Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [137]
The next morning, at Mechanics Pavilion, Roosevelt changed guises, reverting to the exultant imperialism of his prepresidential days. He looked toward the Orient and saw nothing but an American ocean, veined with American cables and crisscrossed by American freighters, the largest in the world:
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist [applause], and after having been here I fail to understand how any man, convinced of his country’s greatness … can be anything but an expansionist [applause]. In the century that is opening the commerce and the command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history.
He reviewed the rise and fall of seagoing civilizations from the Phoenicians and Carthaginians to the more recent navies and the merchant marines of northern conquerors. California—America’s new Greece—must now rise to the commercial and cultural challenges of “the greatest of all the seas.” The United States as a whole must follow its westward destiny until West and East merged. This meant a new global strategy:
In the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at all, if both rich and defenseless.
The audience understood Roosevelt’s last reference very well. He was bringing his historical survey right up-to-date. Current newspapers agitatedly reported a crisis situation in the Chinese province of Manchuria. Tsar Nicholas II, whose forces had occupied that industrialized region for five years, had failed to honor a promised withdrawal timetable. Now Russian officials were conspiring to keep Manchurian ports closed to foreign trade—a clear breach of Secretary Hay’s Open Door policy in the Far East—while profiting themselves from mining and shipping concessions. And much to Japanese alarm, the Trans-Siberian Railway, with its seemingly limitless capability to bring in military reinforcements, was nearing completion.
In other disturbing Russian news, dispatches reported a mass killing of Jews in the Bessarabian city of Kishinev. Casualty figures “worse than the censor will permit to publish” were leaking out. The American Hebrew’s estimate was one hundred and twenty killed and five hundred injured in anti-Semitic riots; the Tsar himself was rumored to have ordered the slaughter.
For the first time, popular unease was palpable about the ever-burgeoning empire in the East. It loomed beyond the haze of the Pacific horizon, menacing primarily Japan. American hearts warmed to that warlike little power, if only because it stood as a bulwark for the Philippines.
Roosevelt was constrained, as President, from criticizing the domestic policies of another sovereign state. But he made clear that he would not tolerate Russian aggression in the Pacific. “The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called providential,” he said. “Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken—” Applause interrupted him. “We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war.”
After making his standard calls for muscular morality at home and a big navy abroad, he concluded on a note of exaltation rare even for him:
Our place as a nation is and must be with the nations that have left indelibly their impress on the centuries.… Those that did not expand passed away and left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the Roman passed