Theodore Rex

by Edmund Morris

  Throwing all semblance of impartiality aside, Roosevelt urged Loomis to expedite the Jewish petition (still gathering signatures), and prepare it for immediate transmission to St. Petersburg. Cassini was about to sail home on vacation; Russia must feel America’s displeasure before he arrived and smoothed things over.

  John Hay, unaware of what was going on, wrote Roosevelt to say that Cassini’s “extraordinary” statement reinforced his earlier doubts about the petition. Better simply for B’nai B’rith to publicize its rejection in advance. “We can then all of us say what we think proper, and Russia cannot complain of anything we say among ourselves.”

  His letter came too late to influence the telegrams and telephone calls buzzing back and forth between the summer White House and Washington. Whether Hay liked it or not, Roosevelt was beginning to act more and more as his own Secretary of State.

  A DAY OR TWO LATER, Hay received a summons to Sagamore Hill, amid rumors that he would soon resign. It was assumed—correctly—that he felt the United States was becoming too confrontational in its foreign policy, not only vis-à-vis Russia and Germany, but also toward Canada and Great Britain in the Alaska boundary dispute. (Roosevelt’s three “impartial jurists,” Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, and former Senator George Turner, were busy polishing their prejudices for an upcoming tribunal in London.)

  Hay was not so much disenchanted as weary of the strain of working for “Theodore the Sudden.” He packed his bags, wondering if this was to be the first of many summer interruptions. McKinley had never called for him without reason. Roosevelt tended to call first and think of reasons afterward. “I always find TR engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.”

  Sure enough, when he rolled under the porte cochere on 7 July, the President was entertaining three senators, a Quaker financier, a poet, and a playboy. “Will you excuse me till I play a game of tennis with Winty Chanler, I have had no exercise all day.” Hay went off for a stroll around the estate, and did not see Roosevelt again that afternoon. In spite of himself he was charmed by Sagamore Hill. He admired its high panorama of trees and water—no other houses visible in any direction—and liked its air of dignified simplicity. At six o’clock, out of long habit, he dressed in black tie for dinner, and noticed that Roosevelt did the same. “The President was so cordial and hospitable,” he wrote his wife, “that I felt ashamed of my surly crossness at having to go there.”

  When they did have their discussion, over coffee on the porch, it was long and businesslike. Hay abandoned all thought of resignation. Aside from Manchuria and the Kishinev petition, there were encouraging developments in Bogotá. President Marroquín had privately begun to pressure the Colombian Congress to ratify the Panama Canal Treaty. Members of the lower chamber were reported to be in favor. Senate opposition was still stiff, but if Marroquín was as powerful as Beaupré believed, the treaty might yet prevail, and Panamanians withdraw their threat of secession.

  President and Secretary talked far into the night, while their imagined world ordered itself pleasingly, obediently, beyond the twinkling horizons of Oyster Bay.

  HAY SAID GOOD-BYE the next morning, then continued south to Washington. His surprise arrival in the broiling city served notice to both Loomis and Roosevelt that he was still boss of the State Department, and would monitor all their future communications. Yet he could not forget the latter’s graciousness at Sagamore Hill. “It is a comfort to work for a President who, besides being a lot of other things, happened to be born a gentleman.”

  On 12 July, a sobering cable arrived from Arthur Beaupré. He reported that only now, after five weeks, had Hay’s ultimatum at last been communicated to the Colombian Congress. It was “construed by many as a threat of direct retaliation against Colombia,” in the event of nonratification of the treaty. Delegates from the province of Panama were capitalizing on that threat, and talking openly of secession.

  By a coincidence unsurprising to intimates of William Nelson Cromwell, the New York World prophesied the next morning that there would be a revolution in Panama on 3 November. Later in the day, a desperate message from Colombian liberals reached the State Department. The treaty might be saved if the United States would consent to two amendments: one requiring the Compagnie Nouvelle to pay a ten-million-dollar rights-transferral fee, and the other increasing the zone’s acquisition price from ten million to fifteen million dollars.

  Hay prepared a note of refusal. “Make it as strong as you can to Beaupré,” Roosevelt ordered him. “These contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future.”

  THE KISHINEV PETITION finally wound its way up Sagamore Hill on 14 July. It was carried by Leo Levi and Simon Wolf, who did not know what to make of the President’s sudden urgency. Levi suppressed the cynical thought that Roosevelt might use a human tragedy in Bessarabia to shame the Tsar into opening up Manchuria. Wolf was embarrassed at how few signatures they had been able to collect on such short notice. The names of influential Gentiles were especially elusive in the vacation season. Unavoidably, the list still looked like a Jewish petition, rather than a mass interdenominational declaration.

  Oscar Solomon Straus, a prominent Jew with diplomatic experience, and Albert Shaw, editor of Review of Reviews, joined the company for lunch in the President’s paneled dining room. When Roosevelt heard that the petition bore “only two or three thousand” signatures, he agreed that it was hardly worth submitting in physical form. Then he made an inspired suggestion. Secretary Hay should dispatch an official cable to Count Vladimir Lamsdorff, the Tsar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs inquiring whether or not an unofficial petition “relating to the condition of the Jews in Russia” would be acceptable to His Majesty. The cable would quote the entire text of the petition. Of course, Lamsdorff would say no. But he would have to file the cable as a formal message, while its senders published it around the world. Americans would have made their moral point, and Russians could not complain of any breach of diplomatic etiquette.

  Everyone approved of this idea. The President led the way to his library, adapted a previous draft prepared by Hay, and pinned the petition to it. Straus, stoop-shouldered and frail, undertook to deliver the precious document to the State Department for immediate dispatch.

  Long before he got to Washington, the Russian Embassy announced that “certain cities in Manchuria” were open to foreign commerce. This was less a coincidence, perhaps, than the consequence of Roosevelt’s earlier blast against the Tsar’s domestic and foreign policies. Evidently Russia did, after all, worry about her inflexible world image. Hated by China, threatened by Japan and Japan’s ally Britain, she did not need to add the United States to her list of enemies.

  Nicholas II’s rejection of the petition cable the next day thus came as neither a disappointment nor a surprise. Roosevelt authorized the B’nai B’rith leaders to publicize the rejection as they chose, and accepted congratulations from John Hay. “You have done the right thing in the right way, and Jewry seems really grateful,” the Secretary wrote.

  An exuberant Roosevelt was less inclined to call the matter quits. “If only we were sure that neither France nor Germany would join in, I should not in the least mind going to ‘extremes’ with Russia!”

  THE CRESCENT SELF-CONFIDENCE Edith Roosevelt had noticed after her husband’s return from the West continued to energize him. He seemed to delight in juggling as many political and diplomatic balls as possible. To the annoyance of his children, carriages full of ponderous adults kept creaking through the chestnut trees. One such vehicle on 15 July discharged Treasury Secretary Leslie Shaw, Herman Kohlsaat of the Chicago Record-Herald, Charles J. Bonaparte, special counsel for the Justice Department in the Post Office investigation, and Ray Stannard Baker, reporter at large for McClure’s. Baker’s briefcase was especially bulky with notes, maps, and memoranda. The President
had asked him to substantiate charges of corruption in the Salt River Valley, Arizona, reclamation project.

  A servant showed the visitors into the library. Roosevelt was nowhere to be seen. They sat for a while under the varnished gaze of Theodore Senior, absorbing an aura of well-handled books, oak, and mahogany. On the desk, radiant with sun slanting in through gauze curtains, there lay a gold-miner’s pan, a silver dagger, and an inkwell ornamented with a little bust of Abraham Lincoln. Bearskins snarled silently on the floor. Somewhere a clock was ticking: it was well past noon.

  Like a sudden explosion, the President blew in through the door. He looked ruddy and healthy in knickerbockers, worn gray shirt, and scuffed hiking shoes, and was bursting with mirth. In his hand he carried a note and newspaper clipping.

  “I want to read you something I have just got,” he said, “in connection with conditions in the South.”

  He shot a gleeful glance at Bonaparte, who owned a Maryland plantation. The note was from Booker T. Washington. “My dear Mr. President, the enclosed is a true story.” Roosevelt turned to the clipping, from the Baltimore Herald:

  An old Florida colonel met Booker T. Washington and in a bibulous burst of confidence said to the Negro educator: “Suh, I am glad to meet you. Always wanted to shake your hand, suh. I think, suh, you’re the greatest man in America.”

  “Oh no,” said Mr. Washington.

  “You are, suh,” said the colonel, and then, pugnaciously, “who’s greater?”

  “Well,” said the founder of Tuskegee, “there’s President Roosevelt.”

  “No, suh,” roared the colonel. “Not by a jugful; I used to think so, but since he invited you to dinner I think he’s a [—] scoundrel.”

  The library rang with presidential laughter. A gong sounded, and Roosevelt led the way into the dining room. Baker left a bemused account of the subsequent proceedings:

  It was a very simple lunch, served by a maid. At first the President talked postal affairs with Mr. Bonaparte, asserting over and over again that he wanted the investigation to be thorough.

  “I don’t care who it hits!” he said. “We must get to the bottom of these scandals.” He then turned abruptly to me and said, “Baker, who is the chief devil down there in the Salt River Valley?”

  Since I had never considered the situation in terms of devils, I hesitated a moment—and the President burst into a vigorous, picturesque, and somewhat vitriolic description of the situation, implying that if he could catch the rascals who were causing the trouble he would execute them on the spot. Several of the statements he made seemed to me to be inaccurate, or at least exaggerated, but when I tried to break into the conversation—boiling inside with my undelivered articles and memoranda (one of which indeed I tried to draw from my pocket)—the President put one fist on the table beside him, looked at me earnestly, and said: “Baker, you and I will have to get together on these subjects.”

  He instantly turned aside, leaving me—I think—with my mouth open, and began telling in a loud voice and with great unction of his lunch [with] a committee of prominent Jews interested in the Kishinev petition. He even imitated Oscar Straus by a hitch of the shoulders and laughed heartily when somebody asked if he had provided boiled ham for his guests. Once he said:

  “Do not all these things interest you? Isn’t it a fine thing to be alive when so many great things are happening?” …

  As the time drew near for leaving, I began to wonder when the President would ask me for the information upon which I had spent so much time and hard work. I had my heavy briefcase in hand when I went up to say goodbye—and my grand plans for enlightening the Government of the United States vanished in a handshake.

  Mr. Bonaparte, Mr. Kohlsaat, and I walked down together, some three miles, to Oyster Bay. I carried my heavy case, filled with my memoranda, and papers, and maps and pictures—and the sun was hot.

  Behind his jocularity on Southern race relations, the President was giving serious thought to an “utterance” on lynching. He admitted that long-term justice for the Negro concerned him more than any other issue. One of his least-noticed guests that July was Rollo Ogden, sometime Presbyterian missionary, editor of the New York Evening Post, and a crusader against mob justice. They met amid reports that anti-Negro vigilantes were menacing a jail in Evansville, Indiana. Governor Winfield T. Durbin had sent in state troops, who killed six rioters; even so, hundreds of terrified blacks were quitting town. The parallels to both the Wilmington lynching and the Kishinev pogrom were obvious. (A cartoon in Literary Digest showed Nicholas II tearfully rejecting the B’nai B’rith petition: “Excuse me, I’m too busy weeping over this Delaware affair.”) Roosevelt promised Ogden that he would say something soon.

  For political reasons, he could not do so immediately. A Democratic primary campaign of extreme virulence was approaching its climax in Mississippi, with two racists, Hernando Money and James K. Vardaman, respectively fighting two Administration-backed moderates for the senatorial and gubernatorial nominations. Since there was no effective Republican opposition in that state, selection was as good as election. Much invective was being lavished on the “nigger-loving gang in Washington,” particularly Roosevelt for his support of Minnie Cox. Governor Andrew H. Longino, running for re-election, was blamed for involving the President in Mississippi politics during his 1902 visit to the Little Sunflower. Any move now by the detested “Teddy” against lynching, which Longino had himself condemned, would ensure the Governor’s defeat.

  SO ROOSEVELT REMAINED SILENT, as midsummer heat mounted across the nation. The sun shone strong on western corn, ripening what looked, to James Wilson’s expert eye, like bumper crops. A good harvest was gold in Republican coffers, the Secretary of Agriculture wrote from South Dakota: “This people is very prosperous and so enthusiastic for you that they will contribute just as freely to next year’s campaign as to build a church.”

  Temperatures—and tempers—rose less encouragingly at labor conventions in many cities. So far in 1903, there had been a record three and a half thousand strikes nationwide, and not only Wall Street held Roosevelt responsible. In a severe blow to his popular image, the National Association of Letter Carriers endorsed William Randolph Hearst for President as “a true friend of the plain people.” Union after union berated Roosevelt for the low pay increase awarded the anthracite miners, and for his more recent, precedent-setting enforcement of an open shop in the Government Printing Office.

  James S. Clarkson, his chief patronage lieutenant outside Washington, grew nervous. He bombarded Sagamore Hill with statistics showing “the alarming growth of the Socialist vote in this country.” Hearst, he wrote, was a real threat, with enough funds and newspapers (three hundred at last count) to alienate every trade union from the Republican Party. He begged Roosevelt to avoid any further gestures toward free labor.

  This was not the right thing to say to a President who prided himself on being fair. “Of course I will not for one moment submit to dictation by the labor unions any more than by the trusts,” Roosevelt shot back, “and that no matter what the effect on the presidential election may be.” Three times in one sentence, he reminded Clarkson that he stood for “a square deal.”

  The sun beat down ever more fiercely, turning Southern plantations white, Western farms gold, Northern fields yellow and silver. It bleached the pale Percherons working Roosevelt’s own forty-seven acres. Farmers everywhere looked forward to an autumn bounty. But in the shadowed enclave of Wall Street, bears prowled. On 22 July, Jefferson Seligman, a banker friend, came out to see the President, warning of an imminent financial “panic.”

  Roosevelt had never understood the ebb and flow of money, through his own hands or anyone else’s. “Every morning Edie puts twenty dollars in my pocket, and to save my life I can never tell her afterward what I did with it.” So he listened with more patience than comprehension as Seligman expounded the need for currency-reform legislation.

  The problem, apparently, was an “inelastic cu
rrency,” combined with a seasonal need for cash to move America’s crops to market. Toward the end of summer, demand greater than supply caused cash to flow from Wall Street banks to the rural heartland, leaving behind depleted vaults and falling stock prices. Late in the fall, the money began to flow back. But promoters, stockjobbers, and other speculators trembled while it was gone, lest banks call their loans. This summer, the risk looked greater than usual. Continued combination and overcapitalization—not to mention worry over the Northern Securities Company’s appeal to the Supreme Court—had created a vast surplus of vulnerable stocks. “Undigested securities,” J. P. Morgan called them.

  Roosevelt referred Seligman to Leslie Shaw, who had an emergency plan to transfer government gold into the national reserves. Then he braced for the strong views his next guest was bound to have on any such corrective measure. Joseph G. Cannon famously knew more about finance than anybody else in Congress, even Senator Aldrich. A profound conservative, of the Midwestern, small-town variety, Cannon was unlikely to be disturbed by the current situation. Eastern trust lords had been too grandiose in their capitalizations: they needed a short, sharp slump (affecting millionaires primarily) to teach them fiscal responsibility.

  “Uncle Joe wants no legislation,” Roosevelt dictated to a secretary, while waiting for Cannon to arrive. “It seems to me we ought to have some.”

  When the Speaker climbed out of his carriage, it was clear he was playing the defiant hayseed. He wore a seersucker jacket with tails that floated on the breeze, and salt-and-pepper trousers ballooned round his bony legs. The accepted uniform for waiting on the President was a dark frock coat, irrespective of season. But Cannon declined to apologize for his appearance. It was too “damn hot,” he said.