roosevelt for a presidential term in his own right, it proclaimed that “foreign policy under his administration has not only been able, vigorous, and dignified, but in the highest degree successful.”

  Roosevelt’s own account of the Panama Canal’s beginnings harked back to his days in the Badlands. Colombia was a “road agent” who had tried to hold the President up, but Roosevelt had been “quick enough” and had “nerve enough to wrest his gun from him.” In his analogy the Colombians’ gun was Panama, and TR refused to heed the protests of any “hysterical sentimentalist” who wanted him to return it.

  Other observers, then and since, have also seen Panama as highway robbery—but with Roosevelt as the bandit. Nor was Roosevelt’s willingness to risk conflict confined to this one affair. He convinced Britain that he would use force to settle Alaska’s disputed boundary, thus causing the British to accept the line claimed by America. He sent gunboats to Morocco to secure the release of a person who turned out not to be a U.S. citizen. In the Caribbean, the President pressured the Germans over Venezuela, took control of the Dominican Republic’s customhouses, and sent troops to occupy revolution-torn Cuba. To the Monroe Doctrine he added the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, a warning that “flagrant cases of … wrongdoing or impotence” in the Western Hemisphere would be checked by the United States acting as an “international police power.” Once again TR painted himself as fighting outlaws as well as European powers who might take over weak Latin American states unable to pay debts or protect foreign nationals.

  Roosevelt quite clearly relished conflict, confrontation, even the risk of war. “No merchant,” he declared, “no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men. No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph over malice domestic or foreign levy.” He was much influenced by the idea of the “competition of races,” preached by Josiah Strong and others who saw America as engaged in a tremendous struggle for the dominance of the fittest among nations. In effect, Strong’s doctrine was Social Darwinism applied to international relations—
and Roosevelt subscribed to it heartily.

  In the hands of Strong, Roosevelt, and other expansionists, Manifest Destiny became practically indistinguishable, as a concept, from the imperialism being practiced by the nations of Europe. The contrast with the dominant ideas of a century earlier was striking. In the early days of the American republic, with France setting all Europe aflame with revolution, men like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson could well hope that democracy was destined to spread throughout the world. Theirs was a belief in the power of ideas—particularly in the idea of liberty. Theodore Roosevelt, President in an era when Europeans were using force to subjugate much of the globe, was wedded instead to the idea of power.

  If Roosevelt, in his self-proclaimed role as policeman among nations, was open to the charge of imperialism, then other actions of his require a very different explanation. One strand in Rooseveltian diplomacy was composed of force and conflict, yet an opposing strand consisted of conciliation and quiet diplomacy. Behind the scenes, the blustering Rough Rider often acted as a force for moderation.

  The most dramatic display of the “other” Roosevelt came in 1905, when he moved to end the Russo-Japanese War. Fighting had broken out a year earlier, when the two powers clashed over their rival interests in Manchuria and Korea. Japan won a series of naval victories and most of the land battles, only to find her economy in critical condition as the war dragged on. The Russians, meanwhile, were bedeviled with internal turmoil, terrible incompetence in their army, and the disastrous loss of their Baltic fleet at Tsushima Straits, after its epic voyage around the world. Neither side could afford to continue the struggle, yet neither would sue for peace. In desperation over the stalemate, Japan turned to Roosevelt in April of 1905.

  Initially TR had favored Japan. “You must not breathe it to anyone,” he wrote TR, Jr., after the battle of Port Arthur; “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory.” The Japanese seemed able and intelligent, while the Russians annoyed him with their “supine carelessness” and “contemptuous effrontery.” Throughout the war, Japan’s diplomats courted Roosevelt’s further goodwill by joining him for hikes and tennis games, arranging wrestling lessons for him, and deluging him with books on the island kingdom. Roosevelt was responsive to this kind of personal approach. He tended to draw advice from his “Tennis Cabinet,” a loose group of friends and sports cronies that already included several foreign diplomats. But apparently the Japanese miscalculated the effect of their efforts. Educated by his crash course of readings—and by the string of Japanese military successes—Roosevelt began to wonder aloud whether the Japanese “did not lump Russians, English, Americans, Germans, all of us, simply as white devils inferior to themselves” and were planning to “beat us in turn.”

  Aware of the big stakes involved, Roosevelt brought to the peace-making process both his vigor and his finesse. While bombarding Czar Nicholas with plans and suggestions for a peace conference, he worked on the Japanese diplomats, urging them to moderate their terms. Notes and telegrams flowed between the President and officials in London, Paris, and Berlin as Roosevelt sought for every opening to influence the belligerents. In June, convinced that at last he would receive a favorable response, he formally invited Japan and Russia to come together for direct negotiations. The two powers consented, designating the United States as the site of their conference.

  At the U.S. naval base in Kittery, Maine, just across the river from Portsmouth, the two sides confronted each other. From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt followed every nuance of the negotiations. It soon became clear that the talks would deadlock; Russia refused to concede defeat or pay an indemnity, while Japan would give up none of its military gains. “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese peace negotiators,” TR fumed to his son Kermit. “The Japanese ask too much, but the Russians … are so stupid and won’t tell the truth.” Again the telegraph wires to St. Petersburg burned with new arguments and proposals. First the Japanese and then the Russians were invited down to Oyster Bay for a private talk with the President. From Japan’s representative, he secured a compromise on two of the four points still at issue. Then, returning from a cruise beneath Long Island Sound in an experimental submarine, Roosevelt offered the Russians a change of wording that helped put a better face on their concessions. His skillful interventions helped to produce a treaty of peace.

  Roosevelt displayed the same firm but gentle touch that made the Treaty of Portsmouth possible in other controversies between the major powers. When war threatened to break out between France and Germany over Morocco in 1905, the President again provided his good offices for settling the dispute. America’s participation in the ensuing Algeciras Conference was greeted with skepticism in Congress, but Roosevelt took considerable pride in the peaceful outcome. He also was the moving force behind the 1907 Hague Conference, which denounced the use of military force to collect foreign debts and tried to establish limits of civilized conduct in war. Watching the emergence of Roosevelt as a “diplomatist of high rank,” the London Morning Post professed to be amazed. “He has displayed … great tact, great foresight, and finesse really extraordinary. Alone ... he met every situation as it arose, shaped events to suit his purpose, and showed remarkable patience, caution, and moderation.”

  Roosevelt, notes biographer Elting Morison, had a “horror of anarchy, disorder, and … wanton bloodshed.” His experiences with the chaos of modern life were intensely personal: he lost a cherished wife in childbirth and a beloved younger brother to alcoholism, witnessed frontier violence, ascended to the presidency through the whim of an assassin, and watched his friend John Hay die as the Portsmouth negotiations commenced. Roosevelt courted strife because he could not seem to avoid it, yet he also was able to rise above the battle, to convert struggle into a personal and political source of power. “TR’s supporters focused on his ability to master seemingly uncontrollable forces and, in so doing, advance the cause of moral order,” according to Robert Dallek. The need to control events underlay Roosevelt’s words and beliefs as well as his actions; it was the thread that united TR the imperialist with TR the peacemaker.

  Solid accomplishments were the only adequate response to life’s natural disorder. “The chief pleasure really worth having,” Roosevelt confided to a friend, “… is the doing well of some work that ought to be done.” Thus no prospect delighted him more than the actual construction of the isthmian canal. Although no President had ever before left the country while in office, Roosevelt could not keep away from Panama.

  The President sailed to the Canal Zone on a battleship, purposely timing his arrival to coincide with the height of the rainy season so as to see the site at its most daunting. The weather pelted him as he rode through the streets of Panama City with Amador, wilted his white suit as he climbed aboard a huge steam shovel to do a little digging on his own, and threatened to derail his train as he inspected the locks. Everything had to be explained to him: engineers’ salaries, the crews’ kitchens, the controls of the various equipment.

  “This is one of the great works of the world,” he assured the assembled diggers. “It is a greater work than you, yourselves, at the moment realize.”

  On his return from Panama, Roosevelt had to take hold of a more prickly situation. The San Francisco Board of Education, under pressure to stem the flow of Japanese immigrants to California, had passed in 1906 an order that segregated all oriental students in the city’s public schools. Labeling the segregation order a “wicked absurdity,” the President tried to bring pressure to bear on the westerners, only to find himself stymied by the constraints of federalism. As Japanese indignation and Californian defiance mounted, TR turned on the charm instead. The mayor of San Francisco and seven school board members accepted his invitation to come to the White House, and in a series of meetings refereed by Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, Roosevelt and the local officials reached an understanding. San Francisco repealed the segregation order, and the President undertook to persuade
the Japanese to limit their immigration to America.

  The same mix of finesse and force was evident in Roosevelt’s negotiations with Japan. To fulfill his promise to the San Franciscans, Roosevelt sent another friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Tokyo. The genial Taft quickly found a face-saving formula for the Japanese: both sides would enter into a Gentlemen’s Agreement to reduce immigration to the other’s country. Roosevelt continued his efforts to assuage the Japanese and, in 1908, Root and Japan’s ambassador, Baron Kogoro Takahira, reached an agreement to maintain the status quo in the Pacific and uphold the continued independence of China. Both Taft’s and Root’s understandings were embodied in executive agreements rather than formal treaties; Roosevelt was not going to stake the fragile détente he had built in the Pacific on the uncertain outcome of a Senate ratification fight.

  Yet while TR wooed Japan, he also sought to show the Tokyo government that he was not negotiating out of fear. In the summer of 1907, he conceived of a grand gesture of American might—a triumphant procession of the U.S. fleet around the world, with its first stops to include Japan. The sixteen sleek white battleships, many of them launched during his term, were other tangible proofs to TR of his success in wielding the power of the United States. In sending them to what the fleet commander thought might be a “feast, a frolic, or a fight,” Roosevelt was putting to the test the prestige of his personal leadership.

  In its fourteen-month tour the fleet encountered much feasting, in Tokyo and elsewhere, some frolic—and a number of disturbing technical failures. The tremendous diplomatic success of the cruise tended to hide the fact that America could not fuel or repair a globe-circling navy, and that the ships themselves had distinct mechanical problems—ruptured boiler tubes, cracked armor plates, defective shell hoists. Nor did Roosevelt anticipate that his show of force would encourage navalists in Tokyo to speed up the expansion of the Japanese fleet, undermining the balance of power in the Orient.