Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris [399]
86 ON 8 FEBRUARY Princeton Alumni Weekly, 14 Feb. 1903.
87 “JUST AT PRESENT,” TR, Letters, vol. 3, 423.
88 Elihu Root’s long The Army Bill became law on 14 Feb. 1903. Internal bureaucratic conflicts kept the General Staff Corps from becoming fully effective in 1910. A quarter of a century later, Newton D. Baker described it as “the outstanding contribution made by any Secretary of War since the beginning of [U.S.] history.” Leopold, Elihu Root, 43. See also Jessup, Elihu Root, vol. 1, 260ff.
89 By agreement with Beale, Theodore Roosevelt, 113.
Historical Note: With a fine disregard for the adjective impartial, TR chose three aggressive expansionists to be his representatives at the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal in London: Secretary of War Elihu Root and Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (R., Mass.) and George Turner (D., Wash.). The appointments were seen as deliberately provocative. Root had sent United States troops north in 1902 to secure the very frontier he would now be adjudicating. Lodge’s personal shoulder-chip, in matters to do with Great Britain and its empire, amounted to a battering ram: “I do not like to be crowded, and I especially dislike being pushed by our British brother.” Turner came from a community that had always regretted President Polk’s failure to extend the Northwestern Territory as far as “Fifty-four Forty.”
The Anglo-Canadian claim, in TR’s opinion, was “an outrage pure and simple.” His own big globe of the world (beside which he posed, in a photograph intended for immediate release) had been “made in London by mapmakers for the Admiralty,” and showed the Alaskan boundary to be precisely where the United States said it was. Since 1825, Great Britain had understood by treaty that the line ran inland from the forty-first parallel to the Portland Channel, at a distance averaging thirty miles from the coast. This seaward strip encompassed all major inlets; when Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, Canada had raised no topographical objections. Only when gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1896 had she begun to regret the ceded inlets. Canada was now suggesting—demanding—that the Alaskan boundary should be measured not from the coast, but from the extremities of islands lying far out to sea. If so, Juneau, Skagway, Dyea, the much-prized Lynn Canal, and all of Glacier Bay would be Canadian.
Roosevelt was willing to grant Canada a limited amount of inlet water, according to charts drawn up by John Hay. Strategist that he was, he suspected that the Dominion’s British rulers knew their case was hopeless, and merely wanted a judicial confirmation, to quell angry local feelings. He therefore made clear to his representatives that they were not to negotiate “untenable” territorial claims, only to decide whether a boundary sanctioned by sixty years of understanding among Russia, Great Britain, and the United States was “right in its entirety or wrong in its entirety.” This caused great resentment at the Alaska Boundary Tribunal. Shortly after negotiations began on 15 Sept. 1903, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., visited London and sent TR private word that the British Government took an “exceedingly grave” view of his inflexible attitude. Six months later, Joseph Chamberlain was still fuming. “Our cordial neutrality and sympathy in the Spanish War followed—by what? By all that happened in regard to the Alaska Arbitration, the secret history of which is not altogether pleasant reading.”
See Tyler Dennett, John Hay: From Poetry to Politics (New York, 1933), 357–59; Henry Cabot Lodge to Elihu Root, 27 June 1903 (ER); John Hay to Joseph H. Choate, ca. 20 Feb. 1903 (JH); TR, Letters, vol. 3, 287; New York Tribune supplement, 29 Mar. 1903, p. 1; map in Review of Reviews, Mar. 1903; Hill, Roosevelt and the Caribbean, 145; TR to Elihu Root et al., 25 Mar. 1903 (ER); Holmes to TR, 11 Oct. 1903 (TRP); Chamberlain to Poultney Bigelow, 30 Apr. 1904 (PB). For more extensive discussion, see John A. Munro, ed., The Alaska Boundary Dispute (Toronto, 1970); Marks, Velvet on Iron, 105–11; and Tilchin, Theodore