The victory over Spain, however much it distressed anti-imperialists in the United States, enhanced American prestige abroad. The President’s unique combination of athletics with statesmanship, together with his literary flair, made his grinning countenance with the buck teeth and the eyeglasses loom large in the European chancelleries. Here was an American politician at home in the world of books and ideas, which meant culture and refinement and status to European statesmen. His flamboyant costumes, the frontier pose, the impudence with which he led members of his “tennis cabinet” and unsuspecting visitors on breakneck hikes through Rock Creek Park, his endless stream of amusing conversation at the dinnertable, his knack for launching pat phrases which became the catchwords of the era, gave a special quality to his personality. As dissimilar Europeans as James Bryce and Kaiser Wilhelm found T.R. irresistibly attractive.
The diplomatic corps respected the professional skill with which he conducted his policy of “walk softly and carry a big stick.” After he had averted possible warfare by inducing the Germans and the British to arbitrate their quarrel over the collection of debts from the Castro who was then dictator of Venezuela, T.R. was admitted to their international club by the world’s potentates.
When they made their moves on the chessboard of power such highbinders as the Kaiser and Czar Nicholas and the imperialists of the Third French Republic could no longer disregard the United States.
Even the somewhat scandalous methods by which T.R. made possible the building of the Panama Canal caused more amusement than protest. The need for an isthmian canal had been dramatized for Americans by the length of time it took the battleship Oregon, plowing at full steam round South America and through the Straits of Magellan, to join the Pacific fleet in 1898. Opinion was about evenly divided on the merits of a canal through Panama and a canal through Nicaragua. Interested parties buzzed like scavenger flies about both projects.
For a century the isthmus had been the stamping ground for freebooters and adventurers. Ever since the failure of the French company its debentures had been the playthings of speculators and bluesky operators on the Paris Bourse. T.R. plunged in where other statesmen had feared to tread. To his death he considered the canal his greatest achievement.
Through John Hay he secured from the British a revision of the fiftyyearold Clayton-Bulwer treaty according to which any such canal was to have been built jointly. Having made the decision to continue the French project in Panama, he induced Congress to put up forty million dollars to pay off the investors in the old company. He looked on with amused approval when Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, de Lesseps’ chief aide, — who’d spent his life promoting the Panama route and was thick with various adventurers on the isthmus—, and a Mr. Nelson Cromwell of New York, representing a group of densely anonymous American investors, took their plot from an O. Henry short story, and backed a cast of comic opera characters in the establishment of an independent Republic of Panama.
The revolution was carried out in a rain of gold. When the Colombian authorities sent troops to prevent the secession of the freedom mad Panamanians, the colonel in charge received a handsome retainer. A couple of American warships were ordered to stand by to see that nobody played it rough. The United States Government thoughtfully paid for the transport of the pacified colonel’s troops back to Cartagena on one of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company’s liners. A Colombian general and an admiral each received whopping sums. Even the enlisted men got fifty dollars a head.
Amid the popular rejoicings that resulted from the distribution of this flood of baksheesh, the republic was proclaimed in November of 1903. An American officer was so indiscreet as to be seen hoisting the new Panamanian flag up a flagpole. When one of the sudden tropical downpours typical of the climate drove the demonstrators indoors, the founders of the new republic expressed their patriotic enthusiasm by pouring bottle after bottle of champagne over the head of defecting Colombian General Huertas, who now became commander of the Panamanian Army. Next day Monsieur Bunau-Varilla, with a cable appointing him Minister of the Republic of Panama in his pocket, called on John Hay. A few days later Washington recognized Panama as independent and sovereign.
“The haste with which the government at Washington acted was regrettable,” wrote one student of diplomatic protocol from the serenity of the Cosmos Club twenty years later. “President Roosevelt apparently could not be restrained.”
“If I had followed traditional, conservative methods I should have submitted a dignified state paper of probably two hundred pages to the Congress and the debate would have been going on yet,” T.R. blurted out to a California audience, “but I took the Canal Zone and let Congress debate, and while the debate goes on the canal does also.”
T.R. was nothing of a pacifist, but he worked hard to stave off wars. In his first administration he took up the cause of the arbitration treaties which had received such a setback when the Senate failed to ratify the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty under McKinley. He proved his good faith by submitting to The Hague court a complicated dispute with Mexico over the disposition of the funds of the ancient California missions.
Arbitration won a victory in Europe with the signature of the treaty between Britain and France in 1903. The following year President Roosevelt through his State Department suggested a fresh meeting of the powers at The Hague.
Taking the Anglo-French agreement as a model he signed arbitration treaties with France, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland, and was promoting negotiations with Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Japan and a number of other countries when the Senate dropped a monkeywrench in the works by insisting that no arbitration should go through without specific senatorial approval in each case.
“I think that this amendment makes the treaties shams,” T.R. wrote his good friend Senator Lodge, the stickler for senatorial privilege who had proposed the amendment, “and my present impression is that we had better abandon the whole business rather than give the impression of trickiness and insincerity which would be produced by solemnly promulgating a sham.”
The outbreak of war in the Far East made it necessary to postpone the second Hague conference to a more propitious time.
Russia and Japan had been bickering over which of them should exploit Manchuria and bring the blessings of civilization to what was then called the hermit kingdom of Korea. When negotiations broke down in the winter of 1904 Japanese Admiral Togo made an unannounced attack on the Russian ships anchored at Port Arthur.
From then on the Japanese held the offensive. They crossed the Yalu River in the face of entrenched Russian positions. They outfought the Russians on land and sea, and knocked out the eastern section of their navy.
Early in the following year, the Russian Baltic fleet, which had distinguished itself by mistaking some British trawlers off Dogger Bank for enemy torpedoboats, and letting fly a salvo that killed a number of peaceful fishermen and added to the unpopularity of the czarist government among the Western nations, arrived in Japanese waters. Togo’s crack squadrons promptly swept the Baltic fleet off the map.
The Russians were driven back into Siberia but the war cost the Japanese lives and money that they could ill afford. Both sides were ready to negotiate a peace.
President Roosevelt, who was already dabbling in mediation between clashing European imperialisms in North Africa, let it be known to the German ambassador that he would favor an arrangement that would give Korea to Japan, and neutralize Manchuria (under German management) in return for a German engagement to respect the “open door” policy in China and not to meddle in the Philippines or other islands in the Pacific, which since the annexation of Hawaii had become necessarily an American sphere.