Theodore Rex (59 page)

ON 15 JUNE
, six solemn gentlemen waited on the President: Leo N. Levi, Jacob Furth, Solomon Sulzberger, Joseph D. Coons, Adolf Moses, and Simon Wolf. They were escorted by John Hay, courteously veiling his usual jocular anti-Semitism. (“The Hebrews—poor dears!”) One could not mock their present distress. All over America, Christians as well as Jews were collecting funds to help the surviving victims of the Kishinev pogrom. Ten thousand refugees were still homeless, and an equal number dependent on relief.

Roosevelt wanted to contribute one hundred dollars. “
Would it do any good for me to say a word in behalf of the Jews?” he asked Hay and Root before receiving the delegation. “Or would it do harm?” He knew the answer in advance. They objected even to his sending money, on grounds of diplomatic propriety. “I suppose,” Roosevelt conceded, “it would be very much like the Tsar spreading his horror of our lynching Negroes.”

Hay tried to explain to the delegation, representing the executive committee of B’nai B’rith, that there were only two “motives” that might justify Administration criticism of Russia’s domestic policy. The first was national self-interest, and the second (hardly imaginable) an expressed willingness in St. Petersburg to listen. “What possible advantage would it be to the United States, and what possible advantage to the Jews of Russia, if we should make a protest against these fiendish cruelties and be told that it was none of our business?”

Leo Levi, the group’s spokesman, awkwardly addressed himself to the first consideration. He said that it was indeed in the national interest to prevent a diaspora of persecuted Russian Jews to America. The anti-Tsarist “propaganda” such immigrants would bring with them was sure to under-mine
“amity between Russia and the United States.” Something must be done “to allay the fears of the Jews in Russia, and thus stem their rush to this country.”

Having thus expressed the traditional disdain of Western for Eastern Jews, Levi went on to read a petition to Nicholas II, the language of which was enough to make Hay blanch. It spoke of “horror and reprobation around the world” at the carnage in Kishinev, accused Russian authorities of tolerating “ignorance, superstition, and bigotry,” and concluded: “Religious persecution is more sinful and more fatuous even than war.”

Hay responded first, in unctuous but negative tones. He said that the United States deplored all “acts of cruelty and injustice” but had to “carefully consider” whether she had any right to question the internal affairs of another sovereign power. The Tsar in any case was an “enlightened sovereign” who would surely never permit another Kishinev.

Roosevelt spoke much more sympathetically. “
I have never in my experience in this country known of a more immediate or a deeper expression of sympathy,” he said. It was natural that the United States, with her large Jewish population, should have “the most intense and widespread” reaction against the pogrom. He recited some lines from Longfellow’s “The Jewish Cemetery at Newport,” and paid tribute to the American Jews who had fought in the Revolution and Civil War.

Inevitably, mention of the word
war
reminded him of his charge up San Juan Heights. “When I was myself in the army, one of the best colonels among the regular regiments who did so well on that day, who fought beside me, was a Jew!” As regimental commander, he had personally promoted five men: “two Protestants, two Catholics, and one Jew.”

Ingenuous protests like this, half boyish, half calculating, always made Hay’s whiskers twitch, but the committee listened with respect. Soon Roosevelt was well away:

It was a story he loved to tell. “Now let me give you another little example.…”

After an hour of such confidences, the committee trooped out glowing
with satisfaction. Questioned by reporters, they had to admit that they had failed in their mission. However, the President had promised to read the petition “most carefully.”

HIS EXCELLENCY
Arturo Paul Nicolas, Count de Cassini and Marquis de Capizzucchi de Bologna, Russian Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States, told Roosevelt that some four hundred anti-Semitic rioters had been arrested in Kishinev, and the local governor dismissed for failing to prevent the pogrom.

Hay cautioned that Cassini could not be trusted. For all his Italian nomenclature, he was as Russian as
borscht
, and lied with fabled virtuosity. The Ambassador, who mysteriously depended on his teenage daughter, Marguerite, for social purposes, introduced her around town as “
Princess Cassini,” when she was neither a princess nor, according to rumor, a Cassini. His numberless jeweled decorations may not all have been earned in the Tsar’s service, but they were the glittering envy of Embassy Row. When he stood under a chandelier at receptions, he looked like a section of the Milky Way.

Cassini’s assurances regarding Kishinev were nothing compared to his obfuscations about when, if ever, Russia intended to withdraw from Manchuria. He would say only that the ports there were now open to United States trade. This came as news to American observers in China, who reported that the Russian Bear had also begun to prowl Korea.

“
Dealing with a government with whom mendacity is a science is an extremely difficult matter,” Hay complained.

Roosevelt cared little for Korea, a little, impotent kingdom that fancied itself an empire—and even less for China. But he was aware that the latter was potentially the world’s greatest market.
If the Open Door was not so blocked by Russia, the United States could easily export everything the Chinese wanted to buy. “We wish for our people the commercial privileges which Russia again and again has said we shall have,” Roosevelt wrote to Lyman Abbott, the editor of
Outlook
. “It is very irritating. I do not know what action may be necessary in the future.”

As a strategic pragmatist, he felt that Russia had some “
legitimate aspirations” to fulfill in Manchuria, providing China was not partitioned, and the Far Eastern balance of power maintained. He agreed with Frederick W. Holls, one of his private foreign-policy advisers, who had written: “You
cannot keep
an Empire of one hundred and twenty million away from a harbor [Port Arthur] which is not frozen up in winter.… No Empire would build a stupendous work like the Siberian railroad, to end anywhere but in an ice-free harbor under its own control.”

Cassini expressed the same thought to his daughter in the privacy of the Russian Embassy. “
Try to understand this, Margot,” he said, running a long
forefinger down the map of Manchuria to Port Arthur. “To possess the East, Russia must possess the Liaotung peninsula.”

ROOSEVELT PUT ASIDE HIS
foreign-policy troubles on the new White House tennis court.
He played with intense concentration, quite unaware of the strangeness of his style. When serving, he grasped the racket stem halfway, forefinger pointing upward. His myopia kept him close to the net, but his reflexes were so quick that he nevertheless covered the court well, chasing the balls that got past him. After smashing a winning shot, he would rejoice with falsetto shrieks, and hop around on one foot, singing and laughing. Washington’s tour guides began driving their vehicles down West Executive Avenue, with megaphoned commentary: “
To the left you will see the famous tennis court. On most any pleasant afternoon you may see the President there, reaching for a high ball.”

Roosevelt’s favorite opponents were Gifford Pinchot and James Garfield. Although they were younger and more lithe than he, he could manage three sets with either of them. Speck von Sternburg, his old partner from Civil Service Commission days, still played a decent game, and Henry Cabot Lodge returned serves from all positions consonant with senatorial dignity. But the season’s real surprise was Jules Jusserand. Looking not unlike a Mont Blanc chamois, with his pointy beard and neat, precise leaps, the little ambassador darted about the court as nimbly as he ranged the field of medieval literature. Roosevelt beamed at him with increasing favor, much to the envy of Count Cassini, who received no invitations.

ON 22 JUNE
, the President received a letter from his first Southern appointee, Judge Thomas G. Jones of Alabama. He was pleased to read that Jones had, true to Booker T. Washington’s recommendation, condemned peonage as the modern equivalent of slavery, and sentenced several white racists to prison for holding black “employees” against their wills. Roosevelt sent a copy to Lyman Abbott (his most consistently reliable editorial supporter). “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “there is in the South a very large element … which hates and despises the Negro but is bent upon his continuing in the land.”

The “element” was larger than he thought, and not confined to the South.
One hundred miles northeast of the White House that evening, quiet groups of white men began to collect around a penitentiary near Wilmington, Delaware. The building was a massive structure, representing the latest in prison engineering. Wilmington’s police chief, whose name was Black, had chosen it to shelter a Negro murder suspect, whose name was White. Black felt that White needed all the security he could get, because the murder victim—who had identified him before dying—was a white teenage girl.

White sat now deep within the penitentiary, in a steel cell in a steel gallery in a steel chamber, sheathed behind brick walls, each with its own steel door, then a thicker wall, with a bigger door of wood and steel, then a yard, then another brick wall, and the biggest door of all, beyond which the quiet groups were forming.