“I hope ye’re satisfied,” he says. “I am,” says Jawn Hay.
AT SIXTY-FOUR years of age, Ion Perdicaris—“Jon” to boyhood friends in New Jersey—felt that he had found his final home in Tangier, Morocco. His dividends from United States cotton and gas stocks financed a palatial villa outside of town, on the slopes of Djebal Kebir.
This did not mean that Mr. Perdicaris had severed all American ties. Cultured and suave, he made a point of entertaining visiting compatriots, and enjoyed his role as dean of Tangier’s little English-speaking colony. When the mood struck him, he was capable of crossing to New York, renting the Fifth Avenue Theatre, and putting on a show scripted by himself, with sets by “I. Perdicaris,” and his own stepdaughter as star. Such shows might open on Monday and close the following Thursday; but Mr. Perdicaris was wealthy enough to be philosophical, returning always to the peace of his Moroccan retreat.
He sat there now on the cool evening of 18 May 1904, relaxed in dinner jacket and pumps, surrounded by his family and the luxurious jumble of a cosmopolitan life. Tiny amphorae on the mantel testified to his birth in Athens, where his father had been United States Consul General. Oriental rugs and American skins bestrewed the floor; Moorish tables and shelves displayed a collection of objets d’art from three continents; William Morris wallpaper hinted that the lady of the house was an Englishwoman. Mrs. Perdicaris, however, was as happily expatriate as her husband. She liked to cuddle two Brazilian monkeys, who ate orange blossoms out of a pouch slung round her waist.
The other male member of the party was her son, Cromwell Varley. He was younger than his stepfather by some twenty years. But when sudden screams came from down the hallway, the old man lithely beat him to the door.
Mr. Perdicaris supposed, as he ran, that his French chef was quarreling with the German housekeeper as usual. Not until he reached the servants’ quarters, with Varley following, did he realize that bandits had invaded his property. Armed Moors approached him, pausing only to club his butler to the floor with rifle butts. Mr. Perdicaris tried to intervene. He was instantly beaten and bound with palmetto cords. Varley leaped forward, enraged, whereupon his hand was slashed and he, too, taken prisoner. The rifles prodded both men toward the guardhouse, where a handsome, short, pale, turbaned Berber intoduced himself.
“I am the Raisuli.”
Mr. Perdicaris was not encouraged. Ahmed ben Mohammed el Raisuli was a notorious insurgent, ruling three of the most violent hill tribes in Morocco—the Er Riff Mountain kabyles, whom Sultan Mulay Abd al-Aziz IV had never been able to subdue. Captured once by the Pasha of Tangier, Raisuli had spent four years chained to a wall. Since then, his hatred of the French-dominated sultanate had become compulsive. Yet his voice tonight was low and unthreatening.
“I swear by all we hold sacred,” Raisuli said, indicating Mr. Perdicaris’s other servants, “that if there is no attempt to escape or rescue, no harm shall come to these people. But they must mount and ride with us!”
Mr. Perdicaris saw his own horses being saddled for travel. He had no idea why he was being abducted. “I accept your assurance, Raisuli,” he replied in Arabic. He and Varley were made to mount, too. A small caravan formed, and trotted out into the darkness.
Helpless and hysterical, Mrs. Perdicaris remained behind. Then she discovered that Raisuli had neglected to cut the villa’s telephone cord. Just before eleven o’clock, Samuel Gummeré, the American Consul General in Tangier, rode up through the cork trees to comfort her.
THE FIRST CABLE from Gummeré did not reach the State Department until early afternoon of the next day, 19 May.
MR. PERDICARIS, MOST PROMINENT AMERICAN CITIZEN HERE, AND HIS STEPSON MR. VARLEY, BRITISH SUBJECT, WERE CARRIED OFF LAST NIGHT FROM THEIR COUNTRY HOUSE, THREE MILES FROM TANGIER, BY A NUMEROUS BAND OF NATIVES HEADED BY RAISULY [sic].…I EARNESTLY REQUEST THAT A MAN-OF-WAR BE SENT AT ONCE.… SITUATION MOST SERIOUS.
John Hay was out of town, so once again Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Loomis had to handle a foreign crisis with the President.
Conveniently, Roosevelt had just dispatched sixteen white warships on a “goodwill cruise” of the Mediterranean. His response was quick, and more forceful than Gummeré could have hoped. Loomis cabled back that several of these ships would be sent to Tangier, as soon as possible. “May be three or four days before one can arrive.”
That estimate was somewhat optimistic. The nearest ships to Morocco were those of Rear Admiral French E. Chadwick’s South Atlantic Squadron, comprising the fast cruiser Brooklyn, a protected cruiser, and two gunboats. About one day behind steamed four big battleships of the North Atlantic Fleet, under Rear Admiral Albert S. Barker. Bringing up the rear was Rear Admiral Theodore F. Jewell’s European Squadron of three protected cruisers.
The last seven units were scheduled to rendezvous in the Azores before proceeding to Portugal and the Rivieras. Chadwick’s four were due to visit Gibraltar, and then tour the North African coast. These were the vessels Roosevelt chose to divert to Tangier. But he overestimated the speed at which even the Brooklyn could move. The Navy Department advised that Chadwick would not reach Tangier much before the end of May.
RAISULI’S CARAVAN JOGGED inland all day, under the staring sun. Mr. Perdicaris and his stepson stifled under Moorish haiks, wrapped around them for disguise. Toward evening, they ascended into the Riff Mountains—tribal country, forbidden to Christians and coastal Arabs alike. Mr. Perdicaris’s horse slipped on some rocks. The old man, still bound, was thrown off, dislocating a thighbone. He lay quivering until Varley and Raisuli lifted him back onto the saddle. For hours, the climb continued up a wet, dark gorge. Shortly before midnight, Raisuli called a halt at the village of Tsarradan, on the spur of Mount Nazul. Mr. Perdicaris was escorted to a hut that reeked of stagnant water. Unable to stand on his throbbing leg, he lay down on the clay floor, and someone threw a blanket over him. He could not sleep. The hut’s thatch was half open to the sky. Rain began to fall, softening the clay to paste.
In all his wandering life, Mr. Perdicaris had never felt so remote from help or hope.
ROOSEVELT’S ARMADA STEAMED on across the Atlantic, leaving the Caribbean basin unguarded. As if to remind its citizens that out of sight was not out of mind, the President chose 20 May—the second anniversary of Cuba libre—to make an official statement of his Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Once again Elihu Root served as his spokesman. Addressing the Cuba Society of New York that evening, Root asked permission to read a letter from the President of the United States.
Its first two paragraphs were blandly congratulatory, but there was a passing clause that caught attention: “It is not true that the United States has any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards other nations, save such as are for their welfare.”
The third paragraph moved quickly from reassurance to threat.
If a nation shows that it knows how to act with decency in industrial and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, then it need fear no interference from the United States. Brutal wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of a civilized society, may finally require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the United States cannot ignore this duty; but it remains true that our interests, and those of our southern neighbors, are in reality identical.
The letter ended as it began, with polite clichés, but its message was clear: Caribbean and Latin American countries must in future match their “interests” to those of the Colossus of the North. If not, they would be policed.
In sending such a message at such a time—little more than four weeks before the Republican National Convention—Roosevelt took a calculated risk. Better, with mere rhetoric, to arouse a chorus of criticism from anti-imperialists than to court much wider outrage by actually implementing the Corollary, if things got any worse in Santo Domingo. His statement should at least reduce the latter possibility through November.
Congressman David DeArmond of Missouri accused him in the New York World of “jingoism run mad.” The same newspaper also used the words patronizing, menace, knight-errantry, and bumptiousness. Yet most commentators north and south of the border praised the President’s good intentions. Memories of German and British gunboats bombarding Venezuela still rankled. For better or worse, the Roosevelt Corollary was now a permanent feature of hemispheric policy.
“I ASK NOTHING from you,” Raisuli told Mr. Perdicaris, much to the latter’s relief. However, Raisuli clearly intended to ask a great deal from the Sultan of Morocco before he released so valuable a pair of hostages, and was content to let international pressure build for their release. At his leisure, he sent Abd al-Aziz a list of his demands, and settled down to the life of a village celebrity. He strolled around Tsarradan, accepting the adoration of youths who kissed the hem of his burnoose.
When Mr. Perdicaris asked what he wanted from Fez, Raisuli mentioned five specific concessions: an end to harassment of the Er Riffs by government forces; release of all kabyle political prisoners; dismissal of the Pasha who had chained him; a ransom of seventy thousand Spanish silver dollars; finally, elevation to overlordship of two of Morocco’s richest districts.
Mr. Perdicaris was aghast and depressed at the extravagance of these terms. Raisuli showed him a plait braided under his turban. “This will disappear only when my wrongs are avenged—mine and those of my people!”
A few days later, word came that Sultan Abd al-Aziz was not interested in bargaining for foreign hostages. Raisuli promptly had the imperial messenger’s throat slit.
ROOSEVELT’S REDEFINITION OF the Monroe Doctrine and his dispatch of warships to the Mediterranean were the gestures of a palpably confident executive. “I had much rather be a real President for three years and a half,” he told George Otto Trevelyan, “than a figurehead for seven years and a half.” The odds on renewed “real” power were in his favor: with 708 out of 988 convention delegates pledged to him, his nomination was now a certainty. Democrat campaign planners were in such despair over his popularity that, having failed to persuade Grover Cleveland to run, they seemed likely to settle for Alton B. Parker—a New York State judge who, as Elihu Root remarked, “has never opened his mouth on any national question.”
Reticence and its political cousin, caginess, were in Roosevelt’s opinion weaknesses to be taken advantage of. When a deputation of conservative senators, including Aldrich and Spooner, visited the White House to protest his selection of the “inexperienced” Cortelyou as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was unsympathetic. “I held this matter open for months, and allowed plenty of time to make selections, and none of you had a word to say.”
Ironically, he was quite capable of being closemouthed himself, but only when the sensibilities of other people or governments had to be considered, or important announcements delayed. And sometimes—as now—he preferred the quick efficiency of a news leak. A White House “source” informed reporters that George B. Cortelyou would become Postmaster General after the election, in place of Henry Clay Payne. This was a strategic move aimed at enhancing the former’s authority as party chairman. Campaign workers were sure to obey Cortelyou if they knew he would soon inherit the government’s richest patronage agency.
Roosevelt assembled the rest of his second-term Cabinet at leisure and mostly in secret. “He wants us all to resign—” John Hay noted in his diary, “but he wants to reappoint me.” Agriculture Secretary James Wilson might be kept on, Hay thought; Treasury Secretary Leslie Shaw, who had presidential ambitions for 1908, probably not. “Taft he wants to keep either where he is, or as Attorney-General if Knox goes.”
This was the first recorded indication that Knox’s astigmatic gaze had begun to focus beyond the Administration. Like Taft, his dearest wish was to sit at center bench on the Supreme Court. But Chief Justice Fuller, at seventy-one, remained annoyingly healthy. Meanwhile, the passing of Matthew Quay gave Knox an irresistible chance to represent his home state in the Senate.
In any case, the President’s latest preference for a Supreme Court appointment was William H. Moody. To that end, Roosevelt decided definitely to shift Moody to the Justice Department as soon as Knox resigned. He had other, long-range plans for Taft.
With less than a month to go before the convention in Chicago, he became obsessive about controlling every last detail. He plotted the Coliseum’s seating plan, insisting that “every Republican editor in the country” be accommodated. He selected the speakers and edited the speeches. “For all we know,” the New York Evening Post jibed, “he may have designated the men who are to lead the cheering.” Representatives of state committees were amazed at his knowledge of what they were doing and whom they were hiring.
“Mr. President, I have come for your final answer,” Albert J. Beveridge said one day, crowding his desk like an earnest schoolboy. “Am I, or am I not, to be temporary chairman of the Chicago convention?”
As tactfully as possible, Roosevelt mentioned the name of somebody taller. Beveridge stiffened. “Root? Elihu Root! What can he say that the country will listen to?”
Unconsoled, the little Hoosier performed one of his imitations of Napoleon retiring to Elba. “Very well, Mr. President, so be it. I am once more alone.… Alone at school, alone at the Bar, alone in the Senate, alone in the party! Good morning, Mr. President.”
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 ideas.”
JOHN HAY FORWARDED another demand from Raisuli to Roosevelt on 15 June. The Berber now wanted control of four more Moroccan districts. “You see there is no end to the insolence of this blackguard,” Hay wrote. “I feel that it would be most inexpedient to surrender to him. We have done what we can for Perdicaris.… Who knows what he will ask next?”
The Secretary’s desire to disengage betrayed a secret embarrassment. Researchers at the State Department were beginning to suspect that Mr. Perdicaris might not be an American citizen after all. Hay was anxiously awaiting their final report. How would delegates to the Chicago convention react if the President was found to have bombarded Morocco in behalf of a fraudulent old Greek?
Roosevelt, unsuspecting, asked Hay to explore the possibility of a joint military expedition with Britain and France. “Our position must be to demand the death of those who harm him if he is harmed.”
Hay unhappily consulted with the envoys of both countries. Neither liked Roosevelt’s idea. Jules Jusserand was particularly wary: an American landing at Tangier might threaten France’s own program for total acquisition of Morocco—“pacification,” as it was called on the Quai d’Orsay. He was astute enough to sense that Hay did not really want him to agree.
“The President’s will is, more and more, predominant in public affairs,” Jusserand informed Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé. “And he hesitates less and less to follow it, despite the advice of his Cabinet officers. They, to tell the truth, resist only very weakly.”
Similar complaints came from Chicago, where the Republican National Committee was already meeting. Senator Nathan B. Scott, the acting Chairman, objected bitterly to the way George Cortelyou had been foisted upon the party. Roosevelt, hearing that the Old Guard was plotting a last-minute revolt, responded forcefully, by telegram: PEOPLE MAY AS WELL UNDERSTAND THAT IF I AM TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT THEN CORTELYOU IS TO BE CHAIRMAN…. I WILL NOT HAVE IT ANY OTHER WAY. He asked for the names of the intriguers, whereupon their opposition faded, but not their resentment. “Your Uncle Theodore knows how to run things,” Scott growled at a newspaperman.
ON MONDAY, 20 JUNE, the mass of Republican delegates arrived in Chicago. They looked languorous, almost bored under their straw hats. As Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Roosevelt, “Excitement is impossible where there is no contest.”
Old-timers talked nostalgically about the last really fought-out Republican convention, in 1884. Some remembered twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt of New York, standing on a chair and yelling for a roll call in his high, harsh voice. They remembered drunken roars for James G. Blaine, glee clubs bellowing the praises of President Arthur, and that softest yet most penetrating of noises, the rustle of “boodle,” as Southern blacks sold and resold their votes.
Now, two decades later, Chicago could have been hosting a temperance chautauqua. No bunting brightened the streets. Sidewalks were bare of button-hawkers and barkers: every fakir with anything to sell had decamped to the World’s Fair in St. Louis. Dull clouds scudded over Lake Michigan. The wind felt heavy and wet.
THAT EVENING, Roosevelt dictated a letter to Kermit. “Tomorrow the National Convention meets, and barring a cataclysm I shall be nominated.… How the election will turn out no one can tell.” The possibility, however remote, that he might be beaten caused an access of pride and gratitude for nearly three years of power:
From Panama on down I have been able to accomplish certain things which will be of lasting importance in our history. Incidentally, I don’t think that any family has ever enjoyed the White House more than we have. I was thinking about it just this morning when Mother and I took breakfast on the portico and afterwards walked about the lovely grounds and looked at the stately historic old house. It is a wonderful privilege to have been here and to have been given the chance to do this work, and I should regard myself as having a small and mean mind if in the event of defeat I felt soured at not having had more, instead of being thankful for having had so much.
“AN ENORMOUS PAINTING OF MARK HANNA … HUNG OVER THE SPEAKER’S PLATFORM.”
The Republican National Convention, Chicago, June 1904
LONG BEFORE PROCEEDINGS began on Tuesday, word spread that the President would monitor every minute of every session, via a special telephone line running direct from his office to the basement of the Coliseum. Delegates began to get uneasy feelings of remote control. A disgusted Pennsylvanian decided not to attend. “The boss has fixed it all up and we might as well go home.”
One thing Roosevelt had neglected to “fix,” however, was the Coliseum’s decor. As a result, it was not his portrait that greeted people entering the hall at noon. An enormous painting of Mark Hanna, seven feet wide and twenty feet tall, hung over the speakers’ platform. Twenty-eight other Hannas looked down somberly from various angles. In further evidence of Old Guard aesthetics, a black-draped chair was “set aside” for Senator Quay, and the dead features of President McKinley appeared on every admission ticket. “In every corner of the hall there is a ghost,” a reporter observed. Even some of the living looked sepulchral when they sat under tobacco-blue sunbeams slanting down from the skylight.
A question buzzed from aisle to aisle: “Where is Roosevelt’s picture?” Sharp eyes eventually noticed a few small steel engravings, spaced around the upper gallery and almost smothered in festoons.
At 12:14, another pallid figure—Postmaster General Payne, clearly not long for the world—approached the rostrum and gaveled the Thirteenth Republican National Convention to order. Elihu Root rose to respectful applause, and began his keynote speech. In the vast space, his husky voice failed to carry. “The responsibility of government rests upon the Republican Party. The complicated machinery through which eighty million people—”
“Louder!” a voice called. “Louder!”
IN WASHINGTON, it was an hour later by the clock, and the President was having lunch. He knew exactly what themes were being sounded in Chicago. Root had promised to trumpet (insofar as quiet Elihu could trumpet anything) the achievements of the last four years, “from an administration rather than from a personal standpoint.” There would be solemn fanfares on the names of McKinley and Hanna, rising scales of economic statistics, a canon on Party and Patriotism, and always the reassuring basso ostinato of Continuity. Root may not be a virtuoso performer, but nobody could match his mastery of political polyphony.
IN TANGIER, it was nearly five hours further on. Late-afternoon sun beat on the seven white warships in Tangier Bay. They made a deceptively peaceful picture. Today, 21 June, was supposed to have seen the release of Mr. Perdicaris and his stepson—or so Consul Gummeré had been led to believe, after the Sultan’s latest yielding to Raisuli’s demands. But the trail down from Tsarradan had remained quiet: Morocco, as Gummeré complained, was “a country of delays.”
Aboard the Brooklyn, he and Admiral Chadwick had decided that the United States could not tolerate any more “double dealing and treachery,” either on the part of Raisuli or the Moroccan government. “We have come to a point when our position has now become undignified and humiliating,” Gummeré cabled Hay. Chadwick joined him in suggesting “an ultimatum immediately for large indemnity for every day’s further delay and that Marines will be landed and customs seized.”
BY NOW, Root’s voice had strengthened, and most delegates were with him. They applauded his depersonalized summary of the Administration’s fiscal, antitrust, agricultural, and foreign policies. They received in silence the news that five battleships, four cruisers, four monitors, and thirty-four torpedo destroyers and torpedo boats had joined the Navy since 1900, while another thirteen battleships and thirteen cruisers were under construction. As Root approached his peroration, the applause grew louder and more frequent. He began to refer delicately to William McKinley’s “successor.” He quoted the honest pledge of “unbroken” continuity given at Buffalo on 14 September 1901, to further cheers. “Our President,” he declared with a sweeping gesture, “has taken the whole people into his confidence.”
“All except the members of the National Committee,” Senator Scott murmured.
Root did not enunciate the words “Theodore Roosevelt” until his final sentence, at 1:18 P.M. There was a gratifying roar, but it died in thirty seconds. At 2:10 P.M., the convention adjourned for the day, and Henry Cabot Lodge’s Committee on Resolutions began to write the party platform. Simultaneously, Consul Gummeré’s cable arrived in Washington.
HAY PONDERED THE cable overnight. More and more, he dreaded an American show of force. European reactions would be negative, and could turn hostile when—as now seemed certain—Mr. Perdicaris was revealed to be a Greek. A report from Athens confirmed that one “Ioannis Perdicaris” had applied for Greek citizenship there, at the start of the American Civil War. Ioannis certainly sounded similar to Ion.
Unable to confront Roosevelt with this news, Hay asked a deputy, Gaillard Hunt, to take the Perdicaris file over to the White House, along with a recommendation that Raisuli and the Sultan be given a final warning. As Commander-in-Chief (not to mention political candidate) Roosevelt must consider the risks.
Hunt came back and said that the President had not been at all pleased with the contents of the file. However, he had authorized Hay’s suggested ultimatum. Rightly or wrongly, Raisuli believed Mr. Perdicaris to be American; he had therefore done deliberate violence to the whole concept of American citizenship. For that he must be held responsible, and the Sultan responsible for him.
ONCE AGAIN IT was afternoon in Morocco as Roosevelt conducted his mid-morning audience, and delegates in the Chicago Coliseum awaited the noon opening gavel.
Hay, drafting his ultimatum, hit upon “a concise impropriety” to gratify the aggressive Gummeré. It nicely balanced the more cautious phraseology that followed:
WE WANT PERDICARIS ALIVE OR RAISULI DEAD. FURTHER THAN THIS WE DESIRE LEAST POSSIBLE COMPLICATIONS WITH MOROCCO OR OTHER POWERS. YOU WILL NOT ARRANGE FOR LANDING MARINES OR SEIZING CUSTOM HOUSE WITHOUT SPECIFIC DIRECTIONS FROM THE DEPARTMENT.
Hay could not resist showing his draft to Edwin M. Hood, the veteran State Department correspondent for the Scripps-McRae news service. “Think I’ll send it,” he said, as one old newspaperman to another.
“Then I will too,” Hood replied. The message went out over government and news wires simultaneously. But by the time it reached Morocco, Gummeré had no need for it. An up-country sheik announced that he would make his village available for the exchange of hostages and ransom on the next morning, 23 June.
HOOD’S DISPATCH REACHED Chicago at about 3:00 P.M., and a copy was delivered to the permanent chairman of the convention, Joseph Cannon. He let it lie on his desk while Henry Cabot Lodge read the Republican Party platform for 1904.
“We declare our constant adherence to the following principles,” Lodge shouted. His voice rang with the earnestness of a politician determined to say as little as possible. He was noncommittal on the tariff, trust control, labor relations, and foreign policy. The future of the Philippines was left vague. Disfranchised Negroes got a few words of sympathy, insurgent Republicans none. There was no call for railroad rate regulation, no acknowledgment of the Iowa Idea, no mention of the power war between Governor LaFollette and Senator Spooner. (The latter’s Old Guard delegation doggedly occupied Wisconsin floor space, courtesy of the Committee on Credentials.)
When Lodge finished, Cannon called for acceptance of the platform. There was a unanimous, if apathetic, chorus of ayes. Cannon, smiling, took up his slip of paper. “With the consent of the Convention, the Chair will direct the Clerk to read a dispatch from Washington … received through the courtesy of the Scripps-McRae Newspaper Association.”
“Bulletin,” the clerk read. “Washington, June 22. Secretary of State Hay has sent instructions to Consul General Samuel R. Gummeré, as follows: ‘We want either Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.’ ”
After two days of procedural torpor, the convention reacted galvanically to Hay’s “concise impropriety.” Delegates jumped on their chairs and shouted with delight. “Roosevelt and Hay know what they are doing,” a Kansan exulted. “Our people like courage. We’ll stand for anything those men do.”
Cannon quickly adjourned the session, content to let enthusiasm build for the nominations.
A FEW MINUTES before eleven o’clock on Thursday, 23 June, Frank S. Black, a former Governor of New York, rose to nominate the President. Immensely tall and craggy, he glared through professional spectacles and shook a boyish thatch of hair. “From every nook and corner of the country,” he orated, “rises but a single choice to fill the most exalted office in the world.” Applause welled up, as if echoing his metaphor. Roosevelt had chosen well. Black—his predecessor in Albany—was the party’s best speaker, more poetic than Spooner, less preachy than Hoar.
After some more flights of populist imagery, Black got down to the personal. He reminded the convention that Roosevelt, for all his fame as a soldier, was by nature a writer and scholar. “A profound student of history, he is today the greatest history maker in the world.” However, “the fate of nations is still decided by their wars.” The peace that scholars craved was probably illusory, certainly temporary:
Events are numberless and mighty, and no man can tell which wire runs around the world. The nation basking today in the quiet of contentment and repose may be still on the deadly circuit and tomorrow writhing in the toils of war. This is the time when great figures must be kept in front. If the pressure is great, the material to resist it must be granite and iron. Whether we wish it or not, America is abroad in this world. Her interests are on every street, her name is on every tongue. Those interests so sacred and stupendous should be trusted only to the care of those whose power, skill and courage have been tested and approved. (Applause) And in the man whom you will choose, the highest sense of every nation in the world beholds a man who typifies as no other living American does, the spirit and purposes of the twentieth century.
It was just eleven o’clock. “Gentlemen,” Black roared, “I nominate for President of the United States … Theodore Roosevelt of New York!”
An elemental din built and built, and for twenty-one minutes the convention rocked in pandemonium. Three sergeants at arms carried in Roosevelt’s portrait, crudely rendered in crayon, yet big enough to blot out most of Mark Hanna’s. They swung the President from side to side, while he gazed with waxy eyes at the party he could at last call his own.
THE REAL ROOSEVELT received the news of his nomination, along with that of Fairbanks for Vice President, and confirmation of Cortelyou as Chairman, just after lunch, as he sat with Edith and Alice on the White House portico. His secretary, Loeb, brought the telegram. The vote had been unanimous, but every state from Alabama to Wyoming had insisted on recording its tally separately, making 994 votes out of 994.
With kisses on his cheeks, he walked happily to his office and met a congratulatory crowd of newsmen. He invited them in for “an Executive session,” and tilted back laughing in his big chair as they fired questions at him. Prophecies, jokes, reminiscences, and indiscretions poured out freely, enchantingly. Roosevelt asked that nothing he said be printed. And nothing ever was.
THAT EVENING, Mr. Perdicaris strolled for the last time on the village green at Tsarradan. His hurt leg had long since healed. Yesterday’s messages, to the effect that “His Chereefian Majesty was most graciously pleased to accede to the demands” of Raisuli, had come too late for quick departure. But the ransom caravan was definitely on its way, and a descent from the mountains was planned for the morning.
Mr. Perdicaris slept no better than he had on his first night, five weeks before. At 4:00 A.M. on 24 June, horses and pack mules were made ready, and soon a long cortege was snaking north to Mount Nazul. Raisuli rode beside the hostages on a gray charger. Dark cords of camel hair twisted about his turban, and a cartridge belt slapped his broad chest: “Every inch,” Mr. Perdicaris thought enviously, “a man of daring deeds.”
They crested Nazul just as the sun did, and in the bursting light, all the peaks and ridges around them, wreathed in lower mists, turned amethyst and rose, crimson and lilac. The old man reined to a halt, enraptured by one of the most gorgeous displays of color he had ever seen. Raisuli, grinning, asked if he “regretted” his involuntary mountain vacation.
Keeping to the ridge, they continued north and eventually sighted a white fleck in the blue distance, which Raisuli said was Tangier. Around noon they found themselves looking down on the town of El Zellal, where the meeting with the Sultan’s emissaries was to take place.
Many hours later, when the last stacks of silver coin had been counted and the political prisoners handed over and two ceremonial luncheons eaten, Raisuli took Mr. Perdicaris aside and said good-bye. He promised that if anyone tried to harm him, “I … will come with all my men to your rescue.”
Mr. Perdicaris was more inclined to cry than laugh. Affectionately drawn to Raisuli even as he rejoiced for himself, he mounted his black horse and rode off with the Sultan’s party. Other emotions struggled in his breast toward midnight, when Tangier came into view, and he saw in the harbor the mastheads of Admiral Chadwick’s ships, twinkling the news of his return.
As a youth, Mr. Perdicaris had thought little of his American citizenship, and bartered it away to avoid taxation during the Civil War. Too much money and travel had made him complacent and careless of formalities; there would be many awkward questions asked soon enough, before the State Department decided to forgive him; but he had no doubt now where, and to whom, his allegiance belonged.
“Thank Heaven,” he said to himself, “it is that flag, and that people—aye, and that President, behind those frigates, thousands of miles away, who have had me dug out from amongst these kabyles! That flag and no other!”