Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [152]
President and Secretary talked far into the night, while their imagined world ordered itself pleasingly, obediently, beyond the twinkling horizons of Oyster Bay.
HAY SAID GOOD-BYE the next morning, then continued south to Washington. His surprise arrival in the broiling city served notice to both Loomis and Roosevelt that he was still boss of the State Department, and would monitor all their future communications. Yet he could not forget the latter’s graciousness at Sagamore Hill. “It is a comfort to work for a President who, besides being a lot of other things, happened to be born a gentleman.”
On 12 July, a sobering cable arrived from Arthur Beaupré. He reported that only now, after five weeks, had Hay’s ultimatum at last been communicated to the Colombian Congress. It was “construed by many as a threat of direct retaliation against Colombia,” in the event of nonratification of the treaty. Delegates from the province of Panama were capitalizing on that threat, and talking openly of secession.
By a coincidence unsurprising to intimates of William Nelson Cromwell, the New York World prophesied the next morning that there would be a revolution in Panama on 3 November. Later in the day, a desperate message from Colombian liberals reached the State Department. The treaty might be saved if the United States would consent to two amendments: one requiring the Compagnie Nouvelle to pay a ten-million-dollar rights-transferral fee, and the other increasing the zone’s acquisition price from ten million to fifteen million dollars.
Hay prepared a note of refusal. “Make it as strong as you can to Beaupré,” Roosevelt ordered him. “These contemptible little creatures in Bogotá ought to understand how much they are jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future.”
THE KISHINEV PETITION finally wound its way up Sagamore Hill on 14 July. It was carried by Leo Levi and Simon Wolf, who did not know what to make of the President’s sudden urgency. Levi suppressed the cynical thought that Roosevelt might use a human tragedy in Bessarabia to shame the Tsar into opening up Manchuria. Wolf was embarrassed at how few signatures they had been able to collect on such short notice. The names of influential Gentiles were especially elusive in the vacation season. Unavoidably, the list still looked like a Jewish petition, rather than a mass interdenominational declaration.
Oscar Solomon Straus, a prominent Jew with diplomatic experience, and Albert Shaw, editor of Review of Reviews, joined the company for lunch in the President’s paneled dining room. When Roosevelt heard that the petition bore “only two or three thousand” signatures, he agreed that it was hardly worth submitting in physical form. Then he made an inspired suggestion. Secretary Hay should dispatch an official cable to Count Vladimir Lamsdorff, the Tsar’s Minister of Foreign Affairs inquiring whether or not an unofficial petition “relating to the condition of the Jews in Russia” would be acceptable to His Majesty. The cable would quote the entire text of the petition. Of course, Lamsdorff would say no. But he would have to file the cable as a formal message, while its senders published it around the world. Americans would have made their moral point, and Russians could not complain of any breach of diplomatic etiquette.
Everyone approved of this idea. The President led the way to his library, adapted a previous draft prepared by Hay, and pinned the petition to it. Straus, stoop-shouldered and frail, undertook to deliver the precious document to the State Department for immediate dispatch.
Long before he got to Washington, the Russian Embassy announced that “certain cities in Manchuria” were open to foreign commerce. This was less a coincidence, perhaps, than the consequence of Roosevelt’s earlier blast against the Tsar’s domestic and foreign policies. Evidently Russia did, after all, worry about her inflexible world image.