Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [145]
The article went on to report that Roosevelt’s Cabinet fully supported his plan, as did congressional leaders. Apparently the President was prepared to wait “a reasonable time” for ratification of the treaty, but if there was any hint of deliberate delay, he would quickly “make the above plan operable.”
One detail missing from the article was Cromwell’s private prediction that the Panamanian revolution would occur on the third day of November.
Roosevelt issued no denial of the World article, nor of similar scenarios in the Washington Evening Star and New York Sun. He was known to be a quick repudiator of his own faux pas, so evidently he was sending Bogotá a message. Herrán sent one, too, also predicting that Panama might secede.
Cromwell, for his part, smoothly assured reporters that he “still expected ratification.”
ON 15 JUNE, six solemn gentlemen waited on the President: Leo N. Levi, Jacob Furth, Solomon Sulzberger, Joseph D. Coons, Adolf Moses, and Simon Wolf. They were escorted by John Hay, courteously veiling his usual jocular anti-Semitism. (“The Hebrews—poor dears!”) One could not mock their present distress. All over America, Christians as well as Jews were collecting funds to help the surviving victims of the Kishinev pogrom. Ten thousand refugees were still homeless, and an equal number dependent on relief.
Roosevelt wanted to contribute one hundred dollars. “Would it do any good for me to say a word in behalf of the Jews?” he asked Hay and Root before receiving the delegation. “Or would it do harm?” He knew the answer in advance. They objected even to his sending money, on grounds of diplomatic propriety. “I suppose,” Roosevelt conceded, “it would be very much like the Tsar spreading his horror of our lynching Negroes.”
Hay tried to explain to the delegation, representing the executive committee of B’nai B’rith, that there were only two “motives” that might justify Administration criticism of Russia’s domestic policy. The first was national self-interest, and the second (hardly imaginable) an expressed willingness in St. Petersburg to listen. “What possible advantage would it be to the United States, and what possible advantage to the Jews of Russia, if we should make a protest against these fiendish cruelties and be told that it was none of our business?”
Leo Levi, the group’s spokesman, awkwardly addressed himself to the first consideration. He said that it was indeed in the national interest to prevent a diaspora of persecuted Russian Jews to America. The anti-Tsarist “propaganda” such immigrants would bring with them was sure to under-mine “amity between Russia and the United States.” Something must be done “to allay the fears of the Jews in Russia, and thus stem their rush to this country.”
Having thus expressed the traditional disdain of Western for Eastern Jews, Levi went on to read a petition to Nicholas II, the language of which was enough to make Hay blanch. It spoke of “horror and reprobation around the world” at the carnage in Kishinev, accused Russian authorities of tolerating “ignorance, superstition, and bigotry,” and concluded: “Religious persecution is more sinful and more fatuous even than war.”
Hay responded first, in unctuous but negative tones. He said that the United States deplored all “acts of cruelty and injustice” but had to “carefully consider” whether she had any right to question the internal affairs of another sovereign power. The Tsar in any case was an “enlightened sovereign” who would surely never permit another Kishinev.
Roosevelt spoke much more sympathetically. “I have never in my experience in this country known of a more immediate or a deeper expression of sympathy,” he said. It was natural that the United States, with her large Jewish population, should have “the most intense and widespread” reaction against the pogrom. He recited some lines from Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” and paid tribute to the American Jews who had fought in the Revolution and Civil War.
Inevitably,