From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (58 page)

American Jews vigorously protested. By this time, they comprised a populous and well-organized group and controlled several major New York banking houses. They represented a crucial voting bloc in major cities. Already angry over Russian travel restrictions, they expressed outrage at the pogroms. They conducted mass protests in New York and Chicago that drew support from human rights advocates such as social worker Jane Addams and journalist Carl Schurz. They flooded the government with petitions demanding action.
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The Roosevelt administration responded cautiously. The president and Hay to some degree shared the anti-Semitism that pervaded old-stock America and viewed the Jewish protest as an unwelcome intrusion from a minority group promoting narrow interests. They believed that protest was futile. On the other hand, they had little use for the tsar, shared Jewish anger at these "fiendish cruelties," and feared that the pogroms might provoke flight to the United States of "hordes of Jews . . . in unabsorbable
numbers," something to "rank with the exodus from Egypt," Hay warned. With an election a year away, they recognized the value of doing something. They passed on to the Russian government a petition drafted by the protestors. To secure maximum political advantage, they released it to the press. This marked the first official U.S. protest against Russian anti-Semitism in a case where the nation's interests were not directly involved.
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Hay congratulated himself that the administration had at least laid the issue before the world, but the protest had little practical effect. The Russian government naturally bristled at U.S. intrusion and refused to accept the petition. Ambassador Artur Cassini pointedly retorted that the lynching of African Americans and beating of Chinese in the United States made it "unbecoming for Americans to criticize" Russia. A new wave of pogroms accompanied the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1905, with an estimated 3,100 Jews killed in that year alone.
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"What inept asses they are, these Kalmucks!" Hay privately fumed, but the administration refused to do more, and Jewish protest mounted and took new forms. The powerful financier Jacob Schiff called for military intervention, and fifty thousand Jews marched in New York City. Schiff and other Jewish bankers blocked U.S. and European loans to Russia for its war with Japan and helped the Japanese secure funds, hoping that a Russian military defeat might provoke revolution and ultimately improve conditions for Jews. In 1906, the protestors formed the American Jewish Committee to orchestrate their actions. Increasingly, they focused on abrogation of the Russian-American commercial treaty of 1832, pointing out that it called for equal treatment for citizens of all countries and should be either honored or scrapped. Upon succeeding Roosevelt, Taft tried to head off congressional action by negotiating an agreement with Russia for joint abrogation. The Russians stubbornly refused. In December 1911, responding to Jewish pressures, the House of Representatives passed 300 to 1 a resolution favoring abrogation. Bowing to the inevitable, a reluctant Taft gave the required year's notice for termination of the treaty.
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American Jewish leaders hailed abrogation as a "great victory for human rights," but it was considerably less. It did little to help Russian Jews; by provoking an anti-American backlash, it may have worsened their condition.
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Russia raised tariffs on U.S. imports and imposed boycotts on some items, leading some Americans to protest that minority groups were exercising mischievous influence on U.S. foreign policy. The affair was of more than passing importance. The United States alone among the great powers spoke out against Russian treatment of Jews. The protest made clear the growing importance of ethnic groups in foreign policy. It brought into being one of the most powerful lobbies in twentieth-century America.

While American Jews protested human rights abuses in Russia, violations of human rights in the United States set off loud protests in China and Japan. The Chinese had ample reason for anger. After extended debate, Congress in 1904 bowed to exclusionist pressure and made permanent late nineteenth-century restrictions imposed on Chinese immigration. In the meantime, the Bureau of Immigration interpreted exclusionist laws in an arbitrary and intimidating manner.
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Bureau officials interrogated, harassed, and humiliated Chinese seeking admission to the United States and used the most whimsical reasons to keep them out. State and local laws blatantly discriminated against the ninety thousand Chinese already in the United States, reducing them to the "status of dogs," one Chinese American complained. The Bureau of Immigration seemed intent on driving them all from the country.
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Even Chinese exhibitors at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis were subjected to discriminatory regulations and restrictions.
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Mounting Chinese anger exploded in 1905 in a boycott of U.S. goods. Centered in the treaty ports, the boycott was one of the first visible signs of an emerging nationalist sentiment among a proud people subjected to foreign domination and insult. Chinese Americans helped instigate the boycott and supported it with contributions of money. Inspired by Japan's war against Russia, gentry, students, women, and intellectuals struck out in whatever ways seemed most available. They singled out the United States because of its gross abuses of human rights and because it appeared least likely to exact harsh retribution. They displayed anti-American posters and sang anti-American songs. They destroyed American property, even such prized personal possessions as record players. A Cantonese student denied access to the United States took his own life on the
steps of the U.S. consulate. "My chair coolies are hooted in the street and I would not be surprised if my servants left me," a beleaguered U.S. consul whined. The Chinese government did not officially support the protestors, but it acquiesced in and approved what they did. The Open Door constituency begged the government to do something.
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Roosevelt handled the boycott with political acumen and dexterity. A person who admired strength in people and nations, he deplored Chinese weakness—one of his major terms of opprobrium was "Chinaman." In the 1890s, he had backed exclusion on racial and economic grounds. He sensed the new winds blowing in China, however, and he recognized the blatant injustice in U.S. policies. To quiet U.S. China hands and the Chinese, he vaguely called for changes in the law on the grounds that "we cannot expect to receive equity unless we do equity." He also promised to implement existing laws more equitably and pressed the immigration bureau to mend its ways. But he would not take risks to ensure equity, and he recognized that his power to sway Congress and the states was limited. He assured exclusionists that he would continue to oppose the admission of Chinese laborers: "We have one race problem on our hands and we don't want another." When the boycott spread and five Americans were killed in an unrelated incident, he demanded an end to the protest and beefed up U.S. military forces in and around China.
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The incident faded without tangible result. The boycott fizzled from its own weakness rather than Roosevelt's threats. The boycotters disagreed on what they were trying to do and overestimated the capacity of economic pressure to influence U.S. policies. The boycott was mainly important as an early manifestation of the rising nationalism that would soon erupt in revolution. In the United States, little changed. Exclusionists continued to control the Congress. The bureau temporarily softened its methods and ended its efforts to drive Chinese from the United States. Americans continued to treat Chinese badly. In its death throes, the Chinese government could do little more than feebly protest.

The United States sought to appease the Chinese by remitting the indemnity imposed after the Boxer Rebellion. Often viewed as an act of generosity, remission was in fact an act of calculated self-interest. For Roosevelt, it provided a substitute for Congress's refusal to modify the exclusion laws. For those merchants and missionaries who sought to extend U.S. influence and trade in China, it offered a means to palliate the justifiably
righteous indignation of the Chinese. It could also be "used to make China do some of the things we want," State Department official Huntington Wilson observed. Alarmed at the number of Chinese going to Japan to study, diplomats also saw remission as a "cultural investment." "The Chinese who acquires his education in this country," diplomat Charles Denby observed, "goes back predisposed toward America and American goods." The United States thus forbade the funds from being used for economic development, insisting rather upon the establishment of an American school in China and creation of a program to send Chinese to study in the United States.
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A similar conflict with Japan provoked in 1907 a sustained war scare. Ironically, the restrictions placed on Chinese immigration and a continued demand for cheap labor led to a dramatic influx of Japanese workers, mostly from Hawaii. This sudden appearance of "hordes" of immigrants from a nation that had just thrashed a European power provoked working-class resentment against those who would "labor for less than a white man can live on" and wild fears of the "Orientalization of the Pacific Coast." Ostensibly to solve a shortage of school space caused by the recent catastrophic earthquake, in fact to avoid racial "contamination," the San Francisco School Board in October 1906 placed Chinese, Korean, and Japanese children in segregated schools.
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This ill-considered order provoked conflict with a nation that could do more than boycott U.S. goods. The Japanese government was not inclined to go to war over a relatively minor issue, but it could not but view the order as an insult and felt compelled to respond to the protests of its own people. Tokyo underestimated the depth of Californians' fears. Viewing U.S. politics through the prism of its own political culture, it also overestimated Washington's ability to control state and local governments. The Japanese thus sharply protested the segregation order.
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Roosevelt badly mishandled this issue. He shared to some degree the racial prejudices of the Californians, although he greatly respected what the Japanese had accomplished and admired their discipline and patriotism. He recognized, too, the threat they posed to the Philippines and Hawaii. He also at first underestimated the depth of anti-Japanese sentiment in California. Privately, he raged at the "idiots" who had proclaimed the order and employed racist terms to denounce racist actions—as "foolish
as if conceived by the mind of a Hottentot," he declaimed. Publicly, he denounced the segregation order as a "wicked absurdity." But he could not persuade the Californians to rescind it. "Not even the big stick is enough to compel the people of California to do a thing which they have a fixed determination not to do," the
Sacramento Union
thundered.
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He compounded his problems with a hasty and ill-conceived effort to charm the Japanese into accepting a treaty providing for the mutual exclusion of laborers. They naturally took offense at the obviously one-sided nature of the treaty and the patronizing manner in which it was presented.
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Having won over neither Californians nor Japanese, a chastened Roosevelt set out to cobble together a settlement. He secured from Congress legislation banning immigration from Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico, thus stopping the major source of Japanese immigration without singling them out by name. He used the leverage thus gained to prevent the California legislature from passing discriminatory legislation and to persuade the San Franciscans to revoke their obnoxious order. As part of what came to be known as the "Gentleman's Agreement," Japan agreed to restrict the emigration of laborers to the United States.

In the short run, the crisis persisted. Japanese immigration actually increased following the Gentleman's Agreement, fanning tensions on the West Coast. Anti-Japanese riots in California further provoked Japan. Hotheads in both countries warned ominously of "yellow perils" and "white perils." Some commentators compared the warlike atmosphere to 1898. Roosevelt seems to have overestimated at this stage Tokyo's inclination toward war. He also exploited the crisis to promote his beloved navy and to indulge his boylike zest for playing war. He persuaded Congress to authorize four new battleships and pressed the navy to develop War Plan Orange, the first time Japan had officially been declared a potential enemy. His master stroke, as he saw it, was to send the fleet on a world cruise that included a stop in Japan. He hoped through this blatant show of force to publicize the importance of the navy, build political capital in California, and give pause to the Japanese.

Fortunately for Roosevelt, what could have resulted in disaster ended without incident. The Japanese cut the flow of laborers, fulfilling their part of the Gentleman's Agreement and taking the steam out of the agitation in California. The world cruise exposed the deficiencies of the Great White Fleet more than its power, but the Japanese warmly received the sailors. Crowds sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" in English and waved
American flags. United States sailors played baseball against Japanese teams. Although agitators in both countries continued to talk of war and the immigration issue would not go away, Roosevelt left office without further crisis.
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In the first decade of the twentieth century, Americans took an active role in promoting world peace. The American peace movement was part of a larger Western phenomenon. One hundred and thirty new nongovernmental organizations dedicated to various international causes sprouted up in the early 1900s, many of which would play an important role in years to come. Like their European counterparts, U.S. peace advocates believed that a shrinking world, frightening advances in military technology, and the escalating costs of weapons gave a special urgency to their cause. Optimistic about humankind and confident of progress, they hoped that the growth of capitalism and democracy would make war less likely. They also worried about rising tensions in Europe and sought to take steps to reduce the chances of conflict. Conservative in politics, these "practical" peace reformers equated peace with order and respect for the law. They believed the United States must work closely with other "civilized" nations, especially Great Britain, and that their cause could best be furthered by the extension of Anglo-Saxon principles, especially the codification of international law and arbitration. They saw no contradiction between working for peace and maintaining military strength.
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