Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [247]
After the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on 5 September, he allowed himself a characteristic moment of self-congratulation. “It’s a mighty good thing for Russia,” he allowed, “and a mighty good thing for Japan.” And, with a thump of his chest, “a mighty good thing for me, too!”
CHAPTER 25
Mere Force of Events
Ye see, th’ fact iv th’ matter is th’ Sinit don’t know what th’ people iv th’ Far West want, an’ th’ Prisidint does.
CROWNED HEADS AND columnists around the world hastened to praise Theodore Roosevelt in September 1905. “Accept my congratulations and warmest thanks,” Nicholas II cabled, adding, “My country will gratefully recognize the great part you have played in the Portsmouth peace conference.” An overjoyed Wilhelm II declared, “The whole of mankind must unite and will do so in thanking you for the great boon you have given it.” Emperor Mutsuhito wrote in the careful language of the Japanese court, “To your disinterested and unremitting efforts in the interests of peace and humanity, I attach the high value which is their due.”
Roosevelt was pleased enough with these pro forma expressions to copy them into a posterity letter to Henry Cabot Lodge. He did not notice, or bother to notice, the subtler signals they sent forth: the Tsar’s unconscious separation of himself from his subjects, the Kaiser’s readiness to speak for every person on the planet, the Mikado’s enigmatic formality. But neither did he let the praise go to his head. As he wrote to Alice (still touring the Far East with Nick):
It is enough to give anyone a sense of sardonic amusement to see the way in which the people generally, not only in my own country but elsewhere gauge the work purely by the fact that it succeeded. If I had not brought about peace I should have been laughed at and condemned. Now I am over-praised. I am credited with being extremely longheaded, etc. As a matter of fact I took the position I finally did not of my own volition but because events so shaped themselves that I would have felt as if I was flinching from a plain duty if I had acted otherwise.… Neither Government would consent to meet where the other wished and the Japanese would not consent to meet at The Hague, which was the place I desired. The result was that they had to meet in this country, and this necessarily threw me into a position of prominence which I had not sought, and indeed which I had sought to avoid—though I feel now that unless they had met here they never would have made peace.
Alice had returned to Japan after visiting China and the Philippines and had been taken aback by the sudden coolness of the Japanese people toward her. Evidently, Komura’s agreement with Witte was seen as a humiliating retreat after one and a half years of military triumph. She heard that there had been riots in Tokyo when news of the treaty signing came in.
This did not mean that high officials in the Katsura government were not secretly satisfied with the treaty. It gave Japan peace at just the moment she would have had to stop fighting anyway, through sheer exhaustion of resources. Nor was Roosevelt under any illusion as to what Portsmouth meant in terms of future Pacific strategy. After Tsu Shima, he had seen the war as “the triumph of Asia over Europe,” and mused, almost with complacency, on America’s geopolitical position between the belligerents. Now, as he studied a report he had commissioned on the immigration scare in California, he again began to worry about what agitators there called “the Yellow Peril.” He admired the Japanese too much to use such language himself, but saw that for the rest of his presidency he was going to have to monitor with extreme caution the ambitions of these “wonderful people.” While he did so, Secretary of State Root (even now immersed in a major