Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [64]
Only afterward, when it was all over, did the State Department inform Gummere how keen indeed was Perdicaris’ cause for appreciation. “Overwhelmed with amazement” and highly indignant, Gummere extracted from Perdicaris a full, written confession of his forty-year-old secret. He admitted that he had never in ensuing years taken steps to resume American citizenship because, as he ingenuously explained, having been born an American, he disliked the idea of having to become naturalized, and so “I continued to consider myself an American citizen.” Since Perdicaris perfectly understood that the American government was in no position to take action against him, his letter made no great pretension of remorse.
Perdicaris retired to England for his remaining years. Raisuli duly became governor of the Tangier districts in place of the false-hearted Bashaw. The French, in view of recent disorders, acquired the right to police Morocco (provoking the Kaiser’s notorious descent upon Tangier). The Sultan, weakened and humiliated by Raisuli’s triumph, was shortly dethroned by a brother. Gurnmere was officially congratulated and subsequently appointed minister to Morocco and American delegate to the Algeciras Conference. Sir Arthur Nicolson took “a long leave of absence,” the Wazan brothers received handsomely decorated Winchester rifles with suitable inscriptions from Mr. Roosevelt, Hay received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, and Roosevelt was elected in November by the largest popular majority ever given to a presidential candidate.
“As to Paregoric or is it Pericarditis,” wrote Hay to Assistant Secretary Adee on September 3, “it is a bad business. We must keep it excessively confidential for the present.” They succeeded. Officials in the know held their breath during the campaign, but no hint leaked out either then or during the remaining year of Hay’s lifetime or during Roosevelt’s lifetime. As a result of the episode, Roosevelt’s administration proposed a new citizenship law which was introduced in Congress in 1905 and enacted in 1907, but the name of the errant gentleman who inspired it was never mentioned during the debates. The truth about Perdicaris remained unknown to the public until 1933, when Tyler Dennett gave it away—in one paragraph in his biography of John Hay.
American Heritage, August 1959.
The Final Solution
Review of Justice in Jerusalem by Gideon Hausner
Not again! Are we never to have done with it? Never be allowed to forget? Once more those six million dead? We have had the pictures of the naked emaciated corpses, the accounts of concentration-camp survivors, the Nuremberg testimony, the Warsaw Ghetto, the genocide debates, the filmed documentaries, the Eichmann trial and its reverberating controversies. Must we now go over it all again? Faced with this vast and terrifying, yet noble book by Gideon Hausner, former Attorney General of Israel and prosecutor of the Eichmann trial, the answer is an inescapable “Yes.”
Hausner has compiled the record not only of the trial and its protagonist but of the total German program for the extermination of the Jews, plus a third record in Chapter 12 dealing with what the Powers did not do. Like the unwilling Wedding Guest, we must listen whether we want to or not, for Mr. Hausner’s book has to do not simply with Germans and Jews, with war crimes and unimaginable atrocities but, like the tale of the Ancient Mariner, fundamentally with the human soul. We must listen because what we are confronting here is the soul of man in the twentieth century.
The “Terrible Twentieth,” it was called by Winston Churchill. Until it opened, the idea of progress had been the most firmly held conviction of the nineteenth century. Man believed himself both improvable and improving. Then, twice in twenty-five years, or the space of one generation, came the Gadarene plunge into world war, accompanied the second time by the Germans’ actual physical killing—pursued with fanatic zeal for more than five years amidst the simultaneous demands of foreign war—of six million people in