Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [236]
Roosevelt’s admiration for Japan had by now passed its peak. He was still amazed that the little Island Empire had managed to humiliate Russia on land and sea, while actually increasing her exports and building up her industrial might. The very efficiency with which she had accomplished such miracles, however, made him wonder what future expansion Japan was capable of. Eight years before, in a strategic question posed to planners at the Naval War College, he had written, Japan makes demands on Hawaiian Islands. This country intervenes. What force will be necessary to uphold the intervention, and how should it be employed? Now, he was even more convinced that the United States had to commission more warships, build them bigger, and launch them faster. Or what had happened at Tsu Shima might happen in Pearl Harbor—and not too far ahead, either:
In a dozen years the English, Americans and Germans, who now dread one another as rivals in the trade of the Pacific, will have each to dread the Japanese more than they do any other nation.… I believe that Japan will take its place as a great civilized power of a formidable type, and with motives and ways of thought which are not quite those of the powers of our own race. My own policy is perfectly simple, though I have not the slightest idea whether I can get my own country to follow it. I wish to see the United States treat the Japanese in a spirit of all possible courtesy, and with generosity and justice.… If we show that we regard the Japanese as an inferior and alien race, and try to treat them as we have treated the Chinese; and if at the same time we fail to keep our navy at the highest point of efficiency and size—then we shall invite disaster.
The oracular tone of this “posterity letter,” addressed to Spring Rice, betrayed anger and embarrassment over an upsurge of anti-Japanese prejudice in California. Members of the state legislature had officially declared all immigrants from Japan to be “immoral, intemperate, [and] quarrelsome.” Roosevelt considered this resolution, passed unanimously, to be “in the worst possible taste.” He was afraid that it might compromise his image as a neutral broker between what Ambassador Cassini was pleased to call the “white” and “yellow” parties to the peace conference. He asked Lloyd Griscom to inform the Japanese Foreign Office that the vote in Sacramento did not represent American popular feeling.
HAPPILY, THE PRESIDENT could rely on two more effective emissaries to communicate this message in a way certain to beguile Prime Minister Taro Katsura’s government. Alice, now twenty-one, and Taft were an odd couple to send halfway around the world on a steamer named, significantly enough, the Manchuria. But her floaty-hatted, butterfly charm and the Secretary’s jovial purposefulness (as palpable, yet unbruising, as his embonpoint) had captivated huge crowds in Honolulu.
“FLOATY-HATTED, BUTTERFLY CHARM AND … JOVIAL PURPOSEFULNESS.”
Alice Roosevelt and William Howard Taft en route to Japan, 1905 (photo credit 24.1)
A complement of about thirty members of Congress and their wives, plus staff and servants, gave Taft’s party the air of a presidential delegation—which in fact it almost was. He insisted that his main purpose was to take the congressmen on a tour of the Philippines (putting paid, presumably, to any lingering illusions they might have about the readiness of islanders for independence), but Roosevelt had asked him to visit Japan first, for public as well as secret reasons.
Alice was by now an assured celebrity, inured to the flare and smell of press photography, and incessant speculation about her romantic intentions. She was, if anything, wilder than ever, smoking cigarettes whenever she felt like it, mastering the abdominal jiggles of the hula, and occasionally firing impromptu fusillades with her pocket revolver. Taft felt obliged to remind her