Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [107]
Part of him welcomed the idea of German capital investment in Latin America, on the ground that countries such as Venezuela would benefit from development by a superior civilization. Another part of him agreed with Taylor that Germany wanted more than dividends in the New World. There was an ominous sentence in her proposal to cosponsor the blockade: “We would consider the temporary occupation on our part of different Venezuelan harbor places and the levying of duties in those places.”
The adjective temporary reminded him that in 1898 Kaiser Wilhelm II had “temporarily” acquired Kiauchow, China, on a lease that had somehow lengthened to ninety-nine years. Germany’s well-known shortage of Lebensraum—in Spring Rice’s phrase, its “curbed feeling”—translated into an explosive need for new horizons. Burgeoning yet hemmed in, the Reich had to feed a million new mouths a year, and market a gross national product that was doubling every decade. Its army was already the most formidable in the world; now it was building a huge new navy. This combination of social, economic, and strategic aggrandizement, to a President who had recently reread Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome, portended the rise of a new, militaristic imperium in Europe, just as the sun was beginning to set on British South Africa.
What better place to establish a collection house today, a colony tomorrow, than lush, crippled Venezuela? Spring Rice and von Sternburg had given Roosevelt, over the years, a shrewd idea of the Weltpolitik of Germany’s militarist ruling class. Expansionists such as Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow regarded the Monroe Doctrine as an insult, at best a hollow threat. Alfred von Tirpitz, Secretary of State for Naval Affairs, made no secret of his desire to establish naval bases in Brazil (where three hundred thousand Germans lived already), and in the Dutch Caribbean islands.
Germany, therefore, stood isolated in Roosevelt’s sights as he braced himself for the shock of foreign aggression in South America. He could not guess that at even deeper levels of secrecy, Wilhelmstrasse strategists were working on a plan for the possible invasion of the United States. The plan called for Tirpitz to dispatch his fleet to the Azores at the first signal of transatlantic hostilities. From that point, the fleet would steam south and take “Puerteriko,” then launch surprise attacks along the American seaboard. A likely landing place was Gardiners Bay, on Long Island—which meant that when German troops advanced on New York City, they would march right past Roosevelt’s house.
THE PRESIDENT, lacking precise intelligence, had to rely on intuition as the Venezuelan crisis developed. Fortunately, that intuition, in situations concerning the Monroe Doctrine, was acute. His animal Americanism—a buffalo nervously sniffing the prairie wind—sensed the circlings of a distant predator. As long as Tirpitz held off (there had been no formal blockade announcement yet), he could technically state that the diplomatic horizon was clear. But he gave notice in his Message that the United States was looking to her defenses. “For the first time in our history, naval maneuvers on a large scale are being held under the immediate command of the Admiral of the Navy.”
Coincidentally or not, these maneuvers were directed at the same theater as the Anglo-German blockade. On 21 November, four battleships of the North Atlantic squadron arrived off Isla de Culebra, Puerto Rico. Four cruisers and two gunboats of the Caribbean squadron lay in wait for them. From other points in the Western Hemisphere, other white warships put to sea, converging like slow bullets upon the target area.
SEA POWER, that early obsession of Roosevelt’s youth, had returned to haunt