Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [187]
Governors, generals, Cabinet officers, and senators pressed sobbing out of the lobby into the freezing night. Even Nelson Aldrich cried, his face contorted with sorrow.
ON 23 FEBRUARY, after nine weeks of debate, the Panama Canal Treaty came up for ratification. By now, most of the world agreed with John Hay that Roosevelt had followed a “perfectly regular course” in recognizing Panama. The little republic had just constituted herself into a tripartite democracy, and elected Manuel Amador as its first President. Encouraged by these developments, and by a positive legal argument by Elihu Root published in that morning’s newspapers, the Senate voted in favor of the treaty, 66 to 14.
Roosevelt and his successors were given power “in perpetuity” over the Canal Zone, ten miles wide, dividing Panama into two provinces and extending three miles out to sea each way. The power, though not technically absolute, was what “the United States would possess and exercise if it were the sovereign of the territory … to the entire exclusion of the exercise by the Republic of Panama of any such sovereign rights, power or authority.”
It was dread of such provisions that had caused old Amador to totter in Bunau-Varilla’s arms. The original Hay-Herrán Treaty had called for a ninety-nine-year renewable lease and a much narrower Canal Zone. But Bunau-Varilla had been so anxious to achieve ratification that Panamanians already felt he had mortgaged their future. Instead of becoming a hero of the people he had helped liberate, he incurred their lasting resentment.
Bunau-Varilla triumphantly resigned as Panamanian Minister, stating that he would accept no salary for his services. It was enough that the Great Idea could now be realized, “for the honor of Panama and for the glory of France and of the United States.”
Few Americans imagined, as Secretary Shaw prepared to disburse ten million dollars as down payment on the Zone (J. P. Morgan & Co., agents), that Amador could be anything but pleased.
AN ENORMOUS MAP in the White House enabled Roosevelt to keep pace with the Russo-Japanese War. He pinned it with little flags to show the movement of forces (“Japan is playing our game”), browsed weekly bulletins from the Office of Naval Intelligence, and wondered if he might not have to mediate a peace settlement one day. At present, the belligerents simply wanted to destroy each other. Japan, flush with naval success, was ready for a land battle. Russia would soon strike back. The world waited.
Cecil Spring Rice, now Secretary of the British Embassy in St. Petersburg, wrote to say that Russia was obsessed with expanding eastward as well as westward. “There has been nothing like it since Tamurlane. The whole of Asia and half Europe!” He foresaw problems with Muslims one day, but who could ultimately resist a Bear so big, so blindly driven?
Roosevelt, replying, looked instead to a victorious Japan as the “great new force” in the Far East. Should Korea and China proceed to develop themselves along Japanese lines, “there will result a real shifting of the center of equilibrium as far as the white races are concerned.” He was philosophical about this. “If new nations come to power … the attitude of we who speak English should be one of ready recognition of the rights of the newcomers, of desire to avoid giving them just offense, and at the same time of preparedness in body and in mind to hold our own if our interests are menaced.”
ON MONDAY, 14 MARCH, both Wall Street and the White House opened nervously for business. The Supreme Court was expected during the course of the day to announce its decision in U.S. v. Northern Securities. Guesses were that the decision would be “very drastic,” perhaps worse for railroad interests than last year’s lower-court ruling.
“All I can do is hope,” Roosevelt told friends.
Of one Justice, at least, he could be sure. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had so far proved a grateful supporter of Administration policies. During the Alaska boundary negotiations in