TR Vs. The World

Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to win a Nobel Prize, which he clinched in part for brokering peace between Japan and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. During his presidency, he also paved the way for the construction of the Panama Canal. He got so far by “speaking softly and carrying a big stick,” as he famously advised to others. But how did that Big Stick Energy go over with his fellow politicians, the press, and the people? Find out all that and more in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
History Versus is a production of I Heart Radio and
Mental Flaws. Bucyrus steam shovel chugging away in the Caliber
cut is huge and complicated. It requires an engineer, a crane,
man of firemen, and several pitmen to keep it operating.

(00:22):
The machines five cubic yard bucket is capable of moving
eight tons of rock or nearly seven tons of earth
in a single scoop. And here in the massive gash
in the earth that will become the Panama Canal, the
machine goes about its job, scooping and dumping, scooping and
dumping elephant sized mounds of earth into waiting railway cars,
and currently President Theodore Roosevelt is behind the controls. It's

(00:45):
November six and with this trip to Panama Tierra has
become the first sitting president to leave the United States.
He's inspecting the progress on the canal that will one
day connect to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. When he
sees the steam shovel from his train, the President, who
is a kid at heart and can't resist a little
adventure or a photo op, instructs the train to stop,

(01:07):
hops down and strides in his crisp white suit into
the muddy cut. He hops on board the steam shovel
and begins a discussion with the engineer. Later, he'll tell
some assembled workers, you are doing the biggest thing of
the kind that has ever been done, and I wanted
to see how you are doing it. He reports that
he'll be able to tell people back in the States

(01:27):
that he can guarantee the success of the mighty work
the men are doing in Panama, adding it is not
an easy work. Mighty few things that are worth doing
are easy. The Panama Canal won't open until Feen, but
tears visit allows him to see a dream he had
spoken of since coming to life, and the fact that
he had supported a revolution with the American Navy to

(01:48):
make it happen didn't bother him in the least. The
canal was being built, and it would allow the U. S.
Navy to move easily from ocean to ocean, and to
get to America's specific territories more quickly and bully to that,
Roosevelt famously said, speak softly and carry a big stick,
you will go far. To some tr was an American visionary,
to others a warmonger, but he was a man just

(02:10):
as notable for the battles he fought, as he was
for the piece he secured. So just how did tr
use this big stick energy at home and around the world,
and how far did it get him? We're about to
find out. From Mental Floss and I Heart Radio. This
is History Versus, a podcast about how your favorite historical
figures faced off against their greatest foes. I'm your host,

(02:33):
Aaron McCarthy, and this episode is t r Versus the World.
It's not so surprising that Theodore Roosevelt had a lot
of opinions about America's place in the world. After all,
by the time he entered politics, Roosevelt had seen a
lot of the world. As a kid. He traveled extensively
with his family, touring Europe between eighteen sixty nine and
eighteen seventy and visiting Egypt and Jerusalem in eighteen seventy

(02:56):
two and eighteen seventy three. After both his first and
second marriages, he honeymooned in Europe. Roosevelt came into the
White House on the heels of a number of Civil
War veterans occupying the office. For them, worldliness was not
a prerequisite for the job. President McKinley famously couldn't even
find the Philippines on a map when the Spanish American
War began. Here's Jeffrey Warrow, professor and director of the

(03:17):
Military History Center at the University of North Texas, speaking
at the twenty nineteen Theodore Roosevelt's Imposium put up by
the Theatre Roosevelt Center at Dickenson State University in North Dakota.
Roosevelt arrived in the White House with a better knowledge
and feel for the world than arguably any of his predecessors,
with a possible exception of James Monroe or John Adams.
What he did was travel and read, travel and read

(03:40):
and reflect. That's Clay Jenkinson, founder of the Theater Roosevelt Center.
He's been to Germany, he lived there, his family has
been to the Vatican. He's met the Pope. He's gone
to Egypt. He's hunted along the Nile. He's you know,
he's met heads of state. He's had one of the
most privileged travel lives of any American president. And he's read.

(04:01):
He reads five languages. He reads maybe not a book
a day, but close to it. He's voracious. He loves history,
he loves geopolitics. He knows the Roman Empire, he knows Napoleon,
you know, rise of the British Empire. And it's the
guy who knows things. From the moment Roosevelt entered the
political arena, his mind was on expansion. After President Grover Cleveland,

(04:22):
and anti imperialist, refused to annex Hawaii, Roosevelt bemoaned his
decision not to exert his power for tr Taking Hawaii
was a necessity for the US. He would help the
country build up a military that could compete with Japan's
might out in the Pacific and expand American influence on
the other side of the globe. In eighteen writing and
Century magazine, Roosevelt said, it was a crime against the

(04:44):
United States. It was a crime against white civilization. Not
to annexit two and a half years ago. The delay
did damage that was perhaps irreparable. Or it meant that
at the critical period of the island's growth, the in
blocks of population consisted not of white Americans, but of
low cast laborers drawn from the Yellow races. So I

(05:08):
just want to pause right here because of those phrases
white civilization and yellow races. Roosevelt stance on imperialism is
tied to and informed by his views of race. We'll
discuss how he developed his views in a later episode,
but the cliffs Notes version is that Tier's elite upbringing, reading, habits,
Ivy League, education, and travels, along with eighteenth and nineteenth

(05:30):
century ideas about cultural and racial development, all informed his
racial theories. Ideas that we know today are totally wrong
and also totally repugnant, according to historian Thomas G. Dyer,
author of Theodore Roosevelt in the Idea of Race, Roosevelt
believed that the white English speaking American race was superior
to other races, and he thought it was America's duty

(05:51):
to export its white civilization to other areas of the globe.
Tr believed that all races and nationalities evolved through the
same stages of development, from chaotic savages to barbarism, where
races organized military virtues are formed, to the next stage,
where those military virtues blend with order and racial proliferation,

(06:11):
to the final two stages, which see a society lose
its fighting edge and eventually fall into decadence and death.
He thought that for a race to be successful and
stay there, it was necessary to keep what he called
its barbarian virtues basically, you've got to keep fighting to
stay on top tier. Knew that conflict would be inevitable
in expanding America's interests around the world, and due to

(06:32):
his belief in the importance of keeping those barbarian virtues,
he wanted it. He wrote that I should welcome almost
any war where I think this country needs one, and
in an address given not long after, he said, all
the great masterful races have been fighting races. And the
minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then

(06:54):
no matter what else it may retain, no matter how
skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it
has lost its proud right to stand as the equal
of the best. Do you feel kind of uncomfortable right
now listening to this? So did I when I read it.
There's so much it's problematic here. But before we dig

(07:17):
into it a little more history. Cleveland wasn't alone in
disliking America's imperialistic tendencies. This was a period when many
elected officials had a general distaste for growing a military
and expanding American influence around the globe. William Jennings Bryan,
President McKinley's opponent in the presidential election, and a man
who was pretty much the complete opposite of Roosevelt, laid

(07:39):
out the anti imperialist viewpoint perfectly, saying, we cannot set
a high and honorable example for the emulation of mankind
while we roam the world like beasts of prey, seeking
whom we may devour. Worldwide, though the tides of returning
Japan and Russia were expanding in the Pacific, in Britain,
France and Germany continued to colonize around the globe. All

(08:00):
these other nations are um building colonial empires and seeking
out new markets and acquiring territory. He thought Grover Cleveland
should be impeached for not taking Hawaii when he had
the chance. Uh, he's an imperialist and a jingoist. He
believes that war can be healthy. A war can be
healthy for a country. It can kind of reinvigorate you

(08:23):
and and and concentrate your manhood and remove some frivolity
and some complacency from the country. And that a good
war now. And then it's out of a tune out. Um,
we don't, we don't. Most of us don't see the
world that way anymore. And he believes he's an ardent
believer in the Monroe Doctrine, and that America is going

(08:44):
to become a world power, and that we need a
big navy because he's been reading um Mayn's book The
Influence of Sea Power on History. Roosevelt's vision for a mightier,
more expansive America would get closer to reality when he
was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy in He was
a vocal proponent for war against Spain at the time,
in defiance of President McKinley's more methodical approach. Tr would

(09:07):
also be a key figure in growing the U. S.
Navy and preparing them to go to war at a
moment's notice. And when the Spanish American War came in
it was Roosevelt's who personally helped lead the charge on
the ground in Cuba. Do you believe two things? One is,
we need we need to do this, We need these wars.
We need to assert ourselves as a nation and become

(09:27):
second only to Britain. But maybe first um and secondly,
if you want to lead this country, you need to
know something about these things. You can't just be standing
out on the prefect You have to get in the arena.
You can see these getting the arena themes often in
Roosevelt's speeches, including in The Strenuous Life, in which he
explicitly linked empire making with the idea of American masculinity.

(09:50):
The timid man, the lazy man, the man who distrusts
his country, the over civilized man who has lost the
great fighting master full virtues, the ignorant man, and the
man of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling
the mighty lift that thrills stern men with empires in

(10:11):
their brains. All these, of course, shrink from seeing the
nation undertake its new duties, Shrink from seeing us build
a navy in an army adequate to our needs. Shrink
from seeing us do our share of the world's work
by bringing order out of chaos. These are the men
who fear these strenuous life, who fear the only national

(10:35):
life which is really worth leading. Roosevelt also argued that
in places like Cuba and the Philippines, Americans had a
duty to oversee their populations until they reached a stage
where they could govern themselves. In the Strenuous Life, he
said that the Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their
population includes half caste and Native Christians warlike Moslems and

(10:57):
wild Pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for
self government and show no signs of becoming fit. Others
may in time become fit, but at present can only
take part in self government under a wise supervision, at
once firm and beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyranny from

(11:18):
the islands. If we now let it be replaced by
savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not
for good. In his nineteen o one Annual Message to Congress,
Roosevelt wrote that Americans could successfully govern themselves because they
have been working at it for generations, and said that
we couldn't expect to have another race accomplished out of
hand what had taken Americans so long to achieve, especially

(11:41):
when large portions of that race start very far behind
the point which our ancestors had reached even thirty generations ago.
He continued, In dealing with the Philippine people, we must
show both patience and strength, forbearance and steadfast resolution. Our
aim is high. We do not desire to do for
the islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for Tropic

(12:04):
people to buy even the best foreign governments, we hope
to do for them what has never before been done
for any people of the tropics, to make them fit
for self government after the fashion of the really free nations.
In the book of People's History of the United States,
Howard's Inn writes that Roosevelt was contemptuous of races and
nations he considered inferior, and according to Waro, Roosevelt never

(12:28):
thought about how weird it was that Americans should be
a democratic nation and yet imposed their decidedly not democratic
will on other nations. He never, for example, contemplated the
contradiction between American democracy and American imperialism, that is, having
one system of government for Americans in the United States
and another system of government for America's overseas columns. Of course,

(12:52):
everything Roosevelt is positing completely disregards that those countries would
have retained their right to self determination and been just
fine if not for the intervention of foreign powers. Later,
while campaigning as the vice presidential candidate for President McKinley,
Roosevelt pushed for American control of the Philippines before he
signed up to be VP. In fact, he'd written to
his friend and mentor, Henry Cabot Lodge that the thing

(13:14):
I should really like to do would be to be
the first civil governor general of the Philippines. Still, there
were opponents at home, including William Howard Taft, who would
go on to serve as governor there. One of the
most visible opponents and one of Roosevelt's most outspoken critics,
was writer Mark Twain. In a interview that appeared in
The New York World, Twain lamented America's insistence on intervening

(13:36):
in the Filipino government. I have tried hard, and yet
I cannot, for the life of me comprehend how we
got into that mess, he proclaimed. I thought we should
act as our protector, not try to get them under
our heel. It was not to be a government according
to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling
of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to
Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for

(13:58):
the United States. But now why we have got into
a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders
a difficulty of extrication immensely greater. The long and shockingly
brutal war would be officially declared over in July two,
and Tira was the President who made the announcement. Here's
Michael Collin and author of Theodore Roosevelt's Ghost, when he's

(14:19):
struggling with the war in the Philippines, the war that
he inherits from McKinley, of course, and he's struggling with
explaining how the US is going to get itself out
of the Philippines with its hands unbloodied. And so what
he does is he just declares the war over. And
it's not over. I mean, the war goes on really
until nineteen fifteen, but officially the war has ended in

(14:41):
en two. In the end, an estimated forty undred American
troops and twenty thousand Filipino troops have been killed in
the conflict, but those numbers are a drop in the
bucket compared to the two hundred thousand Filipino civilians that
are thought to have died from famine, disease and military
actions throughout the campaign. The years of war were and
bloodshed give America a stronger foothold in the Pacific, which

(15:03):
Tier believed was incredibly important for strategic reasons. But for
many this was a potentially horrifying glimpse of a nation
that was seemingly looking to plunge itself into war after war,
all for the sake of devouring more territories. Here's Jenkinson.
There's a constancy to his his foreign policy, and it
really offended people like Mark Twain. And Mark Twain looked

(15:24):
on this. This guy is actually crazy. This is a
very dangerous match. This is the last thing the United
States needs. It's gonna make us do all sorts are
really awful and dark things. And it did you get
involved in this sort of thing and become a world empire.
You're going to start doing things that are not really
harmonizing with the basic ideals of American life. UM ros

(15:46):
do as well. If we don't do it, somebody else will.
So we're going to do it. This seems like a
good place to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Roosevelt viewed his role as a steward of the people,
and as he would later in his autobiography, I did
not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use
of executive power. Roosevelt believed his position should be one

(16:08):
of action. He wanted to influence policy and enact as
much positive change as possible, and he used power aggressively
and oftentimes unilaterally. Often, his weapon of choice was an
executive order. Since the president cannot create new laws without
Congress getting involved, executive orders exist as a way for
a president to instruct employees in the executive branch to

(16:28):
interpret existing laws a certain way. So tr wasn't creating
new laws, but was instead manipulating them how he wanted.
He passed staggering one thousand eighty one executive orders during
his tenure in office to get things done. Roosevelt far
outpaced his predecessor, William McKinley, who tellied just a hundred
and eighty five executive orders. Here's culinen Congress can act.

(16:48):
I mean it is that it is the most powerful
branch if it could operate effectively. Um, and sometimes it does.
But that's what Roosevelt I think understood was that Congress
wasn't able to organize itself. That there's too many factions
within the two major parties that effectively their coalitions, and
those coalitions don't always agree on policy, and it takes

(17:09):
a long time for Congress to work through to reach
a consensus, and so the president can do something in
a moment, and the converse then well, as he said,
has to debate it. Roosevelt's use of executive orders helped
quadruple the amount of protective land in the United States
and lowered the age of eligibility for pension for veterans
to sixty two. For example, Roosevelt also acted unilaterally when

(17:33):
it came to international affairs. Historian Kathleen Dalton writes that
in foreign policy, Tier operated as a law unto himself.
He sometimes dealt with other heads of state or intervened
in international matters without consulting Congress or even his own
cabinet first. These kinds of power moves did not go
over well, and whenever someone criticized the president for making

(17:55):
those moves well, that didn't go over well either. Take
for example, when Roosevelt said the Great White Fleet sixteen
naval battleships on a forty three thousand mile, fourteen month
journey around the globe in n seven. This huge showcase
of American power was sent off without giving Congress or
the State Department a chance to approve the mission, which
was an enormous expense and risk to the country. When

(18:18):
one senator threatened to withhold the money for the trip,
Roosevelt is said to have replied that he already had
the money and dared the Senator to try and get
it back. That brings us back to the Panama Canal,
something tr would take heap for long after he left office.
The idea of a man made canal across the Isthmus
of Panama, a narrow strip of land between the Pacific
and Atlantic Oceans, had been a far off dream for politicians,

(18:41):
royalty and engineers from the sixteenth century. Holy Roman Emperor
Charles the fifth is credited as the first world leader
to seriously consider the idea and ordered a survey of
the area in fifteen thirty four. Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin would later support it, while Presidents Andrew Jackson and
Ulysses S. Grant would go a step further by sending
surveyors out to see about its feasibility. But the canal

(19:02):
always seemed just out of reach of engineers at the
time until eighteen sixty nine that's c of a Siouez
Canal opened, which connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red
Sea through the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt. It provided
the shortest route between Europe and the lands around the
Indian and Western Pacific Oceans. Engineers now had a blueprint
for tackling Panama, and France stepped up to try to

(19:24):
make it happen. The Suez Canal Company had been comprised
mainly of French investors and a team of engineers led
by Ferdinando Lecepps. For the Panama project, France again brought
in de Lacepps, who claimed that the project would take
twelve years and two hundred and forty million dollars to finish.
Work began in eighteen eighty one, but Panama could not
be tamed like Suez. Heavy rains made work sites unnavigable

(19:46):
and boiling heat. Snake bites, malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox
killed off many of the men. Others were buried in
mud slides along with their expensive equipment. The dangerous work
environment was responsible for an estimated twenty thousand as the
project's costs ballooned to two hundred and eighty seven million,
and the canal was nowhere near done. By eighteen eighty nine,

(20:09):
the French had given up. Dreams of a Panama Canal
would seemingly go unfulfilled. Enter Theodore Roosevelts. When tierre ascended
to the presidency, in nineteen o one. He almost immediately
began talks of making his long held dreams of the
canal a reality. He was determined to pick up where
the French left off, telling Congress, no single great material

(20:30):
work which remains to be undertaken on this continent is
of such consequence to the American people. That might not
be as overblown a statement as you'd think. A man
made canal would cut thousands of miles off of trips
that had previously required ships to go around the southern
point of the America's It would speed up commerce, further
connect to the globe, and in the hands of America,
helped create an empire. Still, there was debate over the

(20:53):
exact location of the canal. One school of thought believed
in a canal in Nicaragua, while in increasing minority preferred Panama.
Though Panama was losing in Congress, a man named Philippe
Bruno Varia, a civil engineer and an investor who had
financial ties to the old French project, successfully helped to
lobby politicians to choose the more politically volatile Panama. To

(21:15):
get to Panama, though you had to go through Colombia,
which had control of the area, at the time, so
Roosevelt had his Secretary of State John Hay, offered the
government ten million dollars upfront and after nine years two
and fifty thousand dollars annually for the right to build
the canal and lease the area, but the Colombian government
didn't go for it. One rumored reason for the rejection,

(21:37):
according to Kathleen Dalton, is that Germany may have sabotaged
the U. S s relationship with Colombia. They allegedly did
so by spreading stories that Americans back home were prejudiced
towards Colombians and routinely referred to them by a particular
racial slur, which some claim may have been enough to
sour the country on dealing with the United States. Dalton
also says rumors abounded that Germany was willing to fund

(21:57):
the canal behind the scenes, which would have fed into
increasing paranoia about German immigration, especially to Brazil. Roosevelt couldn't
let another European power have so much say in Latin America,
but Columbia still wasn't budging. He later told author William
Roscoe Fair that trying to make an agreement with the
rulers of Colombia was like trying to nail current jelly

(22:18):
to the wall. There's a certain number of millions of
dollars we can give to them, and then they'll cooperate
because it's obviously going to be in their interest. But
when they begin to to balk a little bit and
don't want to just be rolled over, Roosevelt flies into
a kind of righteousness rage. He's got a problem with
righteousness anyway, and so then he decides to just do

(22:43):
what it takes. Roosevelt and other purveyors of American might
were none too pleased about Columbia's dismissal of the U.
S S. Offer. Roosevelt is said to have remarked, those
contemptible little creatures in boul Guton ought to understand how
much they're jeopardizing things and imperiling their own future. In
November nine three, Panama launched a rebellion against Colombia. Well

(23:05):
Roosevelt didn't officially support the imminent rebellion. He deployed the
USS Nashville and other craft to the Panama coast to
block off any Colombian reinforcements and all but ensure that
the rebellion would be a success and so there's one
of the many, many, many insurrections happens in the Panamanian
neck of Columbia, which is kind of physically isolated from

(23:27):
the rest of the nation. The United States doesn't exactly
foment it, but we do slyly encourage it. We recognize
the new nation of Panama within hours. It's very unseemly um.
The whole thing is the smells of real politique. I
reject the notion that the United States created the the

(23:51):
revolution in Panama, but it certainly made it clear that
it would not mind the revolution and that it would
be siding with the rebels against the kleptocracy as Roosevelt
saw out of Columbia. On November eight three, the Hey
Bunovaria Treaty was signed and then ratified a few months later,
giving the United States possession of the Panama Canal zone

(24:12):
for ten million dollars and two d and fifty thousand
dollars annually beginning nine years later. Roosevelt got roasted. Dalton
writes that the Senate accused him of usurping Congress's war powers,
though they apparently weren't angry enough to vote against the treaty.
It passed the Senate sixty six to fourteen. Colorado Senator

(24:33):
Henry Teller basically called Roosevelt a thief, saying, you have
no right to take Columbia's land and the interest of civilization,
that is the robbers claim we want it, and therefore
we take it. The papers also got in on the action,
with the Chicago American calling Roosevelt's actions a rough riding
assault upon another republic over the shattered wreckage of international

(24:53):
law and diplomatic usage. Even roosevelt Attorney General Philander Knox
couldn't resist ribbing Roosevelt a bit joe, that he shouldn't
let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.
Roosevelt was unapologetic. He would later say that if Panama
hadn't revolted on its own, he would have asked Congress
to invade. In a speech at the University of California

(25:14):
in nineteen eleven, he continued to defend his strategy for
securing the canal, saying, if I had followed traditional conservative methods,
I would have submitted a dignified state paper of probably
two hundred pages to Congress, and the debate on it
would have been going on yet, but I took the
canal zone and let Congress debate. And while the debate

(25:36):
goes on, the canal does also. The fact is he
hastened that project by years probably, and it all kind
of worked out later after he left office. The Taft
and Wilson administrations um essentially apologized to Columbia and offered
economic recompense for the high handedness of what Roosevelt had done.

(26:00):
And this threw him into a powering rage. This was this,
This is one of the most hurtful things in the
course of his life. And his view was, don't you
don't do that. You don't ever, you don't ever after
the fact come back and say, well, my predecessor was
a hothead or an imperialist, and we're now going to
compensate you. That that that's essentially an expost factor vote

(26:23):
of no confidence to the Roosevelt administration. That's unfair. He
wasn't called upon to testify. Um that is that. It
is that and he was deeply offended by this, and
it's part of what drove him to try to get
back into power. In Roosevelt would continue to flex us
might across Latin America for the remainder of his time

(26:44):
in office. By this time, he saw debt as one
of the biggest threats to the US is interest in
the America's and not US debt, but instead debt that
Latin and South American countries owed to European powers. Foreign
debts could be used as a pretext for invasion. Roosevelt
feared that too much economic turmoil could lead to military
intervention and colonization of the indebted countries to a European

(27:06):
power like the UK, France, and Germany. He felt that
things got perilously close during a debt crisis in Venezuela
in nineteen o two and oh three, which led to
a blockade of the country by the United Kingdom, Germany,
and Italy. While there was no seizure of the country,
Roosevelt was on alert. He wasn't about to let Europe
have any influence on his side of the globe. His

(27:27):
solution was to establish the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
The Monroe Doctrine was a policy adopted in eighteen twenty
three that boiled down to this the United States would
intervene in any European attempts at colonizing an independent state
in North or South America. The corollary was declared by
Roosevelt to Congress in nineteen o four. It stated that
not only could the US intervene in any colonization attempts

(27:49):
from Europe, but it could also step in when a
nation's wrongdoing or impotence had invited foreign aggression to the
detriment of the entire body of American nations. In essence,
the United States would prevent European intervention by intervening before
there was even a crisis. In his autobiography, Roosevelt said
that nine tenths of wisdom is to be wise in
time and at the right time, explaining that the entirety

(28:12):
of his foreign policy was based on intelligent forethought and
decisive action before any crisis could pop up, which he
said would make it improbable that we would run into
serious trouble. So afterwards, when rumors were swirling that Europeans
were going to collect on their debt in the Dominican
Republic through the use of military force, Roosevelt sent naval
ships to the country and to control of the customs

(28:33):
house there. The US government began collecting taxes to repay
what was owed, keeping forty percent for the Dominican Republic's expenses,
while the remainder would be used to pay off the debt.
If you're going to protect the Western Hemisphere from European colonization,
if you're going, in the age of steam and railroads,
to protect the Monroe Doctrine, you're going to have to

(28:55):
have the Roosevelt corollary because those nations do misbehave. And
if if we don't want Germany and England to come
in and um and and slap them around, then we're
going to have to police those countries. The policy was
popular among expansionists, but that's about where its popularity ended.
In Latin America, it was seen as a gross overstep

(29:17):
of authority, and in the years that followed Roosevelt's presidency,
growing hostilities would lead the US to get involved in
a number of armed conflicts in Latin America, most notably
Nicaragua and Haiti. It would be Franklin Roosevelt who would
backtrack on the Roosevelt corollary with the Good Neighbor Policy
in N three, which promised more trade and dialogue to
stabilize Latin America rather than military might. This would be

(29:39):
formalized in the Monte Vido Convention, which proclaimed no state
has the right to intervene in the internal or external
affairs of another. During the first few years of his presidency,
Theodore Roosevelt had firmly established a pseudo imperialistic strategy for
dealing with Latin America and the Pacific. But he'd soon
be up against drama on the other side of the globe,
and at home, we'll be right back. We've talked a

(30:04):
lot in this episode about how t R spoke softly
and carried a big stick abroad. But you can't go
up against the whole world without having a few battles
at home. So I want to take a quick aside
to talk about one instance in which he used his
big stick on US soil. It started in two went
around a hundred forty seven thousand workers from the United
Mine Workers of America Union in eastern Pennsylvania went on strike.

(30:26):
These miners specialized in anthracite coal, which was the main
heat source for cities in the eastern United States during
the early twentieth century. A labor strike usually wouldn't fall
under the purview of the President of the United States,
but the prospect of a coal shortage was different. Concerns
rose that homes would go heatless, and as the strike
headed into the latter months of the year with winter looming,

(30:46):
the president feared widespread rioting by heatless homeowners could have
rupted around the country if action wasn't taken. So Roosevelt
brought representatives from the coal mines, railroads, and labor to
the White House and told them basically that they were
going to have to work it out. Jenkinson explains that
Roosevelt also told them that he would be creating a
commission to come up with recommendations, and that those recommendations

(31:08):
would be accepted or else. The captains of industry said, no,
there's just no way we're doing that. That's not how
it works. Rolls outside, Well, that's how it spider work.
I'm going to send in US troops to run the
coal mines if necessary, but I'm not going to let
the people of the United States um frees to death
in this coming winter because you all can't work this out.

(31:29):
And so there's your choice. You either take the commission
and abide by its findings, or I'm gonna do what
has to be done, which is to secure the the
distribution infrastructure of coal, which is how the nation heats
its homes. Roosevelt's commission that helped settle the dispute was
made possible by JP Morgan, who worked with TRS then

(31:51):
Secretary of War Allie, who route to draft the proposal
plan for the commission. The mining operators accepted the plan
for the commission, which would have members chosen by Roosevelt.
By the end of October, it was agreed that the
miners would go back to work and the commission would
be get it to investigation into the situation, which included
three months of meetings, endless interviews from both sides, and

(32:12):
more than ten thousand pages of testimony. In the end,
the commission settled on a verdict. The workers would get
a ten percent increase in pay, not they wanted, and
their work day would be reduced from ten hours to nine,
not the eight hours they'd hoped for, so they didn't
see all of their demands met. The intervention and subsequent
mediation from the federal government helped the workers get a

(32:32):
far fairer hearing than they likely would have otherwise and
avoided the growing violence that so many strikes eventually led to.
At the time. Just like he proved on the global stage,
Roosevelt wasn't afraid to use the power of the presidency
in unprecedented ways when he felt action needed to be taken.
Here's Colinane effectively, Roosevelt believed that the president could act

(32:52):
as a mediator or arbitrator between capital and labor, and
that he thought that there was excesses on both sides there.
I think tr was a particularly good arbitrator. Okay, now
back to the rest of the world. Roosevelt had proven
that he was a skilled arbitrator at home, but in
nineteen o five he faced a challenge that tested those

(33:13):
skills in foreign policy, the Russo Japanese War. The conflict
called for him to take on a new role, not
as a man who wanted to start wars, but one
who stopped them. As Americans, we weren't involved directly in
the Russell Japanese War, but I've heard it described as
World War zero. It was. It was an early mechanized war.
That's Tyler caliberta education technician at Sagamore Hill National Historic Site.

(33:36):
Japanese and Russians were killing each other in great numbers.
They were um sending soldiers to the front by rail car,
and it took place in nineteen o five, so I
mean it's only about ten years before the First World War.
The conflict between Japan and Russia involved the mutual interest
in the lands of Manchuria and Korea. Russia saw control

(33:57):
of this region because of its warm water ports, the
Tree Siberian ports always had to close during the icy winters.
To avoid a military conflict, Japan had originally proposed that
Russia keep its interests in Manchuria while Japan kept influence
over Korea. Negotiations broke down, though, and Japan officially started
the war on February eighth, nineteen o four, with a

(34:17):
surprise attack on a Russian fleet at Port Arthur, Manchuria.
The war raged throughout nineteen o four, with Russia being
handed one humiliating defeat after another. Japan's highly disciplined and
organized navy got the world's attention, But despite the fact
that Japan seemed to be winning the war, the Empire
was running out of money and had discreetly reached out
through an intermediary to see if Roosevelt and the US

(34:39):
would act as a mediator to help broker peace between
the two sides. Roosevelt seized the opportunity, but, as historian
Edmund Morris writes, if he was to be a peacemaker,
he could not let the Czar think he had solicited
the job. Roosevelt told his Secretary of State John Hay
not to make it look like he was outright offering
his help. He wanted to end up fighting, though rose

(35:00):
Veld had grown uncomfortable with Japan's dominance of the war.
A decisive defeat of Russia, an embarrassment of such a
prideful empire, could destabilize the whole political scene in the Pacific,
and what would that look like for America, which had
just taken its first steps into the region. Here's Jenkinson,
and Roosevelt realizes, whenever that happens, this leads to trouble.
When this happens, this, this destabilizes the world and leads

(35:22):
to more conflict than maybe a larger conflict. So he
wants America to get into the arena. So he thinks,
look at this, here's this moment where I understand this.
The rest of the world is too cynical and jaded
to really know what to do here, So I'm gonna
do this kind of impulsive, idealistic thing. I'm gonna I'm
gonna offer to bring the belligerents to the United States,

(35:44):
to this neutral country, and I'm going to say, will
provide the the foundation, the platform where you can work
this out. And it's a it's hard for us to
realize how big a deal this was. This would be
like Vietnam offering to step in unsettled dispute between the
United States and Iran, and the rest of the world

(36:07):
will just sneer and think, what, who are these people
to think? You know what, you have no standing? Who
what a what a ridiculous gambit that is. But there
was a problem. Russia's are Nicholas the second wasn't budging.
The word just compounded Russia's domestic issues. Nicholas was increasingly
unpopular back home, and an anti autocrat sentiment had been

(36:30):
spreading throughout the country ever since his coronation, fanned by
the upstart Socialist Revolutionary Party. Peace talks at such time
would look like a Japanese victory, and the Czar couldn't
give any more ammunition to those salivating for revolution. The
pride was there, but in the face of so many
defeats by the Japanese. The logic was not the Czar
is a preposterous little creature. As the absolute autocrat of

(36:53):
one hundred and fifty million people, he is unable to
make war, and he is now on a b to
make peace, Roosevelt wrote to Hey. But by the start
of nineteen o five, peace talks became the only way
out for Nicholas. In January, the Russian Revolution of five began,
partly brought on by the abject failure of the Japanese campaign.

(37:15):
Worse yet came the disastrous loss of the Battle of
Tsushima in May, resulting in a Russian loss of four
thousand men and almost the entire fleet compared to Japan's
a hundred and seventeen men and three sunken torpedo boats.
By August, both Russia and Japan were ready to talk,
and the first item on the agenda was for both
parties to meet separately with the President at his home

(37:35):
and Oyster Bay to discuss their desired terms for ending
the war. Japan came first, sending diplomat to Tura Kimura
and to Kira Kugoro, Japanese ambassador to the United States,
to Sagamore Hill. They were followed a few days later
by Russian diplomat Baron Rahman Romano Vich von Roisen and
Syrigi Yulovich Vita. On August five, the two sides finally

(37:56):
met in person on the presidential yacht, the U. S. S. Mayflower,
which was anchored in Oyster Bay, for lunch. The Roosevelt
was privately unsure that peace would be made, he warmly
welcomed the two sides. The lunch was just as awkward
as you may imagine, at least for the Japanese and Russians.
According to Marris, Roosevelt alone seemed at ease. The meal

(38:17):
was a cold lunch with even colder wine, a welcome
spread for a hot summer day, And before they dug in,
Roosevelt offered a Champagne toast, which he asked to be unanswered.
I drink to the welfare and the prosperity of the sovereigns,
and to the peoples, to the two great nations whose
representatives had met one another on this ship. It is

(38:37):
my most earnest hope and prayer, in the interest not
only of these two great powers, but of all civilized mankind,
that a just and lasting piece may speedily be concluded
between them. After lunch, the two sides took a formal photograph.
Then the Japanese went to a separate ship, and both sides,
along with the Americans, sailed to the Navy yard at Portsmouth,

(38:59):
New Hampshire the official talks. It was a remote site
that was chosen for its peace and security over the
scorching temperatures and gaggles of reporters that you'd find in
d C. In August later, at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt said,
I think we are off to a good start. I
know perfectly well the whole world is watching me, and
the condemnations that will come down on me if the

(39:20):
conference failed will be worldwide. Two but that's all right.
The talks immediately hit a deadlock. Vita, who was acting
on the Czar's wishes, would not bend to the Japanese.
There would be no reimbursing the Japanese for war costs,
and no forfeiture of territory, especially the Russian island of
sak Holland, which Japan had ceased during the war. Roosevelt

(39:43):
knew that the talks would go nowhere if Russia was
not willing to sacrifice its honor in any way, he
continued to grow frustrated with Russia's attitude, letting slip one
fantasy he had of grabbing the Czar and his ministers
and marching them to the end of Long Island so
he could run them violently down a steep place into
the sea. Soon, Roosevelt shed his role as a neutral
mediator and began taking a more active role in the negotiations,

(40:06):
doing so in the same frank, unpredictable style that had
both thrilled and exhausted so many in Washington. Late one evening,
Russia's negotiator, Baron Roisen, got an unexpected wake up call
at two am from Third Assistant Secretary of State Herbert Pierce,
ordering him to Sagamore Hill to meet with the President
that afternoon. According to Morris, Royson found Tier decked out
in white flannel, absorbed in a game of tennis, but

(40:29):
rather than put his racket down and get to the
business of peacemaking, the President divided his attention between the
action on and off the court, returning to the game
at nearly every pause in the conversation. According to historian
Stanley Wine, It's likely that this conversation on the tennis
court lasted around ninety minutes. And while Roosevelt did reassure
Roisen that Chapan would seed too many of Russia's demands,

(40:50):
he also said that it might be tougher to split
the island of Saklin without some sort of compensation for Japan.
So Roosevelt countered suggesting that Russia pay for it's half
in the north, while Japan would remain in the south.
This would leave Russia with some, but not all, of
the territory it wanted, and Japan would get some money
out of the deal, though not an official reimbursement. Again,

(41:12):
the idea was rejected. The Czar drew a hard line
that no compensation was to be paid, and with a
little digging, you can see why Japan was seeking one
point two billion yen, an amount that made even the
disgruntled Russian people saide with their's are. While Japan was
winning the war, it was hurting financially, leaving them with
little power at the negotiating table. So what happens when

(41:33):
neither side wants to budge, Well, nothing, and I mean
that in the most literal way possible. At one point,
Vita and Comra officially had nothing left to discuss. Russia
refused to pay Japan for its war costs, and Japan
wouldn't move ahead with the talks if no money came
their way. So the men sat across from each other,
slowly taking drags of their cigarettes, not saying a word

(41:56):
for eight agonizing minutes. That silence was the sound of
the Russo Japanese war dragging on and on and on.
Roosevelt's previous fear that the failure of this conference would
become a worldwide failure on his part seemed to be
becoming a reality. On Monday, August, the President realized there

(42:18):
was nothing more he could do. Rumors swirled that the
Russians were asking for their hotel bill so they could
get out of Portsmouth. Then suddenly, on August, Vita entered
another negotiation meeting with a white piece of paper. It
contained Russia's final concessions. There would be no payment, but
Japan would have South Sakkalin if Russia could have the North.

(42:40):
For Roosevelt, this was the only chance to end a
war that neither country could even afford to keep fighting.
So he went to the Japanese and he said, look, yes,
I know you want indemnities, and I know you you
want punitive damages and territorial aggrandousment and and so on.
I get it, and you probably deserve it, but you can't.

(43:00):
I'm going to insist that you cut the deal here
because if you don't, if you cut too severe a deal,
all you're doing is planting the seed of a much
more severe conflict down the lines. So you're gonna have
to swallow your national pride, and I know it's going
to be awful, but if you do it, you're going

(43:21):
to be better off in the long run, and the
world's going to be more stable. And so that's what
I'm asking you to do. The Japanese accepted the terms,
and the Treaty of Portsmouth was officially signed on September five.
The treaty resulted in the recognition of Japan's interest in
Korea and greatly expanded their power in South Manchuria, including
over key railways. Russia's power in the Pacific was now

(43:43):
a fraction of what it had been, but in the end,
Thessar didn't have to open his wallet, in large part
for his work as a mediator to bring peace between
the two nations. Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in nineteen o six, making him the first American to
win a Nobel prize of any kind. Mars would say
Roosevelt Peace was made possible because of his inexplicable ability

(44:03):
to impose his singular charge upon plural power by sheer
force and moral purpose, by clarity of perception, by mastery
of detail, and benign manipulation of men. The most congratulatory
was Roosevelt himself, who gleefully exclaimed, it is a mighty
good thing for Russia, and a mighty good thing for Japan,
and a mighty good thing for me too. The world

(44:25):
was shocked, and they realized this country has arrived, and
this guy is one of the most interesting leaders on
the world stage, and he has moxie, but he also
has the capacity to fulfill the big slopping claims that
he's making. And so this was this was another great
momentum in the history of this country, in a great

(44:47):
moment for Theodore Roosevelt. And and if if he had
said to a thousand advisers, should we try to get
involved in this Russo Japanese conflict, they would have said
that has nothing to do with us. Um, they're probably
gonna swat you away. We could just wind up being humiliated.
No good is going to come with this. Um. We
gotta we got to keep our focus on the real

(45:08):
stuff we're trying to do here. But Roosevelt just had
this big soul and he realized that if we can
pull this off, the world was going to look at
us in a different way. And he was absolutely right.
Roosevelt knew the power of the Japanese wielded, and he
knew that maintaining relations with them was integral to America's interests.

(45:28):
In nineteen o six, a domestic decision out of his
hands threatened that relationship. It happened when the San Francisco
School Board decided to segregate schools in the district by
separating Japanese students from white ones. The order was the
result of hostility stemming from the ever growing Japanese population
that was entering the country for work at the time.
The order incensed Roosevelt, flying into a rage. He threatened

(45:51):
to do anything and everything, from suing the Board of
Education to sending troops to San Francisco to ensure the
segregation wouldn't last. Japan made it known that they were
upset with the ruling, and anti American protests were beginning
to erupt throughout the country. If there was a war,
it would be one of the United States wasn't ready
to fight. Tier knew he had to fix it. Roosevelt

(46:13):
ordered the mayor of San Francisco and the school board
to the White House and convinced them to rescind the order,
assuring them that the federal government would take care of
the issue. He also worked through the Japanese diplomats to
come to an agreement. In nineteen o six, tr wrote
to his Secretary of Commerce that he had spoken with
the Japanese ambassador about the issue, telling him that the
only way to prevent constant friction between the United States

(46:35):
and Japan was to restrict immigration of Japanese citizens into
the US two people like businessmen and students, and to
keep Japanese laborers out, whom he referred to repeatedly using
a racial slur. I'm not going to quote Roosevelt directly
here because of that, but instead paraphrase. According to Roosevelt,
the ambassador agreed with him and said that he had

(46:56):
always been against letting Japanese laborers come into Hawaii in
the US. Roosevelt worried that it would be hard to
get the Japanese to agree to it because of what
had happened in San Francisco, but he hoped that his
annual message would smooth over their feelings so they would
have sent to the policy. At any rate, He wrote,
I shall do my best to bring this about. The
result is what is now known as the Gentleman's Agreement

(47:17):
of nineteen o seven. In it, the United States agreed
to repeal the discriminatory school practice and the Japanese government
agreed to restrict issuing passports to laborers who wished to
leave to work in the United States. Here's Colinane. The
Gentleman's has been viewed as a racialist policy, and I
think that's only part right, and not even a large part.

(47:38):
So Roosevelt's policy was racialists, and that it locked the
Japanese out of the United States, But that wasn't the
primary reason why the Gentleman's Agreement was fashioned. It was
because Roosevelt was worried about labor in on the West Coast, particularly,
and he was worried about labor unions and also he

(47:59):
didn't want to up wealthy Japanese from coming to the
United States. He thought, well, love the Japanese coming. We're
basically a form of direct foreign investment, and he encouraged that.
So the Gentleman's agreement is really locking out Japanese labor.
And that was not the same for other countries like China.
He believed in excluding the Chinese entirely, whereas he saw

(48:19):
the Japanese as being of two classes, the working class
and the elite like him. Uh And that that sort
of positive regard for the Japanese plays out in a
number of letters at Roosevelt Rites, and you know he
speaks about the Japanese with a with a warm sentiment,
where he doesn't talk like that about the Chinese. Thomas

(48:39):
Dyer points out that the key difference in roosevelt strategy
was usually based on his perception of the race he
was dealing with. Tier had respect for Japan, especially their military,
and saw the country as a potential challenger for global
supremacy down the road, whereas he called the leaders and
citizens and countries like Colombia and the Philippines backwards people
and savages, among other things, making them fair game for

(49:02):
American imperialistic desires. According to dire, was there a difference
in the way t r handled a situation based on
sort of the leader of the country or his perception
of the country, Because if you look at how he
handled you know, what happened with Colombia and the Panama Canal,

(49:24):
it's very, very different from how he handled you know,
what was happening with Russia and Japan. Well, he's a racist,
there's no question about it. I mean, you can tiptoe
around this, but he was a racist. And what was
kind of a pseudo scientific way, he believed that there
was a racial hierarchy, that there was a there was

(49:45):
a hierarchy, and at the top of that hierarchy were
the Anglo Saxon people and then the two Topic people, um,
and then it worked its way down and at the
very bottom were indigenous peoples and New Zealand and in
the American West and in South Africa, and just above
those indigenous peoples were Africans. The Roosevelt definitely believed in

(50:09):
a hierarchy, and he believed that the white Anglo Saxon
people's of the world on moss as a culture, as
a civilization, or as a tribe or at the top
of the heap, and that other people's were somewhere down.
The pathy interesting thing is that he put the Japanese
very high in this hierarchy, above some Europeans, but below

(50:31):
what he would have regarded as the most advanced Europeans.
And that's why he found them the Japanese so fascinating,
where it's the Chinese he would have put, and the
Filipinos much lower on those scales. And so when he's
dealing with Canada or England, or France or Germany, he
has a certain way of going about things because they're

(50:51):
part of the club. And we still have this in
the G seven. We say it's economically based, but it
has a lot to do with other dynamics too. Roosevelt's
use on race are, in a word, complex. On certain issues,
he certainly earned his progressive reputation. He supported ending segregation
in New York public schools during his time as governor,
famously invited book Or T. Washington to dine at the

(51:12):
White House when he was president, and fought for a
square deal for all Americans. When you dig deeper, though
many of his opinions are undeniably discriminatory and for some
parts of the world, destructive. It's an aspect of Roosevelt's
legacy that historians still grapple with. How could a president
as forward thinking in some ways has such a blind
spot on the issue of race. It's easy to explain

(51:34):
it away as t r simply being a product of
his time, or you could go the other way and
paint him as a racist with a broad brush. But
those are both oversimplifications, and as we've seen, nothing about
Theodore Roosevelt or his views is simple. We'll be tackling
some of these difficult questions in a future episode. What's

(51:55):
undeniable is that Theodore Roosevelt and his policies had a
lasting impact on affairs both at home and overseas. He
took a country hell bent on staying isolated and turned
it into a dominant force on the seas. He stopped
wars between world powers and carved a canal that united
two oceans, something that was seen as a fantasy only
a few years prior. Works in all, Theodore Roosevelt went

(52:18):
beyond the political battleground of Washington, d c. To announce
to the world that America was now a power to
be reckoned with and if it had to it was
ready to fight. He brought America into the world as
a central player, and we've been that central player ever since.

(52:40):
History Verses is hosted by me Aaron McCarthy. This episode
was written by Ja Serafino, with research by me and
additional research by Michael Salgarolo, fact checking by Austin Thompson,
field recording by John Mayer. Joe Wigan voiced Theodore Roosevelt
in this episode. The executive producers are Aaron McCarthy, Julie Douglas,
and Tyler Lang. The supervising producer is Dylan Fagan. The

(53:03):
show is edited by Dylan Fagan and lowbra Ante. Special
thanks to Clay Jenkinson, Michael Collinane, Tyler Caliberta, Jeffrey Waow,
and the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. To
learn more about this episode and Theodore Roosevelt, check out
our website at mental Flass dot com, Slash History Versus
that's Mental flash dot com. Slash h I S t

(53:24):
O R y vs. History Versus is a production of
I Heart Radio and Mental Floss. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app. Apple

(53:46):
podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.