Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [289]
The result was a gathering war scare in Washington, stirred up by the anti-Japanese rhetoric of Senator George C. Perkins of California. Roosevelt the balancer sought to steady both sides by attaching to a pending immigration bill an amendment that would significantly reduce the number of Japanese arriving in America from Hawaii. Its language, authored by Root, gave him power to deny entry by “any aliens” to both the United States and her insular possessions. The last phrase was vital, because Hawaii had become a cornucopia of coolie labor. Yesterday’s pineapple pickers were today’s almond hullers and tomorrow’s stokers for the Northern Pacific Railroad.
“Why should I have to pay a fireman six dollars a day for work that a Chinaman would do for fifty cents?” James J. Hill asked Finley Peter Dunne, over lunch at Au Savarin in New York. “Let down the bars!”
To win passage, the exclusion amendment needed advance approval from Japan. That authoritarian empire was able to restrict emigration of her nationals by simple denial of exit permits. In fact, she had already discreetly promised Root she would do so, if the San Francisco school ban was rescinded. Once the immigration bill was passed (nowhere citing the Japanese as “Japanese”), Tokyo would cooperate with Washington to keep the flow of cheap labor at an acceptable level.
The only flaw in this commitment was something hard for imperialistic minds to understand: the government of a federal republic, while able to wage war, could not tell a local school board what to do. Negotiation, not coercion, was required. Hence the presence of Roosevelt’s two most persuasive Cabinet officers at the White House on 13 February 1907. They were in the midst of an extraordinary six-day series of meetings with Mayor Eugene E. Schmitz of San Francisco, trying to convince him and members of his school board that their action stood, as Root put it, “in the way of an international agreement.”
Schmitz, who was currently under indictment for embezzlement and extortion, was not unwilling to make a deal, if he could return home with dignity enhanced. Cowed by the President, beguiled by Taft, and outclassed by Root, he agreed to readmit Japanese children to the San Francisco school system, providing they spoke some English and were not overaged. And he could boast, if he wanted, that he had helped initiate a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” between the United States and Japan that would determine Pacific policy for as far ahead as anyone could see.
SINCE ROOSEVELT’S ADMIRATION of the Japanese was based in large part on their fighting qualities, he did not delude himself that a stately exchange of diplomatic notes was enough to counter the threat posed by Admiral Togo’s navy. In the glow of peacemaking at Portsmouth, he had briefly decided that the American fleet was large enough—his first term had seen it double in planned size. One new battleship a year, from 1905 on, seemed all that was necessary to compensate for the attrition of older vessels.
He had even gone along with the Tsar’s recent efforts—understandable, in view of the near obliteration of the Russian Navy—to bring about a Second Hague Conference, which might slow the battleship race among Britain, France, the United States, Germany, and Japan. The idea of arms limitation appealed to Roosevelt in theory. However, “I do not feel that England and the United States should impair the efficiency of their navies if it is permitted to other Powers, which may some day be hostile to them, to go on building up and increasing their military strength.”
This ambivalence between containment