The Imperial Cruise

by James Bradley

  Over the next several years it became increasingly clear that Japan’s behavior was more aggressive than the Chinese had expected. The Chinese government—still believing it called the shots in Korea—acted quickly to minimize Japan’s influence. China had a long tradition of “using barbarians against barbarians” in its international affairs and now encouraged Korea to sign treaties with other countries. In 1880, the Chinese submitted a written report to King Gojong of Korea entitled “A Policy for Korea.” The report proclaimed Korea’s biggest national security threats to be the Japanese from the west and the Russians from the east. China recommended that Little Brother Korea modernize internally and choose America as the first White Western country with whom to make a treaty because “the United States [was] a powerful industrial and anti-imperialist power, was a moral state, founded upon Christianity, which usually supports weaker nations against strong oppressors.”42 Korea beheld the United States as a country that stood for liberty, and unlike Russia, it was far distant and had shown no inclination to encroach upon Asia.

  Believing the United States had only benevolent motives, in 1882 thirty-year-old King Gojong happily accepted the U.S.-Korea Treaty, in which the first article declared that there “shall be perpetual peace and friendship” between Korea and the United States. If a third power acted unjustly or oppressively with either country, the United States and Korea promised to exert their “good offices, on being informed of the case, to bring about an amicable arrangement, thus showing their friendly feelings.”43

  Koreans knew as little about White Western legal concepts as the Americans knew about Confucian ideology. Korean leaders interpreted the “good offices” clause to mean that the United States would be Korea’s new “Elder Brother,” protecting Korea from Western predators. To them, the good offices clause was much more than a legal phrase; it meant that Elder Brother America had a moral commitment to their country. Thus, King Gojong thought his country’s independence was assured when the first U.S. minister to Korea—Lucius Foote—arrived in Seoul in 1883. In their first meeting, Foote told Gojong that the United States was interested in “the comfort and happiness” of the Korean people and that “in this progressive age” there was a moral power “more potent than standing armies.”44

  IN 1883, HORACE ALLEN graduated from Miami Medical School in Cincinnati, Ohio. A good Presbyterian boy, Allen asked the Board of Foreign Missions to send him overseas to proselyte for Christ. In the summer of 1884, he went to Seoul as the chief physician to the United States legation to the Empire of Korea.

  King (later Emperor) Gojong and his son Sunjong in 1890. King Gojong said, “We have the promise of America; she will be our friend whatever happens.” Theodore Roosevelt said, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.”

  On September 20, 1884, a royal prince—Min Yong Ik—was stabbed in an assassination attempt. Allen used Western medical techniques unknown in Seoul to save Prince Min’s life. King Gojong was impressed and gratefully put Allen on the royal payroll. Allen became the embodiment of Elder Brother America: a benevolent White Christian come to help Younger Brother. Upon Allen’s advice, Gojong turned his back on Korea’s traditional policy of anti-Christianity and allowed Allen to bring American missionaries to build Korean hospitals, schools, and churches and Yankee businessmen to construct Korea’s first electric works, waterworks, and trolley and railway systems.

  Gojong did not travel the world; he stayed in Seoul, surrounded by friendly American advisers, who assured him that Elder Brother America was on his side. As a result, he did not know what Americans said about him behind his back. U.S. magazines such as Outlook and North American Review contrasted the Japanese “with what they routinely described as the degenerate Koreans.”45 Koreans, the elite chattering classes declared, were one of the races on the decline, like their Mongolian cousin, the American Indian. And since so many tribes had fallen as the Aryan westered, what was one more?

  To their chagrin, the Japanese had quickly lost their imagined monopoly over Korea, and the reassertion of Chinese influence in Korea raised tensions between China and Japan. In a series of political proxy wars, Japan encouraged progressive politicians in Seoul who wished to reform along Japanese lines while China supported conservative politicians who wanted to maintain the Confucian status quo. The Korean progressives and conservatives battled sporadically until finally Japan declared war on China on August 1, 1894.

  America supported the Honorary Aryans. The New York Times wrote, “The war is often called a conflict between Eastern and Western civilization. It would be more accurate to call it a conflict between civilization and barbarism.”46 The New York Tribune declared, “The present war may decide many things, including whether or not Korea is henceforth to exist as an independent nation. But one of its most important results will be to decide this question, which was its own cause, whether Korea is to march forward or to be carried forward with Japan on the high road of civilization or whether she is to remain with China in the stagnant slough of semi-barbarism.”47 Caustic, critical newspaper articles about uncivilized China and wood-block prints depicting the Chinese as dim-witted Asians were suddenly the rage in Japan. Battlefield depictions featured tall, handsome, Western-looking Japanese soldiers in heroic poses, while the Chinese had jutting cheekbones and slanted eyes and wore pigtails.

  The world expected China to make short work of the Eastern dwarfs, but Japan stung its larger rival with the power of its Westernized military, and China quickly sued for peace. The jubilant Japanese forwarded their terms to Beijing: a juicy cash indemnity and the cession of Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, an enormously valuable and strategic piece of real estate that jutted into the China Seas and controlled access to both Beijing and Manchuria.

  In the resulting Treaty of Shimonoseki, China was forced to cede both territories, pay a large indemnity, accept that Korea was truly independent, and accord the Japanese the same unequal diplomatic and commercial privileges enjoyed by White Christians in China. (The British had long been the dominant Western power in China, but after 1875 others had vied for spheres of influence and predatory trade privileges. The Western nations with special privileges in China included Great Britain, France, Russia, the United States, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Belgium, and Italy.)

  To the jubilant Japanese men in the street, the resounding triumph over China swept away the humiliation of Perry’s Black Ships and proved Japanese greatness. The political commentator Tokutomi Soho¯ boasted that with the triumph over China, the West would now recognize that “civilization is not a monopoly of the white man.”48 An American newspaper observed:

  Ever since the Chicago Exposition [of 1892–1893] foreigners have gradually acquired some knowledge of Japanese culture, but it was limited to the fact that Japan produces beautiful pottery, tea and silk. Since the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War last year, however, an attitude of respect for Japan may be felt everywhere, and there is talk of nothing but Japan this and Japan that…. Most amusing is the craze for Japanese women’s clothes. Many American women wear them to parties, although they are most unbecoming, and the praise they lavish on the Japanese victories sounds exactly as if they were boasting about their own country.49

  Chapter 7

  PLAYING ROOSEVELT’S GAME

  “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”1

  —PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT AFTER THE SURPRISE JAPANESE ATTACK ON RUSSIAN FORCES ON FEBRUARY 8, 1904

  Via the bloody art of conquest, Japan had become the first and only non-White, non-Christian member of the imperial power club. But for the White Christians, that was a problem, and Japan’s elevation was soon proved temporary.

  The Chinese—employing their “barbarian vs. barbarian” strategy—had shared Japan’s demands with the ministers of Russia, France, and Germany, three Johnny-come-lately imperialists who thirsted for a larger slice of the Chinese melon. China’s bet was that the greed of these White
Christians would somehow restrain the Eastern dwarfs. On April 23, 1895, the ministers of Russia, France, and Germany called on the Japanese Foreign Ministry to announce that they opposed Japan’s ownership of the Liaodong Peninsula. The Russian note read:

  The Government of His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russians, in examining the conditions of peace which Japan has imposed on China, finds that the possession of the peninsula of Liaodong, claimed by Japan, would be a constant menace to the capital of China, would at the same time render illusory the independence of Korea, and would henceforth be a perpetual obstacle to the permanent peace of the Far East. Consequently the Government of His Majesty the Emperor would give a new proof of their sincere friendliness for the Government of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan by advising them to renounce the definitive possession of the peninsula of Liaodong.2

  Russia had long coveted the warm water harbor city of Port Arthur, located on the southern tip of the Liaodong peninsula. A Russian official warned that if the Japanese took control of the region, “Russia would need hundreds of thousands of troops and a considerable increase of her fleet for defense of her possessions and the Siberian Railway.”3

  Unable to militarily resist the three European nations, Japan yielded the Liaodong peninsula. The Japanese founding fathers—now middle-aged men—could hardly believe it. Japan had played the White Christian game fair and square—it had picked a fight with an uncivilized country, proven its battlefield superiority, and received concessions that were her due. And now here was this “triple intervention.”

  The Japanese public believed that the triple intervention was visited upon Japan because of the color of their skin. Japanese newspapers coined the term “Shame of Liaodong.” Shame soon gave way to fury when Russia cynically grabbed the Liaodong peninsula for herself. None of the other powers complained when a White Christian country took the very same territory recently denied Japan.

  Theodore Roosevelt summed up his approach to foreign relations with the West African proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt first spoke of the “Big Stick” on September 2, 1901, at the Minnesota State Fair. The burning foreign policy issue of the day was whether to continue the brutal American war in the Philippines. For decades, Roosevelt had defended race cleansing because of the salutary result: American civilization had followed the sun. Now as vice president, he rose to declare that an American Big Stick would now civilize the world.

  “We are a nation of pioneers,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “Our history has been one of expansion [which] is not a matter of regret, but of pride…. We were right in wresting from barbarism and adding to civilization the territory out of which we have made these beautiful states. Barbarism has… no place in a civilized world. It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself.” Roosevelt declared that the original American pioneers who conquered the Indians had exhibited “the essential manliness of the American character” and called American military invasions of foreign countries “the higher duty of promoting the civilization of mankind.” He called for expansion beyond America’s shores: “You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs…. Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.”4

  * * *

  WHEN HE BECAME PRESIDENT, Roosevelt embraced the Monroe Doctrine as justification to wield the Big Stick, dispatching the U.S. Navy to quell a “revolution” in Colombia, an action that allowed him to tear Panama away from that country. Then he extracted canal rights from Panama “in perpetuity.” Roosevelt later admitted that he “took the Canal and let Congress debate.”5 He boasted that if “any South American country misbehaves,” it should be “spanked,”6 and once wrote, “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth.”7 Big Stick, indeed.

  Teddy’s most prominent enunciation of his Big Stick philosophy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe’s goal had essentially been defensive; now Roosevelt took the offense, asserting that the U.S. military was an “international police”8 and that he had the right to order invasions to enforce American foreign policy. The world could trust such a policy, he argued, because the goal of U.S. foreign policy was “the peace of justice.”9 Roosevelt posed as reluctant to deploy his international police force but warned barbarian countries that if they “violated the rights of the United States,” or if he observed “a general loosing of the ties of civilized society,” the United States could exercise its “international police power.”10 Roosevelt informed Congress that American police powers extended to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, as well as to North Asia (Korea and Manchuria) and to enforcing the Open Door policy in China.

  Roosevelt believed he could advance U.S. interests in North Asia through his own sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations.11 To Teddy, North Asia was a waste space that would eventually be civilized by either the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav, the two main branches of the Aryan race. The follow-the-sun crowd saw the Slav, though of Aryan descent, as inferior to the Anglo-Saxon. Declared Professor Franklin Giddings of Columbia University, “The great question of the twentieth century is whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilization to the world.”12

  By the time Roosevelt became president, China—a nation of four hundred million people—was a shrunken country squeezed between the Anglo-Saxon and Slav empires.

  Roosevelt, who had grown up during the peak anti-Chinese years in American history, referred to Chinese people as “Chinks.” He believed that the Chinese had lost the barbarian values and therefore China was the Darwinian prey of virile White Christians. Chinese men were viewed as particularly ludicrous—they tied their hair in sissy pigtails and wore dresses. Roosevelt believed that China’s future would be determined by outside countries that were now slicing the Chinese melon.

  Anglo-Saxon ascendancy in North Asia had traditionally been guaranteed by the British navy, but the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had allowed Russia to flood Manchuria with troops. Meanwhile, Anglo-Saxon armies were far away in the Philippines and India. To counter the Slav’s land power, the Anglo-Saxons would enlist the land armies of the Honorary Aryans.

  Roosevelt loathed the Slav: “No human beings,” he declared, “black, yellow, or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant—in short, as untrustworthy in every way—as the Russians.”13 Teddy’s sun-following friend, Senator Albert Beveridge, traveled to Manchuria via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Roughly the size of France and Germany combined, the region was rich with timber, minerals, and fertile soil. In a subsequent article in the Saturday Evening Post, Beveridge presented Manchuria as the American Aryan’s next Wild West—if only the Slav could be pushed out of the way. Beveridge recalled that a Russian officer had gloated, “You may be stronger now, richer now, than we are—but we shall be stronger tomorrow than you…. The future abides with the Slav!”14 Such comments played right into the fears of Roosevelt and his allies. “There is but one agency which might dislodge the Russians from Manchuria,” Beveridge wrote, “the sword-like bayonets of the soldiers of Japan, the warships of Japan, the siege guns of Japan, the embattled frenzy of a nation stirred to its profoundest depths by the conviction that the Czar had deprived the Mikado of the greatest victory and the richest prize in all the history of the Island Empire.”15 The triple intervention had dashed Japan’s expansionary hopes; now the United States would revive them.

  China and Foreign Territories

  In Roosevelt’s time, China was being squeezed by predatory countries that were “slicing the Chinese melon.”

  The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)

  Japanese leaders feared Russian control of Manchuria. If Russia moved into Korea, Japanese expansion into Asia would be blocked and Russia would dominate China and North Asia.

&nbs
p; As early as 1900, Vice President Roosevelt had written to a friend: “I should like to see Japan have Korea. She will be a check upon Russia, and she deserves it for what she has done.”16 The American motivation in North Asia was economic, but the Japanese focus was strategic: if the Russians expanded from Manchuria to Korea, Japan would be effectively surrounded. So American and Japanese interests meshed in opposition to the Slav. To Roosevelt, the Japanese were the champions of Anglo-Saxon civilization in North Asia and an antidote to the degraded “Chinks” and the slovenly Slavs. Roosevelt was convinced—courtesy of the founding fathers’ “Leave Asia” strategy—that the Japanese were different from other Asians, that they were “a wonderful and civilized people… entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.” Roosevelt dismissed fear of a Yellow Peril* by likening the Japanese to the Teuton of two thousand years earlier when “the white-skinned, blue-eyed… barbarian of the North” was a “White Terror” to the Greeks and Romans.17 The Teuton rose to become civilized, just like the Japanese were doing now. Early in his administration, the president practiced jujitsu grips used by the Japanese army, gaining insight into their barbarian virtues. Teddy considered himself to be on the cutting edge, witnessing a race phenomenon: the rise of the Japanese from barbaric to civilized. They could never be Aryan, but they could serve as a respectable partner, at least for now.