A Great White Fleet…and a new base!

The agreeable monotony of Roosevelt’s schedule for late June
1907 was interrupted on the twenty-seventh by a captain from the General Board
of the Navy and a colonel from the Army War College. They accompanied Victor H.
Metcalf, the Secretary of the Navy, and Postmaster General George von L. Meyer,
who had definitely not come to discuss rural free delivery. Meyer’s presence,
indeed, helped explain his real role in the Cabinet, which was to advise the
President on questions of extreme diplomatic delicacy.

Five weeks before, after returning to Washington from Pine
Knot, Roosevelt had been exasperated to hear that anti-immigrant riots had
broken out in San Francisco. “Nothing during my Presidency has given me more
concern than these troubles,” he wrote Kentaro Kaneko. He argued that what was
happening in California was nothing new. Nor was it essentially racial: it had
plenty of precedents in European history over the last three centuries.
France’s Huguenots, for example, had been as white as their coreligionists in
Great Britain, but when they immigrated there, they had excited “the most
violent hostility,” indistinguishable from what had happened at the Golden
Gate. Then as now, mobs of workmen caused most of the trouble, expressing
labor’s chronic fear of being devalued by competition. Now as not then, hope
lay in the increased ability of “gentlemen, all educated people, members of the
professions, and the like” to visit one another’s countries and “associate on
the most intimate terms.” This was the particular responsibility of elected
representatives. “My dear Baron, the business of statesmen is to try constantly
to keep international relations better, to do away with the causes of friction,
and to secure as nearly ideal justice as actual conditions will permit.”

Meyer himself could not have put the case with more finesse.
But the fact remained that coolies were still coming, and having their faces beaten
in. The Immigration Act was still not working as it should, the San Francisco
Police Board had taken up where the school board had left off, reactionary
newspapers were screaming, and Japanese opposition leaders were calling for
war.

Elihu Root did not take the last threat seriously. He wrote
Roosevelt to say that alarmists had their own agenda, but “this San Francisco
affair is getting on all right as an ordinary diplomatic affair.… There is no
occasion to get excited.”

Roosevelt was not so sure. Japan had behaved with
commendable restraint during the early months of the crisis. Recently, however,
he had begun to detect “a very, very slight undertone of veiled truculence” in
her communications concerning the Pacific coast. He heard from members of his secret
du roi that the Japanese war party really did think the United States was
beatable. The Office of Naval Intelligence reported evidence of Japanese war
preparations, including purchase orders for nearly eighty thousand tons’ worth
of armored vessels from Europe, and a twenty-one-thousand-ton dreadnought from
Britain. (So much for any chance of a disarmament agreement at the Second Hague
Peace Conference, now in session.)

His responsibility as Commander-in-Chief was to look to the
nation’s defenses. Hence the arrival at Sagamore Hill of two top military
strategists. He had asked them to bring him contingency plans, “in case of
trouble arising between the United States and Japan.”

Colonel W. W. Wotherspoon and Captain Richard Wainwright
proved to be little more than messengers, delivering a somewhat obvious finding
by the Joint Board of the Army and Navy. The board stated that because Japan’s
battleships were all in the Pacific, and those of the United States in the
Atlantic, the latter power should “take a defensive attitude” in any
confrontation, until its heavy armor could be brought around Cape Horn.

Roosevelt said, for the record, that he did not believe
there was any real chance of a war with Japan. Then he approved the only
controversial aspect of the Joint Board’s report: a recommendation by Admiral
Dewey that “the battle fleet should be assembled and despatched for the Orient
as soon as practicable.”

The idea was not new. For at least two years, the Navy had
considered transferring the fleet from one ocean to the other as a tactical
exercise, but had never managed to decide the extent of the move, or the
logistics of support. Fuel supplies were a particular problem, and the West
Coast of the United States was short on bases. Dewey calculated that it would
take at least ninety days to mount an emergency battle presence in the Pacific.
“Japan could, in the meantime, capture the Philippines, Honolulu, and be master
of the sea.”

Roosevelt considered the options, and his own as President
and Commander-in-Chief. He had just seventeen months left in office, and wanted
to make a grand gesture of will, something that would loom as large
historically in his second term as the Panama Canal coup had in his first. What
could be grander, more inspirational to the Navy, and to all Americans, than
sending sixteen great white ships halfway around the world—maybe even farther?
And what better time than now, when positive news was in such short supply?
Wall Street’s stock slide in March had caused many brokerage houses to fail and
bank reserves to drop. Foreign markets had also begun a steady decline, with
stocks plummeting in Alexandria and Tokyo, Frenchmen hoarding more gold than
usual, and even the Bank of England low on cash. Jacob Schiff had said that
“uncertainty” lay at the bottom of all distrust. All the more reason, then, to
make one highly visible arm of the United States government look quite certain
of itself, as it moved from sea to shining sea.

The massive deployment appealed to Roosevelt as diplomacy,
as preventive strategy, as technical training, and as a sheer pageant of power.
There was also the enormity of the challenge. He had private information that
neither British nor German naval authorities believed he could do it. Well, he
would prove them wrong. “Time to have a show down in the matter.”

He issued a series of orders to Secretary Metcalf. The Subic
Bay coal stockpile in the Philippines must be enlarged at once. Defense guns
must be moved there from Cavite. Four armored cruisers of the Asiatic Fleet were
to be brought back to patrol the West Coast. And finally—Roosevelt’s operative
order, climaxing ninety minutes of talk—the Atlantic fleet would set sail from
Hampton Roads, Virginia, in October, destination San Francisco.

When someone asked how many battleships would make the trip,
Roosevelt said that depended on how many there were in service at the time. If
fourteen, he would send fourteen; if sixteen, then sixteen. He wanted them “all
to go.”

Metcalf was authorized to announce the dispatch of the “Great
White Fleet”—as it soon became known—appropriately on the Fourth of July. But
the news was too big to hold, in view of the tense state of American-Japanese
relations. By the time the Secretary issued his statement, Ambassador Aoki had
already moved defensively to say that Japan did not regard Roosevelt’s gesture
as “an unfriendly act.”

His Excellency thus avoided sounding overjoyed at the
prospect of an enormous alteration in the balance of naval power in the
Pacific. And Roosevelt, by intimating that San Francisco would be the fleet’s
farthest port of call, encouraged Californian alarmists to think it was being
dispatched for their protection. They would have been less comforted if they
had known that he was privately talking to Henry Cabot Lodge about sending it
on “a practice cruise around the world.”

#

Monday, 16 December, broke sunny, sharp, and clear over the
James River estuary after a weekend of heavy rain. All sixteen ships of the
battle fleet lay waiting for him, blindingly white in the eight o’clock light,
as the Mayflower creamed into the Roads and proceeded past each gold-curlicued
bow. The air drummed with 336 cannon blasts, not quite dividing into
twenty-one-gun strophes.

“By George!” Roosevelt exulted to Secretary Metcalf. “Did
you ever see such a fleet and such a day?”

When the presidential yacht came to anchor, gigs and barges
brought aboard “Fighting Bob” Evans—a surprisingly small, fierce-faced man,
limping with rheumatism—four rear admirals, and sixteen commanding officers.
Roosevelt made no speech after shaking all their hands, only drawing Evans
aside for a few minutes and muttering to him with earnest, snapping teeth.
Bystanders watched the admiral’s cocked hat bobbing like a gull as Roosevelt
bit off sentence after sentence. What scraps of dialogue floated on the breeze
were mostly banal: “I tell you, our enlisted men … perfectly
bully … best of luck, old fellow.”

Less audibly, the President was giving Evans secret orders
to stay in the Pacific for several months, then proceed home via the Indian
Ocean and Suez Canal. Cameras clicked as the two men bade each other farewell.
The commanders returned to their ships, and, as the Mayflower got under way for
Cape Henry, one by one the battleships weighed anchor and hauled around in
stately pursuit. They overtook Roosevelt at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay and
ground past him in a perfectly spaced, three-mile-long column. He watched with
intent seriousness, periodically doffing his top hat, until the Kentucky, the
last unit of the Fourth Division, moved by in a vast white wall, all its
sailors saluting.

#

On 7 February, the Great White Fleet, dispatched toward
unknown possibilities by an allegedly deranged (William James preferred the
term dynamogenic) Commander-in-Chief, entered the Strait of Magellan. Since
leaving Hampton Roads, it had become a diplomatic phenomenon, attracting
worldwide press attention and spreading as much goodwill as foam along the
Brazilian and Argentine coastlines. Even Punta Arenas, Chile, a windswept
wood-and-iron outpost near the extreme tip of the continent, welcomed Admiral
Evans and his sailors with elaborate hospitality and specially hiked prices.

For twenty-two hours, the Chilean destroyer Chacabuco led
Evans’s flagship Connecticut through the misty Strait—a surreal Doppelgänger of
the waterway being carved across Panama—while fifteen other coal-heavy ships
wallowed behind at four-hundred-yard intervals. No more than three men-of-war
had ever performed this maneuver in convoy, and the going was hazardous even
for single units. But the fleet steamed steadily through. It veered off course
only once, when a sudden turbulence proclaimed the conflicting levels of two
oceans. By the time the last vessel emerged into open sea, the first was
already steaming toward Valparaiso, and the Pacific theater had received its
largest-ever infusion of battleships.

Roosevelt had still not announced his intention to send the
fleet around the world—its official destination remained San Francisco. But
Japan was aware that another war scare in the United States could quickly alter
the fleet’s course; Admiral Dewey’s “ninety-day lag” no longer applied. This
knowledge, combined with mounting diplomatic pressure from Elihu Root, now
forced the conclusion of the “Gentlemen’s Agreement,” on which Tokyo had been
politely stalling for nearly a year.

Throughout 1907, the influx of Japanese coolies into the
United States had continued to pour unabated, making a mockery of the new
immigration law. Root had tired of pointing out that the flow had to be restricted
at its source, as per Tokyo’s verbal promise. Instead, he had taken advantage
of the publicity attending the dispatch of the Great White Fleet to warn
Ambassador Aoki that unless there was “a very speedy change in the course of
immigration,” the Sixtieth Congress was certain to pass an exclusion act,
greatly to the detriment of Japanese-American relations.

By 29 February, as the fleet headed north from Callao, Peru,
the Gentlemen’s Agreement was finally implemented. Coolies were no longer
permitted to immigrate to Hawaii, passport restrictions were tightened, and
illegal agencies were being prosecuted by Japanese authorities. And at last,
the monthly “Yellow Peril” index compiled by the State Department began to
decline.

Roosevelt celebrated by confirming that the Great White
Fleet, now en route to the Golden Gate, would proceed around the world after a
couple of months’ rest and refitting. Its itinerary would include Hawaii, New
Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Japan (about two weeks before the
presidential election), China, Ceylon, the Suez Canal, Egypt, the
Mediterranean, and Gibraltar. Its due date for return to Hampton Roads was 22
February 1909, ten days before he was to leave the White House.

#

Pulverizing as the President’s Special Message had been to
the boomlet for Governor Hughes, and however revealing of Roosevelt’s own
changing ideology, it merely increased the opposition of congressional
conservatives against him. Joseph Cannon in the House and Nelson Aldrich in the
Senate vied with each other to deny him the reforms he had begged with such
eloquence. However, a small band of progressive Republicans and a larger one of
moderate Democrats (who had applauded repeatedly during the reading of the
Message) helped him win at least three new laws: a re-enacted Federal
Employers’ Liability Act, the Workman’s Compensation Act for federal employees,
and the Child Labor Act for the District of Columbia.

He also won, on 10 March, a nonlegislative victory with
fruits that tasted distinctly sour. The Senate Committee on Military Affairs
concluded its thirteen-month investigation of the Brownsville affair and found,
by nine votes to four, that Roosevelt had justifiably dismissed without honor
the soldiers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry. Three thousand pages of testimony,
and the congruent opinions of virtually all Army authorities from the
Commander-in-Chief on down, were enough to convince five Democrats and four
Republicans that the men were guilty. The dissenting members were all
Republican, but they were themselves divided, in a way that paradoxically
compromised the majority vote. Two found the testimony to be contradictory and
untrustworthy, reflecting irreconcilable antipathies between soldiers and
townspeople. Senators Foraker and Morgan G. Bulkeley insisted that “the weight
of the testimony” showed the soldiers to be innocent.

So did the weight of the only hard evidence in the case:
thirty-three spent Army-issue cartridges found at the scene of the crime.
Ballistics experts had testified that, while the shells had definitely been
fired by Springfield rifles belonging to the Twenty-fifth, the actual firing
had occurred during target practice at Fort Niobrara in Nebraska, long before
the battalion was ordered to Texas. The mystery of the translocation of the
shells to Brownsville was simply explained. Army budget officers frowned on
waste of rechargeable ordnance, so 1,500 shells had been recovered from the
range, sent south, and stored in an open box on the porch of a barracks hut at
Fort Brown, available for any soldier—or passing civilian—to help himself.

Such technical information, however, could not explain away
the “wooden, stolid look” that Inspector General Garlington had seen on the
faces he interviewed. It was a look so evocative of Negro complicity that the
War Department had briskly dispensed with the formality of allowing every
soldier his day in court.

Roosevelt’s other major legislative request, unsatisfied
through the first weeks of spring, was for four new battleships. The House
followed the recommendation of its Committee on Naval Affairs and appropriated
funds for only two. Unappeased by an extra appropriation to build a naval base
at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt put his hopes in the Senate. Debate there began on
24 April, none too favorably. Senators seemed more inclined to question the
legality of his battle-fleet cruise order than to double the battleship quota
of the House bill. But they also had to take into account his still phenomenal
popularity, and the hold the Great White Fleet had taken of the public
imagination. Three days later, Roosevelt won a modified victory: two
battleships plus a guarantee that two more would be funded before he left
office.

Sounding rather like a small boy, he claimed not to have
expected four all at once, but had asked for them only because he wanted to be
sure of getting two.

During the reign of King Kalākaua the United States was
granted exclusive rights to enter Pearl Harbor and to establish “a coaling
and repair station.”

Although this treaty continued in force until August 1898,
the U.S. did not fortify Pearl Harbor as a naval base. As it had for 60 years,
the shallow entrance constituted a formidable barrier against the use of the
deep protected waters of the inner harbor.

The United States and the Hawaiian Kingdom signed the
Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 as supplemented by Convention on December 6, 1884,
the Reciprocity Treaty was made by James Carter and ratified it in 1887. On
January 20, 1887, the United States Senate allowed the Navy to exclusive right
to maintain a coaling and repair station at Pearl Harbor. (The US took
possession on November 9 that year). The Spanish–American War of 1898 and the
desire for the United States to have a permanent presence in the Pacific both
contributed to the decision.

Following the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the United
States Navy established a base on the island in 1899.