The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [410]
VI
It wasn’t just the Far West that Roosevelt was worried about. An ugly international incident had occurred in the Alaska Territory, involving Japanese seal hunters wielding clubs, knives, and guns in the Pribilof Islands. On July 16 a small fleet of Japanese vessels attacked the Alaskan seal rookery at Saint Paul Island. Unbeknownst to the Japanese, the Roosevelt administration maintained a small naval–biological research facility on this island, which is in the Bering Sea. The American sailors there were fond of the seals, which had originally been saved by President Grant and were celebrated by Rudyard Kipling in The Jungle Book, first published in 1894. A few of the sailors intervened to stop the Japanese poaching raid, and a melee occurred. Sickened because the Japanese had clubbed baby seals and then skinned them alive, the Americans killed five of the raiders, wounded two others, and apprehended another twelve. An international brouhaha erupted over the Japanese butchery and the American’s heavy-handedness. The Japanese Times, for example, said that although seal poaching was a misdemeanor, the U.S. Navy had responded with murder. In contrast, the San Francisco press published gruesome details of the hunt, supported the U.S. Navy, and said that the merciless slashing and beating of American seals in American waters was outrageous.44
One side effect of the San Francisco earthquake was a thoughtless increase in anti-Japanese prejudice on the Pacific coast. When people are under duress, they may look for a scapegoat: in San Francisco the recent Japanese immigrants provided one. The Russo-Japanese War had left the United States and Japan as the preeminent powers in the Pacific basin. The negotiated Portsmouth Treaty also bestowed on Japan strategic, political, and economic interests in Manchuria, and these threatened to undermine America’s open-door policy as formulated by Hay. Roosevelt greatly respected Japan but feared its rise to power. With nativist emotions running high in San Francisco, an anti-Japanese backlash occurred, manifested in school segregation, riots, and a spate of anti-Japanese legislation in Sacramento. In San Francisco between May 6 and November 5, 1906, for example, there were more than 290 cases of assault, most perpetrated against Japanese immigrants. Two eminent seismologists from Tokyo were stoned for investigating the San Andreas Fault; some San Franciscans didn’t want foreigners to tell them not to live on a fault. These racist attacks and stonings angered the Japanese government, particularly because it had given $246,000 to San Francisco for relief after the earthquake. Therefore, a deep distrust already existed between Tokyo and Washington, D.C. when the “Alaskan seal incident” occurred.
The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor quickly submitted a report confirming that many of the seals had indeed been skinned alive. Aleuts who lived on the island were unbiased eyewitnesses. Even more disturbing were the photographs taken of seals half-skinned, hobbling about maimed and apparently bleating in pain. Many bigots in California used the incident as a pretext for sweeping condemnations of the Japanese character. Roosevelt’s own reaction was beyond words. Poaching always set him off like a bomb, and the poaching in this case made him apoplectic. Realizing that the Aleutian Islands were the remotest land in North America, and that policing the 1,200-mile archipelago was an impossible task, Roosevelt nevertheless was proud of the U.S. Navy for attacking these and other raiders. Tokyo wanted the Roosevelt administration to try the sailors for the murder of the five Japanese men. Japanese lawyers, as noted above, argued that according to the Alaskan criminal code, seal poaching was not a felony but a misdemeanor, and that committing murder to stop a misdemeanor was not justifiable in a republic based on democratic principles.
Determined to flummox Roosevelt, the bitter Japanese government developed a legal argument and recommended