Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [157]
Roosevelt concluded that for the time being he had done all he could, rhetorically and practically, to help the American Negro. He would not risk his political future by seeming to endorse, in Vardaman’s phrase, “the black wave of ignorance, superstition, and immorality with which the South is perpetually threatened.”
BY NOW, THE State Department was seriously concerned over Arthur Beaupré’s silence. The Minister to Colombia was notorious for the frequency and verbosity of his cables. Three wordless weeks had given the impression he had been garroted. On 12 August, however, a thousand dollars’ worth of prose suddenly came over the wire. Beaupré summarized no fewer than nine amendments that had been attached to the Panama Canal Treaty in committee. The Colombian Senate now proposed at least five million dollars more in cash, plus huge kickbacks from the Compagnie Nouvelle and the Panama Railroad. The United States would be granted “tenancy” only in the canal zone, and would have to endure Colombian standards of law enforcement and sanitation. Beaupré begged John Hay, who was back in New Hampshire, “for an emphatic statement … or instructions” before the amendments were adopted by the Colombian Senate.
Hay was enraged. He had sent at least two sets of instructions over the past month, making plain that the United States would accept no amendments whatever. Evidently, Beaupré had not received them. Colombia’s cable service, Hay noticed, malfunctioned with curious regularity whenever the text of the treaty was undergoing serious scrutiny.
Now there arrived at Sagamore Hill a letter written by a longtime American resident of Bogotá. It described antitreaty sentiment in the capital as increasingly raucous and bitter. Politicians, merchants, planters, and common citizens were complaining that the United States wanted them to make a sacrifice “of untold millions belonging, by right, to their children.” One agitator was quoted as excoriating the “dirty American pigs” already wallowing in Panama mud.
Neither Roosevelt nor Hay had any public comment or prediction. “I am totally in the dark as to what the outcome in the Isthmus will be,” the President told Senator Morgan.
The first indication that he was losing patience came on Friday, 14 August, when Shelby M. Cullom, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, emerged from a lunchtime conference at Sagamore Hill. Speaking with obvious authority, Cullom told reporters that no matter what happened in Bogotá, the Administration remained committed to a Panama Canal.
Q How can the canal be built without the treaty?
A Well, we might make another treaty, not with Colombia, but with Panama.
Q But Panama is not a sovereign state.…
A Intimations have been made that there is great discontent on the Isthmus over the action of the Congress of the central government, and Panama might break away and set up a government which we could treat with.
Q Is the U.S. prepared to encourage such a schism in a South American republic?
A No, I suppose not. But this country wants to build that canal and build it now.
Whatever “action” Cullom was referring to—or anticipating—he could not have more clearly signaled Senate support for any executive powers Roosevelt might avail himself of in the near future.
That weekend, an extraordinary naval panoply spread across Long Island Sound. Twenty-two white warships could be seen lying in parallel rows off the entrance to Oyster Bay, a spectacle, in the eyes of one observer, “almost overwhelmingly suggestive of America’s newly-born sea power.” Monday dawned bright and mirror-calm. The sun picked out thousands of white-clad sailors stationing themselves in geometric shapes on decks and in rigging. Oyster Bay bristled with pleasure