Theodore Rex (61 page)

“WHAT HE GAVE HE GAVE WITHOUT STINT.”
The President and his family, summer 1903
(photo credit 17.1)

Kermit, thirteen, was a grave, fine-eyed, clumsy adolescent, whom Edith adored. Roosevelt was aware of a solitariness and bookishness not unlike his own in youth. But Kermit also had a yielding quality: if not exactly soft (“He seems to hold his own well with boys”), he was pliable and easy to bruise.

Ethel, nearly twelve, was already the family
hausfrau
—a heavy-legged, blunt-featured girl who bossed the servants and took no nonsense from horses. Roosevelt thought her “gloomy,” but she was in reality shy, intimidated both by his power and by her half-sister’s glamour.

The two smallest boys, aged nine and five, were still too much in a state of perpetual motion, on banisters, bicycles, ponies, stilts, or swaying trees, to register on anyone with precise definition. Out of the noisy scurry that was Archie there poked occasionally a fierce, hawklike face, and sharp bony extremities
much bitten by Josiah the badger. When the dust clouds around Quentin thinned, a miniature Theodore Roosevelt was revealed, dome-headed and wheezily garrulous, with mild, rather abstracted blue eyes.

“
WASHINGTON IS NOW
quite deserted,” Speck von Sternburg noted at the end of June, “and the men who are pushing the world seem to be taking a short and well-deserved nap.” One of the pushiest, however, remained in town long enough to disturb the rest of both President and Secretary of State. “The Russian Government,” Count Cassini announced on 1 July, “most positively and absolutely denies the reports that it has offered any official explanations to the American Government … regarding the Kishinev incident.”

Roosevelt was mystified. No explanation had been demanded. He and Hay had decided, on second thought, to allow the B’nai B’rith leaders to proceed with their petition, on the understanding that it was nongovernmental, and almost certainly a waste of ink. Cassini confirmed the latter point: “The Russian Government has categorically refused to receive any petitions, communications, or representations from any power regarding Russian internal affairs.”

Behind this statement Roosevelt sensed shame over the pogrom, as well as fear of publicity that might further hurt Russian prestige—already damaged by the occupation of Manchuria. He saw how he might exploit the Tsar’s embarrassment to his own advantage, winning the gratitude both of Jews and of American exporters hungry for Far Eastern trade.
A peremptory telegram went forth from Oyster Bay to Acting Secretary of State Loomis, ordering him “in the absence of Secretary Hay” to respond publicly to Cassini’s statement. He must express “the deep sympathy felt not only by the Administration, but by all the American people for the unfortunate Jews who have been the victims of the recent appalling massacres and outrages.” Loomis was further authorized to quote “another official” as saying, in tones recognizably Rooseveltian, that “it seemed somewhat strange, to say the least,” for the Russian government to make such a statement at such a time, “when by methods which are certainly the reverse of friendly to the United States, it has sought to make China join in breaking the plighted faith of all the powers as to the open door in Manchuria.”

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, bey
ond 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.