Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [122]
“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.”
The arbitration negotiations, begun in plenary on the twenty-sixth, were not going well. Herbert Bowen was blustering so much about American security that he was neglecting the desperate condition of Venezuela, starved even for bread and salt. Britain was agreeable to a token settlement, but Germany insisted on full retribution. Her envoys now talked of occupying Venezuela’s customs houses for the next six or seven years.
That sounded, to Roosevelt, ominously like the beginning of another “ninety-nine year lease.”
“Are people in Berlin crazy?” he burst out to the German chargé d’affaires, Count Albert von Quadt. “Don’t they know that they are inflaming public opinion more and more here?”
He did not add that one of his own German informants had told him that war fever was on the rise in the Reich. But he counted the hours until Quadt’s new boss arrived at the White House on 31 January.
BARON VON STERNBURG found the atmosphere along Massachusetts Avenue much changed from the days when he and Sir Michael Herbert had been young men about town together, playing tennis with “Teddy” and courting American girls. Indeed, it had become more formal in the few months since von Sternburg had been the President’s houseguest. Now he represented the full majesty of the German state.
After his first formal meeting with Roosevelt, von Sternburg told Sir Michael (“Mungo” no longer) that the President had not concealed his impatience for a prompt settlement of the Venezuela dispute. Roosevelt had also, disturbingly, suggested that the Anglo-German alliance was weakening. If so, the Kaiser’s small squadron might soon be left alone in the Caribbean, facing 130,000 tons of American armor.
Von Sternburg sent a worried cable to the Wilhelmstrasse, just as his predecessor had done in December. He warned that the United States fleet had again been ordered to “hold itself in readiness.” Whether it was this threat, or Bowen’s bullying, or advices from London that the British Government was in danger of collapse, German intransigence at the arbitration table soon moderated.
ROOSEVELT COULD NOT resist boasting about his sense of burgeoning American power to his next ambassadorial visitor, Jules Jusserand, on 7 February. “I am not for disarmament,” he said. On the contrary, he intended to build up the American Army and Navy until they could handle “foes more formidable than Spain ever was.”
Relaxing in the silken glow of the Blue Room, the two men took stock of each other. Roosevelt was familiar with Jusserand’s writings, in particular a study of Piers Plowman that had made him temporarily wistful about the low estate of American literary scholarship.