Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [197]
Roosevelt’s next visitor found the President convulsed with laughter.
ROOSEVELT DID NOT read Raisuli’s list of demands until 28 May. He sent for Hay in a hurry, and asked what the State Department thought of them. Hay said they were “preposterous.” The United States could not possibly force their acceptance on the Sultan. Personally, he would like Mr. Perdicaris’s life to be saved. “But a nation cannot degrade itself to prevent ill-treatment of a citizen.”
The President seemed to agree. However, that afternoon a Navy Department cable went out to Admiral Jewell’s European Squadron, east of the Azores, ordering it to proceed to Tangier at once. With the South Atlantic Squadron already dispatched, some thirty thousand tons of American gunmetal should soon persuade the Sultan to start negotiating.
AT 5:30 A.M. on 30 May the white turrets of the Brooklyn appeared off Tangier. Her big guns boomed a long salute. Moroccan cannons politely boomed back. Admiral Chadwick’s other three ships, the Atlanta, Castine, and Marietta, glided in at intervals through the day. Each in turn sent its salute, and the cannons answered. The prolonged, stately thudding was music to Samuel Gummeré’s ears.
That night, four Marines armed only with pistols slipped ashore to guard the Consul and Mrs. Perdicaris. More thudding on 1 June announced the arrival of Admiral Jewell’s cruisers, Olympia, Baltimore, and Cleveland. Unnoticed in all the excitement, one of Raisuli’s agents left town and galloped to Tsarradan, in the mountains. He breathlessly reported the arrival of the American warships, “one after the other.” Tangier was mkloub, “upside down.”
Mr. Perdicaris listened, his heart surging with patriotic gratitude. His only fear was whether this messenger, too, would have his throat slit. But Raisuli seemed pleased at the pressure building up on Abd al-Aziz.
“The presence of these vessels,” he said, “may result in his acceding to my demands, and then you will be able to return to your friends.”
SEVEN DAYS AFTER the arrival of the last American warship in Tangier Bay, Gummeré was able to communicate only an unofficial, preliminary hint that the Sultan might deal with Raisuli. Roosevelt’s patience began to run out, and Hay cabled:
PRESIDENT WISHES EVERYTHING POSSIBLE DONE TO SECURE THE RELEASE OF PERDICARIS. HE WISHES IT CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD THAT IF PERDICARIS IS MURDERED, THIS GOVERNMENT WILL DEMAND THE LIFE OF THE MURDERER.… YOU ARE TO AVOID IN ALL YOUR OFFICIAL ACTION ANYTHING WHICH MAY BE REGARDED AS AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO BRIGANDAGE OR BLACKMAIL.
Before nightfall, Tangier advised that the Moroccan government had formally accepted Raisuli’s terms, except the huge ransom, which would have to be “reasonably negotiated.”
ON 10 JUNE, Governor Samuel Pennypacker announced that Philander Chase Knox had been appointed to succeed Matthew Quay as Senator from Pennsylvania. Roosevelt accepted the Attorney General’s resignation, but no longer with Dickensian emotions. He wrote effusively, carelessly. Knox was replaceable—as Root had proved to be. Even so, the President’s words were sweet enough for Knox to paste them in his scrapbook:
Many great and able men have preceded you in the office you hold; but there is none among them whose administration has left so deep a mark.… You have deeply affected for good the development of our entire political system in its relations to the industrial and economic tendencies of the time.
Behind the exchange of courtesies lay some personal disillusionment. Roosevelt had grown impatient with the Attorney General’s obsessive legalism. Knox was critical of the President’s autocratic tendencies, particularly in the area of executive prerogative. And he was quick to reject press speculation that he would be an antitrust crusader on Capitol Hill. “President Roosevelt’s policies are his own,” he told reporters. “I have been no more than the exponent of his