Roosevelt’s next visitor found the President convulsed with laughter.
ROOSEVELT DID NOT read Raisuli’s list of demands until 28 May. He sent for Hay in a hurry, and asked what the State Department thought of them. Hay said they were “preposterous.” The United States could not possibly force their acceptance on the Sultan. Personally, he would like Mr. Perdicaris’s life to be saved. “But a nation cannot degrade itself to prevent ill-treatment of a citizen.”
The President seemed to agree. However, that afternoon a Navy Department cable went out to Admiral Jewell’s European Squadron, east of the Azores, ordering it to proceed to Tangier at once. With the South Atlantic Squadron already dispatched, some thirty thousand tons of American gunmetal should soon persuade the Sultan to start negotiating.
AT 5:30 A.M. on 30 May the white turrets of the Brooklyn appeared off Tangier. Her big guns boomed a long salute. Moroccan cannons politely boomed back. Admiral Chadwick’s other three ships, the Atlanta, Castine, and Marietta, glided in at intervals through the day. Each in turn sent its salute, and the cannons answered. The prolonged, stately thudding was music to Samuel Gummeré’s ears.
That night, four Marines armed only with pistols slipped ashore to guard the Consul and Mrs. Perdicaris. More thudding on 1 June announced the arrival of Admiral Jewell’s cruisers, Olympia, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Unnoticed in all the excitement, one of Raisuli’s agents left town and galloped to Tsarradan, in the mountains. He breathlessly reported the arrival of the American warships, “one after the other.” Tangier was mkloub, “upside down.”
Mr. Perdicaris listened, his heart surging with patriotic gratitude. His only fear was whether this messenger, too, would have his throat slit. But Raisuli seemed pleased at the pressure building up on Abd al-Aziz.
“The presence of these vessels,” he said, “may result in his acceding to my demands, and then you will be able to return to your friends.”
SEVEN DAYS AFTER the arrival of the last American warship in Tangier Bay, Gummeré was able to communicate only an unofficial, preliminary hint that the Sultan might deal with Raisuli. Roosevelt’s patience began to run out, and Hay cabled:
PRESIDENT WISHES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE DONE TO SECURE THE RELEASE OF PERDICARIS. HE WISHES IT CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD THAT IF PERDICARIS IS MURDERED, THIS GOVERNMENT WILL DEMAND THE LIFE OF THE MURDERER.… YOU ARE TO AVOID IN ALL YOUR OFFICIAL ACTION ANYTHING WHICH MAY BE REGARDED AS AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO BRIGANDAGE OR BLACKMAIL.
Before nightfall, Tangier advised that the Moroccan government had formally accepted Raisuli’s terms, except the huge ransom, which would have to be “reasonably negotiated.”
ON 10 JUNE, Governor Samuel Pennypacker announced that Philander Chase Knox had been appointed to succeed Matthew Quay as Senator from Pennsylvania. Roosevelt accepted the Attorney General’s resignation, but no longer with Dickensian emotions. He wrote effusively, carelessly. Knox was replaceable—as Root had proved to be. Even so, the President’s words were sweet enough for Knox to paste them in his scrapbook:
Many great and able men have preceded you in the office you hold; but there is none among them whose administration has left so deep a mark.… You have deeply affected for good the development of our entire political system in its relations to the industrial and economic tendencies of the time.
Behind the exchange of courtesies lay some personal disillusionment. Roosevelt had grown impatient with the Attorney General’s obsessive legalism. Knox was critical of the President’s autocratic tendencies, particularly in the area of executive prerogative. And he was quick to reject press speculation that he would be an antitrust crusader on Capitol Hill. “President Roosevelt’s policies are his own,” he told reporters. “I have been no more than the exponent of his ideas.”
JOHN HAY FORWARDED another demand from Raisuli to Roosevelt on 15 June. The Berber now wanted control of four more Moroccan districts. “You see there is no end to the insolence of this blackguard,” Hay wrote. “I feel that it would be most inexpedient to surrender to him. We have done what we can for Perdicaris.… Who knows what he will ask next?”
The Secretary’s desire to disengage betrayed a secret embarrassment. Researchers at the State Department were beginning to suspect that Mr. Perdicaris might not be an American citizen after all. Hay was anxiously awaiting their final report. How would delegates to the Chicago convention react if the President was found to have bombarded Morocco in behalf of a fraudulent old Greek?
Roosevelt, unsuspecting, asked Hay to explore the possibility of a joint military expedition with Britain and France. “Our position must be to demand the death of those who harm him if he is harmed.”
Hay unhappily consulted with the envoys of both countries. Neither liked Roosevelt’s idea. Jules Jusserand was particularly wary: an American landing at Tangier might threaten France’s own program for total acquisition of Morocco—“pacification,” as it was called on the Quai d’Orsay. He was astute enough to sense that Hay did not really want him to agree.
“The President’s will is, more and more, predominant in public affairs,” Jusserand informed Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé. “And he hesitates less and less to follow it, despite the advice of his Cabinet officers. They, to tell the truth, resist only very weakly.”
Similar complaints came from Chicago, where the Republican National Committee was already meeting. Senator Nathan B. Scott, the acting Chairman, objected bitterly to the way George Cortelyou had been foisted upon the party. Roosevelt, hearing that the Old Guard was plotting a last-minute revolt, responded forcefully, by telegram: PEOPLE MAY AS WELL UNDERSTAND THAT IF I AM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT THEN CORTELYOU IS TO BE CHAIRMAN…. I WILL NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY. He asked for the names of the intriguers, whereupon their opposition faded, but not their resentment. “Your Uncle Theodore knows how to run things,” Scott growled at a newspaperman.
ON MONDAY, 20 JUNE, the mass of Republican delegates arrived in Chicago. They looked languorous, almost bored under their straw hats. As Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “Excitement is impossible where there is no contest.”
Old-timers talked nostalgically about the last really fought-out Republican convention, in 1884. Some remembered twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt of New York, standing on a chair and yelling for a roll call in his high, harsh voice. They remembered drunken roars for James G. Blaine, glee clubs bellowing the praises of President Arthur, and that softest yet most penetrating of noises, the rustle of “boodle,” as Southern blacks sold and resold their votes.
Now, two decades later, Chicago could have been hosting a temperance chautauqua. No bunting brightened the streets. Sidewalks were bare of button-hawkers and barkers: every fakir with anything to sell had decamped to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Dull clouds scudded over Lake Michigan. The wind felt heavy and wet.
THAT EVENING, Roosevelt dictated a letter to Kermit. “Tomorrow the National Convention meets, and barring a cataclysm I shall be nominated.… How the election will turn out no one can tell.” The possibility, however remote, that he might be beaten caused an access of pride and gratitude for nearly three years of power:
From Panama on down I have been able to accomplish certain things which will be of lasting importance in our history. Incidentally, I don’t think that any family has ever enjoyed the White House more than we have. I was thinking about it just this morning when Mother and I took breakfast on the portico and afterwards walked about the lovely grounds and looked at the stately historic old house. It is a wonderful privilege to have been here and to have been given the chance to do this work, and I should regard myself as having a small and mean mind if in the event of defeat I felt soured at not having had more, instead of being thankful for having had so much.
“AN ENORMOUS PAINTING OF MARK HANNA … HUNG OVER THE SPEAKER’S PLATFORM.”
The Republican National Convention, Chicago, June 1904 (photo credit 21.1)
LONG BEFORE PROCEEDINGS began on Tuesday, word spread that the Presid
ent would monitor every minute of every session, via a special telephone line running direct from his office to the basement of the Coliseum. Delegates began to get uneasy feelings of remote control. A disgusted Pennsylvanian decided not to attend. “The boss has fixed it all up and we might as well go home.”
One thing Roosevelt had neglected to “fix,” however, was the Coliseum’s decor. As a result, it was not his portrait that greeted people entering the hall at noon. An enormous painting of Mark Hanna, seven feet wide and twenty feet tall, hung over the speakers’ platform. Twenty-eight other Hannas looked down somberly from various angles. In further evidence of Old Guard aesthetics, a black-draped chair was “set aside” for Senator Quay, and the dead features of President McKinley appeared on every admission ticket. “In every corner of the hall there is a ghost,” a reporter observed. Even some of the living looked sepulchral when they sat under tobacco-blue sunbeams slanting down from the skylight.
A question buzzed from aisle to aisle: “Where is Roosevelt’s picture?” Sharp eyes eventually noticed a few small steel engravings, spaced around the upper gallery and almost smothered in festoons.
At 12:14, another pallid figure—Postmaster General Payne, clearly not long for the world—approached the rostrum and gaveled the Thirteenth Republican National Convention to order. Elihu Root rose to respectful applause, and began his keynote speech. In the vast space, his husky voice failed to carry. “The responsibility of government rests upon the Republican Party. The complicated machinery through which eighty million people—”
“Louder!” a voice called. “Louder!”
IN WASHINGTON, it was an hour later by the clock, and the President was having lunch. He knew exactly what themes were being sounded in Chicago. Root had promised to trumpet (insofar as quiet Elihu could trumpet anything) the achievements of the last four years, “from an administration rather than from a personal standpoint.” There would be solemn fanfares on the names of McKinley and Hanna, rising scales of economic statistics, a canon on Party and Patriotism, and always the reassuring basso ostinato of Continuity. Root may not be a virtuoso performer, but nobody could match his mastery of political polyphony.
IN TANGIER, it was nearly five hours further on. Late-afternoon sun beat on the seven white warships in Tangier Bay. They made a deceptively peaceful picture. Today, 21 June, was supposed to have seen the release of Mr. Perdicaris and his stepson—or so Consul Gummeré had been led to believe, after the Sultan’s latest yielding to Raisuli’s demands. But the trail down from Tsarradan had remained quiet: Morocco, as Gummeré complained, was “a country of delays.”
Aboard the Brooklyn, he and Admiral Chadwick had decided that the United States could not tolerate any more “double dealing and treachery,” either on the part of Raisuli or the Moroccan government. “We have come to a point when our position has now become undignified and humiliating,” Gummeré cabled Hay. Chadwick joined him in suggesting “an ultimatum immediately for large indemnity for every day’s further delay and that Marines will be landed and customs seized.”
BY NOW, Root’s voice had strengthened, and most delegates were with him. They applauded his depersonalized summary of the Administration’s fiscal, antitrust, agricultural, and foreign policies. They received in silence the news that five battleships, four cruisers, four monitors, and thirty-four torpedo destroyers and torpedo boats had joined the Navy since 1900, while another thirteen battleships and thirteen cruisers were under construction. As Root approached his peroration, the applause grew louder and more frequent. He began to refer delicately to William McKinley’s “successor.” He quoted the honest pledge of “unbroken” continuity given at Buffalo on 14 September 1901, to further cheers. “Our President,” he declared with a sweeping gesture, “has taken the whole people into his confidence.”
“All except the members of the National Committee,” Senator Scott murmured.
Root did not enunciate the words “Theodore Roosevelt” until his final sentence, at 1:18 P.M. There was a gratifying roar, but it died in thirty seconds. At 2:10 P.M., the convention adjourned for the day, and Henry Cabot Lodge’s Committee on Resolutions began to write the party platform. Simultaneously, Consul Gummeré’s cable arrived in Washington.
HAY PONDERED THE cable overnight. More and more, he dreaded an American show of force. European reactions would be negative, and could turn hostile when—as now seemed certain—Mr. Perdicaris was revealed to be a Greek. A report from Athens confirmed that one “Ioannis Perdicaris” had applied for Greek citizenship there, at the start of the American Civil War. Ioannis certainly sounded similar to Ion.
Unable to confront Roosevelt with this news, Hay asked a deputy, Gaillard Hunt, to take the Perdicaris file over to the White House, along with a recommendation that Raisuli and the Sultan be given a final warning. As Commander-in-Chief (not to mention political candidate) Roosevelt must consider the risks.
Hunt came back and said that the President had not been at all pleased with the contents of the file. However, he had authorized Hay’s suggested ultimatum. Rightly or wrongly, Raisuli believed Mr. Perdicaris to be American; he had therefore done deliberate violence to the whole concept of American citizenship. For that he must be held responsible, and the Sultan responsible for him.
ONCE AGAIN IT was afternoon in Morocco as Roosevelt conducted his mid-morning audience, and delegates in the Chicago Coliseum awaited the noon opening gavel.
Hay, drafting his ultimatum, hit upon “a concise impropriety” to gratify the aggressive Gummeré. It nicely balanced the more cautious phraseology that followed:
WE WANT PERDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD. FURTHER THAN THIS WE DESIRE LEAST POSSIBLE COMPLICATIONS WITH MOROCCO OR OTHER POWERS. YOU WILL NOT ARRANGE FOR LANDING MARINES OR SEIZING CUSTOM HOUSE WITHOUT SPECIFIC DIRECTIONS FROM THE DEPARTMENT.
Hay could not resist showing his draft to Edwin M. Hood, the veteran State Department correspondent for the Scripps-McRae news service. “Think I’ll send it,” he said, as one old newspaperman to another.
“Then I will too,” Hood replied. The message went out over government and news wires simultaneously. But by the time it reached Morocco, Gummeré had no need for it. An up-country sheik announced that he would make his village available for the exchange of hostages and ransom on the next morning, 23 June.
HOOD’S DISPATCH REACHED Chicago at about 3:00 P.M., and a copy was delivered to the permanent chairman of the convention, Joseph Cannon. He let it lie on his desk while Henry Cabot Lodge read the Republican Party platform for 1904.
“We declare our constant adherence to the following principles,” Lodge shouted. His voice rang with the earnestness of a politician determined to say as little as possible. He was noncommittal on the tariff, trust control, labor relations, and foreign policy. The future of the Philippines was left vague. Disfranchised Negroes got a few words of sympathy, insurgent Republicans none. There was no call for railroad rate regulation, no acknowledgment of the Iowa Idea, no mention of the power war between Governor LaFollette and Senator Spooner. (The latter’s Old Guard delegation doggedly occupied Wisconsin floor space, courtesy of the Committee on Credentials.)
When Lodge finished, Cannon called for acceptance of the platform. There was a unanimous, if apathetic, chorus of ayes. Cannon, smiling, took up his slip of paper. “With the consent of the Convention, the Chair will direct the Clerk to read a dispatch from Washington … received through the courtesy of the Scripps-McRae Newspaper Association.”
“Bulletin,” the clerk read. “Washington, June 22. Secretary of State Hay has sent instructions to Consul General Samuel R. Gummeré, as follows: ‘We want either Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.’ ”
After two days of procedural torpor, the convention reacted galvanically to Hay’s “concise impropriety.” Delegates jumped on their chairs and shouted with delight. “Roosevelt and Hay know what they are doing,” a Kansan exulted. “Our people like courage. We’ll stand for anything those men do.”
Cannon quickly adjourned the session, content to let enthusiasm build for the nominations.
A FEW MINUTES before eleven o’clock on Thursday, 23 June, Frank S. Black, a former Governor of New York, rose to nominate the President. Immensely tall and craggy, he glared through professional spectacles and shook a boyish thatch of hair. “From every nook and corner of the country,” he orated, “rises but a single choice to fill the most exalted office in the world.” Applause welled up, as if echoing his metaphor. Roosevelt had chosen well. Black—his predecessor in Albany—was the party’s best speaker, more poetic than Spooner, less preachy than Hoar.
After some more flights of populist imagery, Black got down to the personal. He reminded the convention that Roosevelt, for all his fame as a soldier, was by nature a writer and scholar. “A profound student of history, he is today the greatest history maker in the world.” However, “the fate of nations is still decided by their wars.” The peace that scholars craved was probably illusory, certainly temporary:
Events are numberless and mighty, and no man can tell which wire runs around the world. The nation basking today in the quiet of contentment and repose may be still on the deadly circuit and tomorrow writhing in the toils of war. This is the time when great figures must be kept in front. If the pressure is great, the material to resist it must be granite and iron. Whether we wish it or not, America is abroad in this world. Her interests are on every street, her name is on every tongue. Those interests so sacred and stupendous should be trusted only to the care of those whose power, skill and courage have been tested and approved. (Applause) And in the man whom you will choose, the highest sense of every nation in the world beholds a man who typifies as no other living American does, the spirit and purposes of the twentieth century.
Theodore Rex Page 44