Theodore Rex (49 page)

ROOSEVELT WORKED OFF
his political frustrations in typical physical fashion. He chopped down trees on Cathedral Heights, gunned his big horse Bleistein daily through Rock Creek Park, and, when ice made riding dangerous, hiked for miles in hobnailed boots, crashing over saplings like a bear. His singlesticks duels with Leonard Wood continued: after one session he was so whacked about the right arm that he had to greet his evening guests left-handed.

ALONG EMBASSY ROW
, anticipation of the arrival of new ambassadors from Germany and France mounted. Jusserand was an unknown quantity, but Baron von Sternburg’s previous postings to Washington, not to mention his closeness to the President, allowed for a good deal of gossip—not all of it friendly. “
Il est plus anglais qu’un anglais
,” sneered the Russian envoy, Count de Cassini, “
et plus américain qu’un américain.”
Insofar as Cassini himself spoke French at home, and was excessively proud of his Italian surname, this was a qualified condemnation.

“
I see you are to have Specky again,” Cecil Spring Rice wrote enviously from St. Petersburg. “What fun.” With the Venezuela arbitration talks not yet under way, Roosevelt remained guarded. Time enough for “fun” when the Kaiser withdrew his warships, which were ostensibly guarding against any breakdown in the peace process. “He thinks he has me because he is sending an intimate friend of mine to Washington. I know what I mean to do.… The new Ambassador will not influence me any more than Herr von Holleben could.”

This confidence, shared with the French
chargé d’affaires
, Pierre de Margérie, let the diplomatic corps know that Roosevelt had not been merely modest in declining to arbitrate Allied claims against Venezuela. He wanted to use the current negotiatory situation to make a powerful, one-sided point. Since Germany and Britain would not deal directly with their debtor, President Castro had asked Herbert Bowen, the United States Minister in Caracas, to represent him at the talks. This awkward choice played right into American hands.

“
Mr. Bowen is a capable man, but his manner is not always, shall we say, diplomatic,” the President said to de Margérie. Rambling on half ruminatively, he enunciated for the first time the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine:

De Margérie speculated that it might have been a delusion to the contrary that caused President Castro to be so cavalier about credit in the first place. “
That is precisely what I want no more of,” Roosevelt snapped. If Venezuela refused to abide by the arbitration agreement, he would enforce it himself. “I have the means.”

ON 22 JANUARY
, Roosevelt held another conference, this time with Senators Hanna, Spooner, and Shelby M. Cullom, chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Relations. They discussed the deadlocked Panama Canal Treaty. Bogotá’s latest instructions to Dr. Herrán proposed an annual rent that was at least a half-million dollars more than the United States was prepared to pay for a sea-to-sea strip of jungle six miles wide. Secretary Hay had made a New Year’s concession, offering to begin rental payments within nine years rather than fourteen, but this was still not satisfactory to Herrán. After six weeks of argument, negotiations had broken off, and both men were bedridden with frustration.

Under the Spooner Amendment—now enshrined in law—Roosevelt was required to revert to the Nicaragua alternative in the event of failure to negotiate a satisfactory agreement with Colombia. His advisers, Panama partisans all, dreaded such a reversal. Recent events in the Caribbean, they said, indicated that trouble with some major foreign power over the Monroe Doctrine was “inevitable.” Prompt construction of a Panama canal was “an absolute vital necessity for the United States.”

Roosevelt agreed to offer Bogotá a final concession, more than doubling the original rental figure proposed. The next morning, 22 January, Hay wrote to Herrán:

Herrán weighed this note for a few hours only. Its finality was unmistakable. Unbeknown to Hay, Herrán had secret instructions to sign the moment he felt “
everything might be lost by delay.” That moment had now come. According to his calculations, Colombia actually had everything to gain. Indeed, by signing now, she would make a profit of $7.25 million on the original protocol. The loss of a few extra rental millions was nothing compared to the catastrophe of losing all. Colombia might have her canal, and Panama too, forever.

Late in the afternoon, Herrán went to Hay’s house.

NEWS THAT THE
Panama Canal Treaty had been signed reached the White House in time to cheer Roosevelt at another disastrous reception. His problem this evening was not with crowd handling, but with the color of certain
guests.
Four or five Negroes strolled in to shake his hand. They were federal officeholders, so their attendance at an official, stand-up event was not unusual. This time, however, they made so bold as to bring their wives. Southern Congressmen hurried for the exits, swearing never to visit the White House again. No black women, as far as anybody could remember, had ever been entertained at a private function at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Yet another racial scandal erupted in Dixie.

“
’Pears lak us niggers is on top now, Marse Roberts,” an old field hand teased his boss in Georgia.

“How’s that?”

“H’ain’t we got a nigger for President?”

White reactionaries believed the same, but failed to find it funny. James K. Vardaman, running for Governor of Mississippi, went to the limits of public invective. Theodore Roosevelt was nothing but a “little, mean, coon-flavored miscegenationist,” while the White House had become “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”

This was not the kind of publicity Roosevelt needed, coinciding as it did with Senate Commerce Committee hearings on his nomination of Dr. Crum and floor debate on his closing of the Indianola post office.

He was lucky enough to be defended in the latter case by the fastest mind on Capitol Hill. John Spooner addressed the Senate on 24 January, in an atmosphere more rife with sectionalism than at any time since the “bloody shirt” demagoguery of his youth. Speaking with his usual easy rapidity, he affirmed the President’s goodwill toward all law-abiding Southerners. But the principle at stake in Indianola was that for which the Union Army had fought: an unconscionable minority must not be allowed to subvert the sovereignty of the state. Mrs. Cox had been “asked” to resign, after years of exemplary service:

Senator McLaurin rose to defend the right of a community to rid itself of
personae non gratae
. Mrs. Cox must submit to the will of her neighbors; that was the way of the South. Why, he himself had known persons who were asked to leave town in twenty-four hours.

“I have no doubt the Senator has,” Spooner said.

Goaded by chuckles, McLaurin launched into a rambling correlation of
race domination and rape. White Southerners would never forsake their own moral standards. “It will take a hundred thousand bayonets to restrain them if the virtue of their women is assaulted.”

Spooner affected polite puzzlement. “Mrs. Cox had not made any improper advances to any woman in Indianola, had she?”

McLaurin ranted on for another forty minutes, but the debate was over.

ON 25 JANUARY
, Dr. Herrán received new and belated instructions not to sign the Panama Canal Treaty.
He cabled home that he had already exercised his previous authority to do so. Now it was up to the Colombian and United States Senates to ratify or reject the agreement.

“
Gladly shall I gather up all the documents relating to that dreadful canal,” he told a friend, “and put them out of sight.”

IN THE LAST DAYS
of January, the press began to notice unusual overtime activity in naval yards and stations. Roosevelt, alarmed by new signs of German truculence,
had secretly directed that the Caribbean situation, while still under control, “was that which usually precedes war, and all possible preparations were to be made.”