Chapter 7

PLAYING ROOSEVELT’S GAME

“I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”¹

—PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT AFTER THE SURPRISE JAPANESE ATTACK ON RUSSIAN FORCES ON FEBRUARY 8, 1904

Via the bloody art of conquest, Japan had become the first and only non-White, non-Christian member of the imperial power club. But for the White Christians, that was a problem, and Japan’s elevation was soon proved temporary.

The Chinese—employing their “barbarian vs. barbarian” strategy—had shared Japan’s demands with the ministers of Russia, France, and Germany, three Johnny-come-lately imperialists who thirsted for a larger slice of the Chinese melon. China’s bet was that the greed of these White Christians would somehow restrain the Eastern dwarfs. On April 23, 1895, the ministers of Russia, France, and Germany called on the Japanese Foreign Ministry to announce that they opposed Japan’s ownership of the Liaodong Peninsula. The Russian note read:

The Government of His Majesty the Emperor of all the Russians, in examining the conditions of peace which Japan has imposed on China, finds that the possession of the peninsula of Liaodong, claimed by Japan, would be a constant menace to the capital of China, would at the same time render illusory the independence of Korea, and would henceforth be a perpetual obstacle to the permanent peace of the Far East. Consequently the Government of His Majesty the Emperor would give a new proof of their sincere friendliness for the Government of His Majesty the Emperor of Japan by advising them to renounce the definitive possession of the peninsula of Liaodong.²

Russia had long coveted the warm water harbor city of Port Arthur, located on the southern tip of the Liaodong peninsula. A Russian official warned that if the Japanese took control of the region, “Russia would need hundreds of thousands of troops and a considerable increase of her fleet for defense of her possessions and the Siberian Railway.”³

Unable to militarily resist the three European nations, Japan yielded the Liaodong peninsula. The Japanese founding fathers—now middle-aged men—could hardly believe it. Japan had played the White Christian game fair and square—it had picked a fight with an uncivilized country, proven its battlefield superiority, and received concessions that were her due. And now here was this “triple intervention.”

The Japanese public believed that the triple intervention was visited upon Japan because of the color of their skin. Japanese newspapers coined the term “Shame of Liaodong.” Shame soon gave way to fury when Russia cynically grabbed the Liaodong peninsula for herself. None of the other powers complained when a White Christian country took the very same territory recently denied Japan.

Theodore Roosevelt summed up his approach to foreign relations with the West African proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Roosevelt first spoke of the “Big Stick” on September 2, 1901, at the Minnesota State Fair. The burning foreign policy issue of the day was whether to continue the brutal American war in the Philippines. For decades, Roosevelt had defended race cleansing because of the salutary result: American civilization had followed the sun. Now as vice president, he rose to declare that an American Big Stick would now civilize the world.

“We are a nation of pioneers,” Roosevelt proclaimed. “Our history has been one of expansion [which] is not a matter of regret, but of pride…. We were right in wresting from barbarism and adding to civilization the territory out of which we have made these beautiful states. Barbarism has… no place in a civilized world. It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they are freed from their chains, and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself.” Roosevelt declared that the original American pioneers who conquered the Indians had exhibited “the essential manliness of the American character” and called American military invasions of foreign countries “the higher duty of promoting the civilization of mankind.” He called for expansion beyond America’s shores: “You, the sons of the pioneers, if you are true to your ancestry, must make your lives as worthy as they made theirs…. Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.”⁴

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WHEN HE BECAME PRESIDENT, Roosevelt embraced the Monroe Doctrine as justification to wield the Big Stick, dispatching the U.S. Navy to quell a “revolution” in Colombia, an action that allowed him to tear Panama away from that country. Then he extracted canal rights from Panama “in perpetuity.” Roosevelt later admitted that he “took the Canal and let Congress debate.”⁵ He boasted that if “any South American country misbehaves,” it should be “spanked,”⁶ and once wrote, “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth.”⁷ Big Stick, indeed.

Teddy’s most prominent enunciation of his Big Stick philosophy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe’s goal had essentially been defensive; now Roosevelt took the offense, asserting that the U.S. military was an “international police”⁸ and that he had the right to order invasions to enforce American foreign policy. The world could trust such a policy, he argued, because the goal of U.S. foreign policy was “the peace of justice.”⁹ Roosevelt posed as reluctant to deploy his international police force but warned barbarian countries that if they “violated the rights of the United States,” or if he observed “a general loosing of the ties of civilized society,” the United States could exercise its “international police power.”¹⁰ Roosevelt informed Congress that American police powers extended to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, as well as to North Asia (Korea and Manchuria) and to enforcing the Open Door policy in China.

Roosevelt believed he could advance U.S. interests in North Asia through his own sense of the ebb and flow of civilizations.¹¹ To Teddy, North Asia was a waste space that would eventually be civilized by either the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav, the two main branches of the Aryan race. The follow-the-sun crowd saw the Slav, though of Aryan descent, as inferior to the Anglo-Saxon. Declared Professor Franklin Giddings of Columbia University, “The great question of the twentieth century is whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilization to the world.”¹²

By the time Roosevelt became president, China—a nation of four hundred million people—was a shrunken country squeezed between the Anglo-Saxon and Slav empires.

Roosevelt, who had grown up during the peak anti-Chinese years in American history, referred to Chinese people as “Chinks.” He believed that the Chinese had lost the barbarian values and therefore China was the Darwinian prey of virile White Christians. Chinese men were viewed as particularly ludicrous—they tied their hair in sissy pigtails and wore dresses. Roosevelt believed that China’s future would be determined by outside countries that were now slicing the Chinese melon.

Anglo-Saxon ascendancy in North Asia had traditionally been guaranteed by the British navy, but the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway had allowed Russia to flood Manchuria with troops. Meanwhile, Anglo-Saxon armies were far away in the Philippines and India. To counter the Slav’s land power, the Anglo-Saxons would enlist the land armies of the Honorary Aryans.

Roosevelt loathed the Slav: “No human beings,” he declared, “black, yellow, or white could be quite as untruthful, as insincere, as arrogant—in short, as untrustworthy in every way—as the Russians.”¹³ Teddy’s sun-following friend, Senator Albert Beveridge, traveled to Manchuria via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Roughly the size of France and Germany combined, the region was rich with timber, minerals, and fertile soil. In a subsequent article in the Saturday Evening Post, Beveridge presented Manchuria as the American Aryan’s next Wild West—if only the Slav could be pushed out of the way. Beveridge recalled that a Russian officer had gloated, “You may be stronger now, richer now, than we are—but we shall be stronger tomorrow than you…. The future abides with the Slav!”¹⁴ Such comments played right into the fears of Roosevelt and his allies. “There is but one agency which might dislodge the Russians from Manchuria,” Beveridge wrote, “the sword-like bayonets of the soldiers of Japan, the warships of Japan, the siege guns of Japan, the embattled frenzy of a nation stirred to its profoundest depths by the conviction that the Czar had deprived the Mikado of the greatest victory and the richest prize in all the history of the Island Empire.”¹⁵ The triple intervention had dashed Japan’s expansionary hopes; now the United States would revive them.

China and Foreign Territories

In Roosevelt’s time, China was being squeezed by predatory countries that were “slicing the Chinese melon.”

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905)

Japanese leaders feared Russian control of Manchuria. If Russia moved into Korea, Japanese expansion into Asia would be blocked and Russia would dominate China and North Asia.

As early as 1900, Vice President Roosevelt had written to a friend: “I should like to see Japan have Korea. She will be a check upon Russia, and she deserves it for what she has done.”¹⁶ The American motivation in North Asia was economic, but the Japanese focus was strategic: if the Russians expanded from Manchuria to Korea, Japan would be effectively surrounded. So American and Japanese interests meshed in opposition to the Slav. To Roosevelt, the Japanese were the champions of Anglo-Saxon civilization in North Asia and an antidote to the degraded “Chinks” and the slovenly Slavs. Roosevelt was convinced—courtesy of the founding fathers’ “Leave Asia” strategy—that the Japanese were different from other Asians, that they were “a wonderful and civilized people… entitled to stand on an absolute equality with all the other peoples of the civilized world.” Roosevelt dismissed fear of a Yellow Peril^* by likening the Japanese to the Teuton of two thousand years earlier when “the white-skinned, blue-eyed… barbarian of the North” was a “White Terror” to the Greeks and Romans.¹⁷ The Teuton rose to become civilized, just like the Japanese were doing now. Early in his administration, the president practiced jujitsu grips used by the Japanese army, gaining insight into their barbarian virtues. Teddy considered himself to be on the cutting edge, witnessing a race phenomenon: the rise of the Japanese from barbaric to civilized. They could never be Aryan, but they could serve as a respectable partner, at least for now.

ROOSEVELT VIEWED JAPAN’S TAKEOVER of Korea as a progressive social experiment. For the first time in history, an Asian nation was making a serious attempt—complete with international lawyers and a huge military-industrial complex—to assume The White Man’s Burden. And Roosevelt was eager to help, believing that Japanese conquest would benefit millions of Asians.

At the turn of the century, Britain was suffering a number of imperial crises. Rebellions in Burma, Siam, Afghanistan, Tibet, Egypt, the Sudan, the Ottoman Empire, Venezuela, Samoa, and South Africa all required British military action. By 1901, Lord Henry Lansdowne, the new foreign secretary, had developed a new strategy based on ententes and alliances. This was especially important in North Asia, where Britain had no land forces to counter the Russians.

Japanese leaders supported the Anglo-American Open Door policy^* but their embrace of Anglo-Saxon ideals was born of strategic necessity. Britain’s and the United States’ motivation was the Open Door in China, and Japan’s was to expand into Korea. Joint opposition to Russia was a means to an end.

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SOON AFTER ROOSEVELT ASCENDED to the presidency, Tokyo shocked the world when it announced that Japan had signed a treaty with the mightiest White power of all—Great Britain. The terms of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Treaty upheld the Anglo-Saxon Open Door policy, recognized Japan’s “special interests” in Korea, and placed Britain on Japan’s side in a potential conflict with the Slav. If any nation became allied with Russia during a war with Japan, the treaty stated, Britain would enter the war on Japan’s side. Russia could thus no longer count on help from Germany or France if hostilities broke out. This meant that the next time Japan set foot on the Asian continent, it would not suffer another “Shame of Liaodong.” One New York newspaper described the treaty as “a shaft aimed at Russia.”¹⁸

In contrast to Great Britain, the other Anglo-Saxon power was an isolationist country that shunned imperial power treaties, with a constitution that required its Senate to shine its examining light on all agreements. But in the White House sat a young president who planned to use his “little Jap” allies to enlighten Asia and wedge the Open Door even wider.

On April 23, 1903, Secretary of State John Hay wrote to President Roosevelt, “We could never get a treaty through the Senate the object of which was to check Russian aggression.”¹⁹ Hay said two days later that the American public was only dimly aware of America’s interests in North Asia: “I am sure you will think it out of the question that we should adopt any scheme of concerted action with England and Japan which would seem hostile to Russia. Public opinion in this country would not support such a course, nor do I think it would be to our permanent advantage.”²⁰Big Stick Teddy responded in frustration, “The bad feature of the situation from our standpoint is that as yet it seems that we cannot fight to keep Manchuria open. I hate being in the position of seeming to bluster without backing it up.”²¹

Czar Nicholas II of Russia believed it was his destiny to control North Asia and he dismissed the Japanese as makaki, or “little Jap monkeys.” Hoping to forestall any bloodshed, Japan suggested an exchange: if Japan could have Korea, Russia could have Manchuria. In response, Nicholas ignored the little monkeys and moved thirty thousand more troops east. A Japanese newspaper complained, “A peaceful solution of the Manchurian question through indecisive diplomatic measures and humiliating conditions is meaningless. This is not what our nation wants.”²² On January 21, 1904, the American minister to Japan, Lloyd Griscom, warned from Tokyo: “The Japanese nation is now worked up to a high pitch of excitement…. Nothing but the most complete backdown by the Russian government will satisfy the public feeling.”²³

Roosevelt was so eager to see the Japanese initiate their mission of civilization that one month before the war broke, he boasted that he “would not hesitate to give Japan something more than moral support against Russia.”²⁴ But Big Stick Teddy knew that he’d have to get permission from Congress to use military force in North Asia, something they almost certainly wouldn’t authorize. Roosevelt could only watch from afar as his Japanese allies prepared to advance the cause of civilization.

On February 1, 1904, William Howard Taft became secretary of war, after Elihu Root resigned and returned to his remunerative Manhattan law practice. Roosevelt’s wife, Edith, complained that Taft was “too much of a yes-man,” but as Roosevelt became more secretive in his dealings, he disliked consulting experts who might disagree.²⁵ The whole idea was that Big Bill would be an “assistant president” who would always agree with his boss.

Roosevelt was already effectively serving as his own secretary of state as elderly John Hay declined in health. Now, having gathered the powers of the State and War departments into his own young hands, Roosevelt would shape America’s reaction to history’s largest armed conflict prior to World War I.

ON FEBRUARY 4, 1904, the prime minister of Japan, Taro Katsura, assembled his somber cabinet before Emperor Meiji and the founding fathers. Katsura reported that Japan had tried to work things out with Russia regarding Korea but that the Russians wouldn’t negotiate seriously.

The founding fathers were not optimistic. Japan was much weaker than the Russian Bear, with only one hundred eighty thousand army troops compared to Russia’s 1.1 million men. The Russians had nine battleships and five armored cruisers in the Pacific, compared to the Japanese navy’s six battleships and six armored cruisers. The army figured it had an even chance against the Russians while the navy believed it might destroy the Russian fleet at the cost of half of the Japanese fleet. No one would assure Meiji of victory. But they reasoned that even if a war with Russia ended in a draw, it would still vault Japan into the White Christian power club. The Japanese ambassador to the United States, Takahira Kogoro, had already let Tokyo know that Roosevelt felt that Japan’s plans constituted a wise course, which would meet the sympathy of the civilized world.

When Commodore Matthew Perry had kicked open Japan’s closed doors, it caused a chain reaction now in play like balls on a pool table. Japan had been advised by General LeGendre in the 1870s to “act courageously for the purpose of pushing forward the flag of the rising Sun in Asia and for the sake of the expansion of our empire… [and] to become the protector of the various nations in Asia…. This policy resembles the one taken by the United States.”²⁶

Now was the time. On February 6, 1904, Japan broke relations with Russia. Roosevelt wrote privately, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side, but we will maintain the strictest neutrality.”²⁷

IN SEOUL, THE NOW Emperor Gojong (desiring to keep up with the imperial Joneses, he had recently declared Korea an “empire”) watched Japan’s moves with trepidation. Britain was allied with Japan, but in Washington sat Elder Brother Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s minister in Seoul was Horace Allen, Emperor Gojong’s favorite Elder Brother, and Allen led Gojong to believe “that the United States would indeed exercise good offices in accord with the treaty of 1882 should the occasion arise.”²⁸

The historical record is silent on whether the Americans ever warned the emperor what the Roosevelt Corollary meant for Korea. Roosevelt had written that “impotent” countries were legitimate prey for the civilized nations. In the dark, the Koreans had no idea what was about to happen. As war clouds gathered, a court official in Seoul assured a Western reporter: “We have the promise of America. She will be our friend whatever happens.”²⁹

To project their military power onto the Asian continent, the Japanese navy would first have to capture ports where they could land army troops. The best two harbor cities were Port Arthur, the Russian fortress on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, and Incheon, Korea, with a port that harbored warships from a number of countries, including Russia.

On February 8, 1904—with no declaration of war—Japanese torpedo boats surprised Russian ships at Port Arthur and Incheon. The Russians denounced the Japanese move as a shameful violation of international law, but Americans were delighted. Oscar Straus, later Teddy’s secretary of commerce and labor, wrote the president, “Japan is certainly battling on the side of civilization—may Wisdom and Victory be on her side.”³⁰ Elihu Root gushed to Teddy, “Was not the way the Japs began the fight bully?”³¹ Roosevelt wrote his son, “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”³²

Roosevelt’s ideas about civilization and barbarism blinded him to the obvious: Japan’s advances on the Liaodong and Korean peninsulas were the opening moves in Japan’s expansion into all of Asia. The president believed that his Honorary Aryans would play America’s game as loyal promoters of Anglo-Saxon ideals in Asia. He never imagined that the surprise-attack tactics he praised in 1904 would later bedevil another President Roosevelt. (As he planned the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy admiral Isoroku Yamamoto would write, “We have much to learn from the Russo-Japanese War…. Favorable opportunities were gained by opening the war with a sudden attack on the main enemy fleet.”)³³

At Port Arthur, Japanese and Russian troops set in for a long siege. At Incheon, the Japanese navy quickly bested the surprised Russians, and Japanese army troops marched on to Seoul. Korean leaders were forced at gunpoint to accept an “alliance” with Japan.

The Japanese legation in Washington subsequently informed the Roosevelt administration that Korea was merely “allied” with Japan. In fact, Japan now had the right to station troops anywhere in Korea, controlled Korean officials, and even had veto power over Korea’s relations with other nations.

The Russo-Japanese Land War

The Russo-Japanese War was fought on neither Russian nor Japanese territory, but rather was a contest to determine which country would dominate Korea and China.

As the Russo-Japanese War erupted, Roosevelt took action to ensure that Japan would not suffer another “Shame of Liaodong.” He immediately notified Germany and France that if they assisted Russia, “I should promptly side with Japan and proceed to whatever length was necessary on her behalf.”³⁴