Colonel, The The Life and Wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950

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ALSO BY GODFREY HODGSON

Llovds of London:

A

Reputation

at Risk (1986)

All

Things to All Men: The False Promise of

the

Modern American

Presidency (1980)

in Our Time: From World War II Nixon— What Happened and Why (1976)

America to

Do You

Want to Be Rich? Raw and Bruce Page) (1971)

Sincerely

(with Charles

An American Melodrama: The

Presidential

Campaign of 1968

(with Lewis Chester

and Bruce Page (1969)

THE COLONEL

THE

COLONEL The

Life

and Wars of

Henry Stimson i

8 6

7-1 950

Godfrey Hodgson

Alfred A.

New 1990

York

Knopf

IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF,

THIS

INC.

Copyright © 1990 bv Godfrey Hodgson

under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously All rights reserved

in

Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Random House, Inc., New York.

Distributed by

is made to the following for: "The Reminiscences of Harvey Bundy (i960), in the Oral

Grateful acknowledgment

Collection of Columbia University, hereafter Bundy,

History

COHC."

Reprinted by permission of Columbia University, Oral History Research Office. Excerpts from an

by Henry L. Stimson and an

article by Copyright 1947 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs.

George

F.

article

Kennan,

1947.

Excerpts from Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson by Elting E. Morison. Copyright © i960 by Elting E. Morison. Excerpts from Shattered Peace by Daniel Yergin.

Copyright ©

1977

by Daniel H. Yergin. Excerpts from The

Life

of Roosevelt by William Roscoe Thayer. Copyright 1919 by

William Roscoe Thayer. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin

Company.

Excerpt from an essay by David Watt, from The Special Relationship, edited by Louis and Bull, Oxford University Press, 1986. Reprinted

by permission of Oxford University

Press,

Oxford, England.

Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard J. Rhodes. Published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 1987. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Excerpts from The

Two

letters to Mrs. Stimson, lanuary 31, 1918, and July 21, 1945, and excerpts from diaries and papers of Henry L. Stimson, from the Henry L. Stimson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale

University Library. Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hodgson, Godfrey. The colonel: the life and wars of Henry Stimson, 1867-1950

/

Godfrey Hodgson. — 1st ed.

cm.

p.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1.

o-394-5744i-9

Stimson, Henry Lewis, 1867-1950.

States— Biography. 20th century.

4.

2. Statesmen— United United States— Foreign relations—

3.

United States— Politics and

government— 1901-1953. E748.S883H63 973.91

[B]

'

Title.

092— dC20 89-43474

Manufactured First

I.

1990

CIP

in the

United States of America

Edition

Picture of

Henry and Mabel Stimson and

picture at end of insert

courtesy of Culver Pictures. All other pictures courtesy of Henry L.

Stimson Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University.

Uxori meae dilectissimae

Contents

Acknowledgments I:

American Leadership

ix

3

The Warrior Dream

23

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

87

II:

III:

IV: The Oriental Experience:

The

122

Philippines

122

Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice

141

V: The Atlantic Experience:

The

Suicide of Europe

169

VI: The Organizer of Victory

213

VII: The Least Abhorrent Choice

VIII:

A

Fair

274

and Tempting Challenge

342

IX: The Guardian

367

Index

391

8 pages of illustrations will be

found following page

148

Acknowledgments

impossible to thank

It is

that this ever,

book has been

all

of those

in the

who

making.

I

have helped over the years

owe

special gratitude,

how-

to the staff of the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Library of

Congress, Washington, D.C.; Leicester University Library; the Yale

most of all, to Alan

University Library; and,

Rhodes House Library

Among many

Bell

and the

staff

of the

Oxford.

in

who

numerous to thank individually, I cannot forbear to name McGeorge Bundy, for his generous help and acute reminiscence; his brother William P. Bundy, for his meticulous editing skills and for some remarkable insights; their niece Lowell Winfriends

kelmann, for her help

in

are too

understanding her family history, so closely

life; Peter Kaminer, for educating me in the and history of Stimson's law firm and for lending me his copy of

interlinked with Stimson's lore

My

Kingman Brewster, for an understanding of many things in Stimson's life; Lord Sherfield, who as Roger Makins saw the world Henry Stimson lived in from the Hoover, Roosevelt and TruVacations; the late

man

administrations and shared his recollections with me; Robin

W.

Winks, for his generous hospitality and for teaching me the history and spirit of Yale; Anthony Storr, for his insight into Stimson's per-

David Adams; Professor Jack Pole, Dr. Peter Carey and Dr. Lawrence Whitehead, of Oxford University; and many others who contributed knowledge and ideas on which I have drawn. Of all the hundreds of historians, biographers and other authors on sonality; Professor

must mention two in particular: Professor Elting Morison, without whose work my portrait of Stimson would have been in monochrome; and Richard Rhodes, who helped me to

whose work

I

have drawn,

I

understand the of the I

full

sweep of the decisions that went into The Making

Atom Bomb.

am

equally in the debt of those friends

unstinting hospitality during particular

who

also

helped

me

with their

showed me around Woodley.

have dedicated this book to

excuse

who

research trips to the United States, in

Harry and Trish McPherson; Philip Babbit; and John and

Diana Zentay, I

my

me from

my

wife, Hilary, but that does not

the duty of thanking her for her support

when

the

want to thank my friends, especially Nicholas Faith, for his patience and kindness; and my children, Pierre, Francis, Jessica and Laura, for restoring both spirits and perspective. This book owes more than I can express to its chief begetter, my doughtv agent and valued friend, Robert Ducas, and to all of those at

going was rough.

Knopf who have beautifully

I

also

driven

me on and

produced book,

rewarded

especially

me

with the quality of a

Melvin Rosenthal, George An-

dreou and that incomparable taskmistress and inspiration, Elisabeth Sifton.

G.H

THE COLONEL

I

American Leadership

o

n Sunday, October 14,

1962, a

U-2 reconnaissance

by Major Rudolph Anderson brought back analysts the next in a

meadow

aerial

aircraft piloted

photographs of what

day rightiy concluded were Soviet missile

installations

The next day Presisecurity, McGeorge Bundy,

near San Cristobal, in western Cuba.

dent Kennedy's special assistant for national

was telephoned by Ray Cline, a deputy director of the Central gence Agency. The pictures confirmed reports, Cline

Intelli-

said, that the Soviet

Union had sneaked missiles and aircraft into Cuba that were capable of delivering nuclear

warheads to

targets in a large part

So began the most dangerous two weeks

in

of the United

more than

States.

forty years'

confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the

second week, the world knew

how

close

it

was to catastrophe. After

THECOLONEL

4 the President

went on

on Monday, October

television

22, to disclose

the presence of the missiles and to announce that he had called for a naval blockade of Cuba, people everywhere asked themselves

Most people confronted

they were to nuclear war.

A

dignity.

few

canned food or

But

tried to

in the first

were government

week, the burden of

officials.

Kennedy— conscious of in

World War

House. tary

II

a

fear

and decision had to be

few dozen people. Not

In this, his most dangerous

own youth and

his

who had

of

all

crisis,

of them

President

inexperience— also con-

been through

earlier

times of trouble

and the Cold War. So Dean Acheson, Secretary of

under President Truman, was summoned

State

that risk with stoic

run away.

no more than

sulted elder statesmen

close

Washington suburbs and elsewhere hoarded

in the

shared in secret by

how

in secret to the

White

And so was Robert A. Lovett, who had been Assistant SecreWar in charge of the Army Air Corps in World War II, had Under

served as

Truman

Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense in the

administration, and had been offered by President

Kennedy

the choice of the three top jobs in his Cabinet: State, Defense or Treasury. Lovett

close friend

was an American grandee, the son of

a legal adviser

and

of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, and himself an

investment banker and one of the moving

spirits

of the famous house

of Brown Brothers Harriman.

new

Lovett, in other words, was neither decisions nor hesitant by nature.

When

to the world of great

he arrived

in

Washington he

went to McGeorge Bundy's crowded office in the basement of the west wing of the White House, and there on a side table he spotted a small picture of Bundy's mentor, Henry L. Stimson. "All during the conversation," Lovett recalled later, "the old Colonel seemed to be staring

me

straight in the face."

Kennedy's

Finally Lovett said to service

we

adviser,

can perform for the President

is

"Mac,

I

think the best

to try to approach this as

Colonel Stimson would."*

Who missile crisis

*There

is

was Colonel Stimson, that

some of the

sagest

a vast literature, scholarly

and

at the

and most experienced of a journalistic,

Cuban young Pres-

height of the

on the Cuban

missile crisis. See, for ex-

T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis; James G. Blight and David A. Welch, On the Brink, which has very full source

ample, Elie Abel, The Missile

Crisis;

Graham

notes. For Lovett's remark, see Walter Isaacson and Evan

Thomas, The Wise Men,

p. 624.

American Leadership

5

would turn to his shade for guidance? For Henry Lewis Stimson had been dead for twelve years.

ident's advisers

1962

For one thing,

of

as Secretary

War

October

in

wartime administration

in the

of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stimson had been served both by Lovett and

by Bundy's

who

Harvey Bundy,

father,

were

war under him. With both men, indeed,

as

assistant secretaries

with half the

of

men who

had exerted influence over American foreign policy from Theodore Roosevelt's time to that of Franklin Roosevelt, Stimson had been con-

web of

nected by a interests

common

and

Many

and

articles

friendships.

books have been written about what

several

is

American foreign-policy establishment, and one short an-

called the

swer to the question, selves,

common

shared beliefs and shared experiences,

Why

did President Kennedy's advisers ask them-

"What would Colonel Stimson

have done?" might be: Because

he was the founding father and patron this answer,

while true,

inadequate.

is

much else besides. Few Americans in the

saint

of that establishment. Yet

Henry Stimson was

that,

but

he was

public

life

twentieth century served so long in high

or over so long a period; none spanned in a single career so

drastic a transformation

of the United States's position

in the world.

The emperor Augustus boasted that he found Rome a city of brick and left it a city of marble. Henry Stimson first came to Washington when it was a quaint little southern town, and left it as the unchallenged capital of the greatest power the world had ever seen. Stimson was born the

less

than three years after Lincoln was assassinated, and sur-

FDR by

vived

last

New

town

five years.

His personal experience of life stretched from

Indian wars of the frontier to the partners' rooms of down-

York law

from the chanceries of Western Europe to

firms,

the sunbaked grandeur of the Spanish Viceroy's palace in Manila.

men,

after all,

in the Rockies

have had

and

named

a great

for

them both

a

Few

peak they discovered

Wall Street law firm.

His experience of war, in particular, stretched from Indian battles to atomic attack. 1887,

whose he fell

As

a Yale

undergraduate on vacation in Colorado in

and spoke to men had been tortured "by Indian methods";

Stimson lived through friends

and

relations

commanded an to

him to be

a

Ute Indian

artillery battalion in

France in World

War

I;

and

responsible for the decisions to drop the only

atomic bombs thus

far

used on

human

His experience of diplomacy, even greater than

rising

his experience

if

it

two

targets.

not quite so long, was arguably

of warfare. In the

1920s, as a private

THE COLONEL

6 citizen,

he helped to negotiate the settlement of the Tacna-Arica

dis-

pute between Chile and Bolivia, which had originated in

1883; and in Potsdam when Truman, Churchill and Stalin met to divide the legacy of Adolf Hitler, in the shadow of the bomb Stimson had helped to build.

was present

1945 he

at

Henry Stimson's

thus spanned the whole period of the

life

rise

of American power, from the beginning of American involvement

world

affairs in

the

power under the second. For almost of power, alternately wielding

who

An

did.

it

fifty

years he

was near the center

himself or in the confidence of those

intimate friend of the older President Roosevelt, he

served in the Cabinet of the younger, and was the only Cabinet

ber with the standing and self-confidence to criticize

ousness to his

face.

He

was Secretary of War

and Secretary of State under Hoover. oath of office

in

Roosevelt's time, to the apex of American

first

as Secretary

mustered 74,638

officers

of War in and men,

On

virtually

mem-

for devi-

in the Taft administration

the day

the

1911,

FDR

when he took

the

army of the United States all of them dispersed in

dusty camps across the West to keep an eye on the Indians, roughly

one such camp to

On

happy.

April

a state,

12,

to keep the senators

when

1945,

it fell

and congressmen

to Stimson, Secretary of

War

once again, to break to the freshly sworn-in President Truman the

news that the United States would within weeks possess the atomic bomb,* there were more than fourteen million Americans under arms: an increase of roughly two-hundredfold. The growth in Amer-

power conferred by the bomb, which was built under Stimson \s authority and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on his orders, was ican

incalculably greater.

first

Having taken the responsibility for using atomic weapons for the (and, one hopes, the last) time in history, Stimson was also the

first

responsible American leader to grasp the

ened, and one of the

first

new dangers

they threat-

to grapple seriously with the intellectual and

moral problems presented both by controlling the new weapons and

by

failing to

do

so.

And

his last act in public life

was to propose that

nuclear technology be internationalized in the hope of persuading the Soviet

Union not

"The Truman, "President

to start an arms race.

chief lesson

I

have learned in a long

"is that the only

Truman had been

way

to

make

a

man

life,"

he told President

trustworthy

is

to trust

skerchily informed already by his friend James F. Byrnes.

American Leadership

7

him."* That was something he had learned in dealing with nationalists like Manuel Quezon. It may be doubted whether

Filipino it

was

a

wise principle for dealing with Josef Dzhugashvili Stalin. In the short run, Stimson's dreams of international control of atomic

power were

to be disappointed, though not before they had led to the Lilienthal-

Acheson

initiative

and President Eisenhower's Atoms

for Peace pro-

however, and in the context not

posals. In a longer perspective,

just

of nuclear warheads but of whole arsenals of delivery systems, including intercontinental

ballistic missiles,

Stimson's insistence that atomic

weapons must be controlled, and controlled on an

international basis,

looks not naive but prescient.

In January

1902, as a thirty-four-year-old lawyer,

Washington with

his wife,

Mabel, to stay with

Stimson was

in

his old friend Gifford

Pinchot, chief forester of the United States and the moving

spirit

be-

hind the national parks. The occasion was the annual dinner of that circle

of well-bred big-game hunters, the Boone and Crockett Club.

The afternoon

before the dinner, he and a friend borrowed two of

Pinchot's horses and went for a ride in Rock Creek Park, the splinter

of the Appalachians which meanders so

Washington.

It

had been

rurally

through northwest

and the creek was high.

raining,

men

Suddenly Stimson was hailed by name by four

through the woods on the other side of the creek. At

walking

first

astonished, for he was a comparative stranger in Washington.

he was

Then he

recognized the voice of President Theodore Roosevelt, laughingly asking

him

known

to

swim the

creek and join them.

Then

to him, that of the Secretary of War, his

ner Elihu Root, called out,

"The

Sergeant Stimson of Squadron assistance

even better

a voice

own

former law part-

President of the United States directs

A

to cross the creek and

come

to his

by order of the Secretary of War."

"That's an order, sure enough," cried Stimson to

and shouted back, "Very good,

sir!" as

his

companion

he put Gifford Pinchot's old

horse Jimmie at the creek. *Memorandum

for the President,

On

September

n, 194s,

quoted

in

Henry

L.

Stimson and Mc-

and War, pp. 642-46. The book was actually written by Bundy, son of one of Stimson's close associates, working with Stimson's diary and papers, and calling on his memory by means of many hours of conversation. Although written in the third person, the book, Bundy wrote, "has no other aim than to present the record of Mr.

George Bundy,

Stimson's public

Active Service in Peace

life

as

he himself sees it."

THE COLONEL

8

Jimmie, place

did as he was ordered, and

like his rider,

where the creek was revetted on both

But the horse

lost his footing in the spate

plunge downstream/

ment seven

Stimson wrote

as

'

kk

years later,

good

a

in

sides

bv vw

and

jumped a

in, at a

masonry

began to

wall.

and

roll

an autobiographical

frag-

deal of the time both of us being

completely under water." Eventually Stimson was able, breast-high in the swift, cold water, to lead the horse downstream to a break in the

him up on the bank, and

wall, get

ride

him down

to a bridge and over

to where the President of the United States and the Secretary of

stood, looking

wv

two

like

small boys

apples/' Roosevelt protested with

who had

War

been caught stealing

some words about

his

not believing

would be obeved because Stimson could have seen that it was impossible. That gave Stimson his chance. "Mr. President," he the order

said,

Lk

when

see that

a soldier hears

an order

like that,

it

isn't his business to

impossible." Roosevelt laughed and said, "Well,

it is

it

was

of you to do it; now hum' home and drink all the whisky you can." And that night at the dinner he hailed his impetuous advery- nice

mirer as

kW

young Lochinvar/'*

Plunging your horse into

a torrent in

obedience to

a frivolous

order was just the sort of reckless manliness Theodore Roosevelt and his circle

admired. Certainlv

for his

New

first

it

can have done Henrv Stimson no harm

and mav well have helped him to be chosen

in the President's eyes,

federal job, as U.S.

York, four years

Roosevelt's

Rough

later.

Attorney for the Southern District of

Although Stimson did not

Cuba

Riders in

in 1898,

serve with

Teddy

an omission he regretted

ever afterward, t he imitated the older man's cult of physical tough-

Like Roosevelt, he hunted grizzly bears, mountain sheep, elk

ness.

and moose Squadron

West. For nine years he was

in the

A

of the

recalled later in

fulness of the

As soon

New

life,

flat

of

and

a cavalry

as the earnings

events in

my

life

keen

member of

camaraderie, expert horsemanship— and the use-

'Stimson told the story, seven years occasions

a

York National Guard, which taught him, he sword from

for dispersing rioters.*

practice allowed

his law

after the event,

in

a

Memorandum

him

(to

me)

is>--s>.

and

of interesting

during the past few years, which he began on January

17,

to.

which forms the opening passage of the first of fifty-one volumes of his diary. tOi Active Service, p. 92: 'For nearl\ twenty Years he had felt a certain regret that he had not been free to go to the Spanish-American \ur." "I also learned that the sabre, while almost obsolete in war. might become l humane and effective

method of dissolving

close charges

a

dangerous mob, when

of well trained cavalry.* 1 HLS.

My

its

Hat side was used in connection with

Vocations, p. ir.

American Leadership

9

Stimson bought himself

North Shore of Long and there, his coverts it

like

TR, he

home

a

in

Island, not far

led the

life

Huntington Township, on the from his hero's Sagamore Hill;

of an American squire, shooting over

and riding to foxhounds. Though Roosevelt

privately held

against Stimson that he served in the administration of William

Howard inner

Taft,

circle.

Stimson was for twenty years

He

the time he was

War I,

as well

on

active

letters

visited

before his death.

from

it

member of

a

TR in

duty with the

as— honesty requires

Stimson

Taft.

kept three

his

Roosevelt's

pocket throughout

artillery in

France in World

H.

to be recorded— one from William

Theodore Roosevelt

"Thank Heaven,"

in the hospital a

few days

his old chief said characteristically,

"I never spared myself for the sake of a problematical old age."

Stimson was to be the

last

bomb and

Nations, the atomic

survivor— in the days of the United the Cold

War— of that

influential co-

of unashamed nationalists which included, besides Theodore

terie

Roosevelt himself, Charles Francis Adams, General Leonard

Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. At the very time when,

War

War

during World

as Secretary

of

he was pushing forward the Manhattan

II,

Project to build the atomic

Wood and

bomb

as fast as possible,

he was fighting a

rear-guard action to preserve the United States cavalry, a job for which,

he told the

he had more enthusiasm than for helping to devise

his friends,

Sherman tank.*

Few Americans

in public

life,

indeed, have matched Stimson 's

sheer intellectual and political versatility or continuity. to serve in Herbert Hoover's food administration in

declined because he

aging

young men

felt

he had played so prominent

He

was asked

World War a part in

I.

He

encour-

to go and fight that he ought to fight himself.

He

survived a year in France as an artillery officer to serve as Hoover's Secretary of State; then joined Franklin Roosevelt's administration

when

it

was time to persuade

was another war to

a

new generation of Americans

that there

fight.

JLn the middle of

May

1940 the Nazi panzers punched through

the French armies and, pouring westward, encircled both British and

By June 4, 338,000 and French troops had been rescued from the trap on the French

French divisions and attacked them from the British

*HLS,

My

Vacations, p.

116.

rear.

THE COLONEL Winston Churchill said at the time, wars are not won bv evacuations. That night Churchill promised the House of Commons that, even though manv old and famous states might fall under "the odious apparam> Nazi rule. Britain would tight on "until, in God's gt xi time, the New World, with all its power and Dunkerquc. But.

at

:

as

:

migh:. acps rorth to the rescue and liberation of the Old."

On

the French could not fight on.

na N

•

Penan," made

rf

on

:e a

a>

undertook. Fixing

French government had halted DC all

as

Roose-

he went further.

13

Pnme

anv British

Flamingo

aircraft to

in its flight

clear

Churchill, signing himself

and on June

venture

in his light

12

a personal appeal to President

velt to intervene to save France, set

Tune

was

It

from

He

Minister ever

Tours, where the

Bordeaux, he

Paris to

he had to give, "the indissoluble union of our two

peop..

In this desperate hour of Europ. stricken

ref\:

ids

r

c

of France and

and the cunning

tience of an elephant ^e

that

what was

at stake.

\ to teach

same month of June iq+c. the proportion

public-opinion

in the

nlv

cam;

g

it

sing

He

would

might have done, since

Republican

be-

lead to

at this very

Wendell Willkie that

hope of beating Roosevelt in the forthcoming presidential uld be to scare the American people and denounce the

President as

At

" and so

one-half to

come.

not vet

d that to advocate the draft openlv at that juncture [

as

the American

moved from

Rut Roosevelt's opportunity had

moment

though

as

was summer

it

Public opinion was beginning to move. In

polls favoring introduction ot conscription

political

ot panic-

Roosevelt was maneuvering with the pa-

x

United

in the

looked

it

nothing could prevent the triumph of barbarism,

2ms

this

as different

2

warmonger.

moment Henrv Stimson

left

New York on

a

journey about

from Winston Churchill's forlorn dash to Tours :nson had been educated chusetts.

at Phillips

and he was the most

loyal

as

Academy

alumnus of

could at

An-

that au-

gment. In 194c he was due to give the commencement ind the summer weather was delightful. New England a vision of peace that contrasted painfully with the martial

rums and the

..

t:

howe

f

1

refugees

on the other

side

ala-

of the

.roubled. and not only by the fate of Eu-

rope or even by the isolationists in

his

own

Republican Party.

He was

1

American Leadership

1

seventy-two years old and bothered by insomnia, indigestion and poor health generally. suit

of

He

his career,

heard at

common

indeed what was

at the

in the biggest law-

time the biggest case ever

law, the Blaustein case, over the ownership of

was to become the

work involved

had been involved for months

Amoco

in preparing

oil

company.

and trying the

He

was exhausted by the

case,

and he had allowed

himself to be rattled by counsel for the defendants,

other great Wall Street lawyer, John

W.

what

who

included an-

Davis, founder of the Davis,

Polk law firm and candidate for the 1924 Democratic presidential nomination.

In these circumstances Stimson resolved to defy his party, and in his address at

Andover on

Friday, June 14, he put the case for con-

scription, national preparedness and, if

wrote

more

a second,

explicit

need be, war.

On

Saturday, he

speech in favor of conscription and com-

pulsory military training, which he gave at the Yale University com-

mencement on Monday. Then, after watching the Yale-Harvard baseball game, he sat down and prepared a radio talk which was broadcast the next evening,

June

18.

also the day General Charles de Gaulle made his famous "Frenchmen and Frenchwomen" from a BBC studio in London. An argument can be made that Stimson's speech was the more important event. For if De Gaulle was making certain that France would emerge from her agony with at least some shreds of honor intact—at first only a relative handful of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen,

That was

appeal to

both inside and outside France, responded to emphasizing that dent's

call

minimum

"The United the greatest set

appeal— Stimson, by

who

backed the

the British

all

history."

fleet.

that stood

group of powerful governments

on which

Only

And

if Britain

so Stimson

planes, munitions

had been

he argued, was "an appalling

were supported by American producair

made his and— if

supply Britain

civilization

between the Nazis and the Americas was

American aid and American

trality acts;

A

the principles

A victory for the totalitarians, all

Presi-

FDR to get

he required from a recalcitrant Congress.

crisis in its

prospect," and

in check.

his

States," Stimson began his address, "faces probably

out to reverse

developed.

tion,

was not only Democrats

for preparedness, played a large part in enabling

at least the

had

it

power could the Nazis be held

recommendations: repeal the neushe remained afloat— France with

and every other kind of

assistance;

adopt

at

once a

system of universal compulsory military training and conscription.

The next

day, President Roosevelt called and offered Stimson the

•

THE COLONEL

12

He made

job of Secretary of War.

plain that another anti-isolationist

it

Republican, Frank Knox, had been offered, and had accepted, the post

of Secretary of the Navy. Stimson had heard that some of his friends*

had put

name

his

He asked for Stimson. He sought

law partners and Mrs.

his

would not be embarrassed by

President

FDR

forward, but he was taken aback that

have acted on their suggestion.

time to

would consult two of

to be reassured that the

And

his radio speech.

then he

accepted.

The Republicans were

so respected a Republican expert

been, after

the

all,

hope of mounting

on

defection of so eminent and

international affairs— Stimson had

Republican Secretary of State— sabotaged any

last

a united

more important,

Far

The

furious.

campaign to portray

a decisive step

FDR as

a

warmonger.

had been taken to remove from

the realm of politics the question whether the United States would, in

God's good time, or

at

least

Franklin Roosevelt's, abandon

in

neutralitv.

Thhe war

in

day

after

Europe— the

Pentagon

ct

V-E Day"— May 8, 1945, the formal end of Secretary of War received in his new office in

a delegation

the

of senators and congressmen led by Senator

Alben Barkley of Kentucky. They had

just returned

where they had

camps

visited the concentration

chau and Nordhausen. Several of them trip

the

freely

at

from Europe,

Bergen-Belsen, Da-

admitted that before the

they had been skeptical of reports of German atrocities, dismissing

them

as

What

they had seen changed their minds.

exaggerated or even as projections of Allied propaganda.

of the opinion," Stimson wrote

"They were unanimously

in his diary,

"that the so-called atroc-

ities had represented a deliberate and concerted attempt by the government of Germany to eliminate by murder, starvation and other

methods of death large numbers of classes of people, "t That meeting began in the

same room

Secretary of

War

for the

Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Diary, vol.

51,

eleven o'clock. first

with deciding

* Among them Grenville Clark, a who was a prominent champion

tHLS,

at

May

9, 1945

Russians, Poles, Jews and other

An hour

earlier there

time the committee charged by the

how

the mysterious

weapon then

lawyer and prototype of the Establishment of"

met ap-

man of influence,

conscription; and Stimson 's old friend And legal protege-

3

American Leadership

1

proaching readiness and

still

known

only by

cover name,

its

S-l,

should

be used. The committee was called, with deliberate obscurity, the Interim Committee. Stimson was in the chair. Three of the scientists

who

had taken the lead

there:

in establishing the

Manhattan Project were

James Conant, Vannevar Bush, Karl T. Compton. The other

members were

representatives of the State

Department and the Navy,

Will Clayton and Ralph Bard respectively; Stimson's deputy chairman,

George Harrison, former chairman of the Metropolitan

Company; and had

Life Insurance

the President's personal representative. Stimson himself

tactfully suggested that this

should be President Truman's close friend

James Byrnes of South Carolina, soon to become Secretary of State.

At a panel

a later

May

meeting of the same committee, on

of scientists that included Enrico Fermi and

J.

31,

enlarged by

Robert Oppen-

heimer, several of Stimson's hand-picked civilian associates from the

War Department, and General

as well as

General George C. Marshall, chief of staff,

Leslie R. Groves,

ect, the issues

who commanded

the Manhattan Proj-

were thoroughly thrashed out. At lunch

intense discussion centered

on an

idea,

a brief

but

put forward by the physicist

Ernest O. Lawrence, that the terrifying destructive power of the

bomb

should be shown to the Japanese enemy in some harmless demonstration.

That was soon dismissed. Stimson and the men around him, with

very few exceptions, took for granted that the

an instrument of war, and by a

momentum

May

bomb would

be used

as

1945 that assumption had acquired

that could hardly have been resisted. All that remained

how, where, and in precisely what circumstances explosion would take place. Before leaving the meeting in

to be decided was

the fateful

midafternoon, Stimson was able to States should indeed "vital

sum up

drop an atomic

sense: that the

its

bomb on

United

Japan, preferably

on

a

war plant" surrounded by workers' housing, and with no warning.

In May 1945 Henry Stimson was seventy-seven years old, a trim man of middle height, with a military bearing and a horseman's posture. His hair was white, and this somehow gave a curiously boyish aspect to his face, with

its

high, aquiline nose, firm chin, and eyes that

were shadowed by insomnia and exhaustion yet could twinkle with intelligence a point

and good nature.

of riding

as often as

He

was both

he could on

his

fit

and

own

frail.

He

still

made

eighteen-acre estate,

Washington suburb of Cleveland Park, or along

Woodley,

in the inner

the

of Rock Creek Park, where he had embarrassed Theodore

trails

Roosevelt by his obedience more than forty years

earlier.

Until late

THECOLONEL

14 middle age, he had loved to ride

his big,

hard-mouthed

Van-

horses,

guard and Aberdeen, in the wooded Long Island countryside near the

home home

he had built for himself, Highhold. In wartime, he often went early to

Woodley

for an energetic

game of deck

tennis, the

game

played with a rope or rubber quoit on the ocean liners of his vouth,

with his aides or friends.

Bush to

a

game of deck

was because he was Bush,

you

who was more

will live the

as I

once challenged the

tennis.

Bush

said

scientist

Vannevar

he couldn't. Stimson said

than twenty years younger, that wasn't why. "If life I

"when you

have and avoid these dissipations,"

get to

am." Stimson loved

my

age you will be in as

good

it.*

Stimson had the excellent condition of a much younger man. the other hand, he had been an insomniac for his digestion

it

Stimson, would trim him. No, said

afraid he,

kind of moral

said the scientist,

condition

He

was poor, and he suffered from

more than

fits

On

forty years,

of weakness that may

have foreshadowed the heart disease that was soon to

strike

him. Per-

haps because of his insomnia and his indigestion, his temper was notoriously volatile. His office in the old State,

War and Navy

building,

one man who had occasion to know it recalled more than forty years ct later, was an oasis of gentility," but it was not always an oasis of

as

calm. If a paper was lost, Colonel Stimson was capable of bellowing so

down

that he could be heard

the

hall. If a

wordy, he was capable of throwing

it

paper was too long or too

on the

floor.

This was a physically hard and courageous old man, his grizzlies

and climbed

a volunteer at the age

his

of

mountains

fifty,

in his

and now,

who had

youth, fought

in his seventies,

shot

war

his

as

had driven

himself mercilessly for four years at the head of the greatest military

machine ever assembled

in

the history of the world. At the same time,

he was the very paradigm of the American gentleman. Not only had he attended

all

the best schools, the best universities, and belonged to

the best clubs; he did not think such things unimportant.

He

attended commencements and reunions

at

Andovcr,

at Yale

at the Harvard Law School whenever he could, and was a loyal member of Skull and Bones, the secret Yale senior society of which many of his friends were also members. He was apt to attribute supe-

and

rior qualities to

products of these institutions.

so impressed by the that he

one occasion he was

work of a new young lawyer at Winthrop, Stimson at Andover and Yale, and

assumed the man had been educated

"Kiting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition: p. 600.

On

A

Study of the Life and Times of Henry

/..

Stimson,

5

American Leadership it

was with some

1

of the man's excellence,

He

persuaded him that, in spite

difficulty that partners this

was not the

case.

was an assiduous clubman. In Washington, he

ate lunch, as

often as not, in the cavernous dignity of the Metropolitan Club, a

block up Seventeenth Street from that glorious French Renaissance

wedding

War and Navy

cake, the State,

When

three different jobs. as in the spring

building, his

official

home

he found time for a brief holiday, or

of 1945— he wanted to mull over an important question,

he could escape to a hunting club in South Carolina or to the

Hubert's Club

summer camp

in

when—

at

New

Ausable,

York, in the Adirondacks,

for wealthy, old-family

New Yorkers.

In

New

most lunchtimes, he would walk around the corner from Ruskin Gothic splendors of the

at 32 Liberty Street to the

St.

a glorified

York City,

his

law

office

Down Town

more august premises of An appealing anecdote documents the re-

Association, and he also frequented the even

the Century Association. spect in

which Stimson held that

institution.

Gentlemen of Stimson 's generation took clubs seriously. Toward life, as a mark of high favor, he proposed to make a

the end of his

young

colleague a

member of

the Century.

returning after the war to academic plained gratefully that he

would not

life,

really

The

colleague,

and not

in

New

who was York, ex-

be able to afford the

mem-

bership dues or to get value for them.

"Young man,"

said

Stimson

severely,

"when

I

was your age Mr.

me up for the Century, and I said pretty much you have just said to me. And Mr. Root said to me, 'Stimson, when a man offers to put you up for the Century, you } "* join, even if it means writing for the newspapers! Root

offered to put

him

the same to

as

Stimson 's marriage, to the former Miss Mabel White, of

Haven, was respect.

A

a relationship

little

New

of unblemished happiness and reciprocal

before his seventy-eighth birthday he took time off

from the great international conference at Potsdam, where the world was being partitioned by titanst under the shadow of the atomic bomb, to write her this letter:

Dearest

This

little

Misty,

a little

is

token of the fifty-seven years of happiness we

have spent together. piness as *

I

No

other

have with you.

Personal communication to the author.

tHLS,

Papers, Reel

113,

p. 90, July 20, 1945-

man

has ever received such hap-

THE COLONEL

16

Mrs. Stimson was not only a companion

who

could and did

to his nightly conversation and that of his friends about

but also a somewhat unlikely amazon, riding

who

affairs

shared his passion for

and accompanied him on some camping expeditions

Rockies. Their rectitude was total.

It

was

listen

of state,

in the

Mr. and Mrs.

also Victorian.

Stimson did not entertain divorced persons. In sexual matters he was

one of the pure to whom,

One of

his

as the

Gospel

says, all things are pure.

law partners remembers an occasion when,

young man, he was helping Stimson

as a very

to prepare the Blaustein case.

on

expert witness was required to testify as to the law of Texas ticular point.

A

An

a par-

former attorney general of the Lone Star State was

induced, in part with an offer of lavish expenses to be paid, to travel

New

to

York to

He

give evidence.

was

late for

when

the meeting, and

telephoned by the young lawyer protested vehemently that Northerners didn't

understand

Regis Hotel and

St.

how

to

he was in bed with

live;

would be along when

it

a

blonde

at

When

suited him.

the

he

eventually arrived at the Century Association, where the legal confer-

ence was to be held, he entered the room, put

son— something

in itself that brave

expressed himself in such terms as

son for forty years,

"Colonel," say,

is

To

unreconstructed last

Stimson caught

young

this

man

talking it

his

likely

do— and

no one had used

to Stim-

about?"

man of law was

night in sin as

It

I

associate's eye

bold enough to

did!"

and asked

coldly,

"What

was not a question that invited an an-

receive one.

That same young man had spent the whole night looking up cases. do so he had to use initiative above and beyond the call of duty to

persuade a law librarian to It

it is

arm round Stim-

hesitate to

if ever.

this

"I hope you spent

swer, nor did

his

men would

was not

let

him

until four o'clock in

stay in the library after

containing the relevant Texas cases, and

aged to find

The

cases

later in

lawyer

what he wanted

were

now

in

it

it

had no index.

time for the conference

He

at the

proud of

a

just

book man-

Century.

put before the errant attorney from Texas, and

the day he was successfully produced in court. felt

was closed.

the morning that he had found

himself.

Only

at the last

The young

minute before going to

him with a word. "You haven't shaved, have you?" he said. The same lawyer recalls Stimson turning down what

court, however, did Stimson favor

to any other

lawyer would have been a tempting retainer from a major trade asso-

7

t

American Leadership ciation because he

honest.

He

1

thought what the association was doing was

listened attentively to the

and then told them, "Gentlemen, jailhouse gates clanking behind

Forty years

later,

Winthrop, Stimson, had was the another

whom

with

again

"He

think

I

I

you."* And

young

can hear the sound of the that was that.

lawyer, retired after

who had a man

that influence."

of such

many

What was

the secret of

everybody

total uprightness that

he worked had nothing but confidence

in

him and never

man would ever manipulate them, for his own advantage."

or betray

Certainly there have been few figures in American public inspired such unquestioning loyalty in

public office, as

men of such

he

have never met

I

had the feeling that the them, or do anything

years at

fantastic attribute

he inspired in other men.

was

dis-

clients' presentation,

of Stimson, "The most

said

total loyalty

man

that ability?

the

would-be

life

who

talent. In his first

Theodore Roosevelt's trust-busting U.S. Attorney

for

the Southern District of New York, Stimson assembled an outstanding

team of lawyers to work for him. Some,

Emory

Thacher, lawyers,

Bickner, are

like

Goldthwaite Dorr, Thomas

now remembered

only by

New

York

and not by many of them at that. One, however, Felix Frankwon universal fame wherever the writ of Anglo-Saxon law

furter, has

runs.

They were

God

that

sent,

all

willing to

work

for

Henry Stimson

looked back on their time in the U.S. Attorney's

most

for

all

the hours

and many of them subsequently indicated that they

satisfying periods

of their

lives.

office as

one of the

War Department, even men of great ability but

In the

more conspicuously, he not only recruited welded them into a team who would do anything included George L. Harrison, Harvey Bundy, John

for their coach. J.

Page, Robert Lovett. In a very direct way, the

They

McCloy, Arthur W.

men

Colonel Stim-

son recruited and their friends became a nucleus of the foreign-policy establishment. But they a privilege to

gave him

self.

all

work

came together because to each of them it was and when it came to working they

for Stimson,

they had.

As a young man, Stimson worked with that same intensity himThe hallmark of his style as a trial lawyer was meticulous prepa-

But by the time he was Secretary of State under President Hoover, he had learned that there was one thing even more important

ration.

for a leader than being well briefed, Putnam

and that was to

& Roberts: A History of a Law Firm,

*

Winthrop, Stimson,

t

Personal communication to the author.

p. 23.

find time to think.

18

THECOLONEL

Drew Pearson* thought he was "mentally and

physically lazy." It

wasn't that. Stimson had learned to save himself for the things only

he could do.

T,hrough

World War

the years of

cations of atomic energy

II

he reflected on the impli-

and the atomic bomb. When,

in the spring

came time to take the fateful decisions on its use, he cleared his desk for a week and spent every day either rereading the record to clear his own mind or talking the issues through with one or another of 1945,

of

it

His reflections were then

his aides individually.

cently,

noted

Stimson was

far

was appalled by the

Tokyo

from

insensitive to the moral

in to strike the ancient Japanese capital,

shrine of Japanese art

He

and

it.

He

also stepped

Kyoto, the most precious

from the

religion,

He

list

of projected atomic

was shocked by the vengeful character of the Morgenthau

Plan for reducing

would

burdens of war.

caused by the fire-bombing of

civilian casualties

and he intervened to order an end to

in 1944,

targets.

carefully, if reti-

in his diary.

Germany

war to an agrarian

after the

be, he said, "just such a crime as the

on

to perpetrate

their victims

...

a

society.

That

Germans themselves hoped

crime against civilization

itself."

"Childish folly!" he scrawled in the margin of a Treasury paper on

postwar plans for Germany.

"A

beautiful Nazi program! This

to

is

laugh! "t

How

did

it

come about

that this

champion of

traditional

Ameri-

can morality and civilized international behavior took the decision to

drop an atomic

bomb on

the city of Hiroshima, in the

full

knowledge

would be the result? Then, when known, how could he have allowed a second weapon be dropped on Nagasaki? Of course, the decision was hardly Stim-

that tens of thousands of casualties

the worst was to

son's alone. bility

A

Secretary of

War may

have

full

bureaucratic responsi-

for developing and then ordering the use of a weapon, and

Stimson was almost alone

in

having responsibility for every stage in

the atomic-bomb project— from the theoretical research that

*Drew tThe

comments

R. A.

are revealed in a

memorandum from

Winnacker, to Harvey Bundy, Stimson's

a civilian official in the

War

special assistant, tactfully suggest-

ing a "personal" classification for this and other potentially embarrassing papers. 113.

it

Pearson, Washington Merry-Go- Round, p. 109.

Secretary's

Department,

reel

made

HLS,

Papers,

American Leadership

19

possible to the operational decision to drop particular day.

Even

on

it

more or

President and with dozens, even hundreds, of vilian officials

and

military officers

who knew what

do not wish to exaggerate or

I

sibility for

was inclined to

between Stimson's concern sibility for

to isolate

one of the most

for morality

and

his share

senior

ci-

a

of the respon-

of war. What

terrible single acts

repeatedly demonstrated a far from

less

an apparent conflict

is

ing about that conflict, in the context of 1945,

who

a

was being planned.

was not, however,

It

There

shirk.

on

Henry Stimson's respon-

bomb.

the decision to drop the

responsibility he

a certain target

was shared both with the

so, that responsibility

is

interest-

that even Stimson,

is

common

sensitivity to the

moral outrages of war, should have seen no objection to opening the atomic Pandora's box and loosing

That decision, taken that day

two days

after the last

after the

world celebrated victory

demons on

its

the world.

in Stimson's office at the Pentagon,

of Hitler's armies had surrendered and the day Europe, powerfully evokes the

in

tragedy of the second half of the twentieth century. the grand Allied coalition had at long cruelly destructive ter

Stimson and

his advisers

subject

it

moment when

to terror of a

new

tradition that accepted that

have to be fought

for,

he was untroubled by his kill

infer that

responded a

young

a

to determine the

he slipped away to learn

at Belsen, at

Dachau and

at

the victorious Americans had

life,

a

squeamish man.

land, civilization

and that there would be killing;

Stimson was

He grew up

and freedom might

casualties.

As

a hunter,

it.

a cruel or crass

But

it

would be

a mistake to

man. Quite the opposite.

evening around campfires or in barracks with

his friend

man," Stimson recorded

little

men

and dangers of Indian fighting." Later he

recalled with nostalgic pleasure the trips

of War with

He

of the military profession. As

Secretary of War he loved the "long days in the saddle, a side,

in a

indeed, he was unusually determined to

sensitively to the ancient lure

recalled the excitement

retary

ended

kind.

once he had decided on

hunting on the

who

very day after

from terror in one form, they were getting ready to

Stimson was not naturally

make

down

sitting

for Japan,

of what had been done

Nordhausen. At the very freed the world

The

at fearful cost

nightmare of nuclear war.

terrible

were

form atomic holocaust would take in sickening detail

and

world war, the process began that replaced the spec-

of fascism with the even more

When

last

of inspection he made

General Leonard

admiringly,

"who

Wood, "the

as Sec-

only white

could run with an Apache

THE COLONEL

2O

scout" and

He

self.

who "gloned

and

in courage

^dmson did him-

fitn.

looked back proudly on turkey shoots in Arizona and big-

game fishing in the the army was used

Philippines,

army posts

V

and remembered proudly that though to pro\iding Washington visitors with a safe old plug with a Western saddle no one could fall out of. when he visited horse and a

in the flat

saddle" for

the end of his L: -ise

on ahead ordering "a real him. The regular armv officer, he said at §

i

"the code of the

man

whom

for

officer

sent

he

felt

a natural svmpathv,

and gentleman was

Stimson grew up in admiration of

mv own of

a generation

cocL

men

slighth*

older than himself— men like Theodore Roosevelt. Elihu Root. Albert

Bevendge and Brooks

what was

of

whom

ociated with

Movement, although they were not

all

by anv measure, and in anv case the label can be mislead-

Prog ing.

Adams— many

called the Progressive

What

held

them together was.

believed in the United States and

They on the

rather, a militant nationalism.

its

destiny to p:

cat

_

part

world's stage. As a consequence, they wanted action to meet the chal-

and mass immigration. Thev saw that

lenges of sprawling citv slums

government must respond to the new But thev

also believed in the virtues

themselves and for the nation. Brooks

scale

of an imperial America.

of conflict and adventure, for

Adams

said that

Amenca would

West Point for the values of Wall Street. Henrv Stimson. who spent his life on Wall Street, would not have gone along all the way with that, but he would have felt some svmpathv with what Adams was trying to say. Herbert Croly. editor of The Xnr Republic and author of the Progressive best seller Tlx Prom-

do

ise

well to substitute the values of

of Amencs.

a serious

aid that the

American nation "needs the tor

moral adventure." Stimson came to know too

:o see

it

as

much about

the national equivalent of a regimen of jogging and

cold showers. But he shared the Progressive hankering for

virility

and

strenuous endeavor, strong leadership in America, and American leadership in the world.

Theodore Roosevelt died

in 1919. Elihu

Root

in 19?"

Henry Stim-

son was. almost uniquelv. the connection between their early dream

of

Amencan power and

earned across the gulf of the fierce conflicts of his

*0» Actor

Service,

p

_

its \

later fulfillment.

ears

between

Some of

his Victorian

the values he

upbringing and

maturity were not suited to the world ot

1

American Leadership

2

nuclear weapons that was

For

all

existence as he

his rocklike confidence in the lasting

Stimson was,

He

figure.

coming into

we

as

shall see,

both

left

the stage.

worth of those

a contradictory

and

values,

a transitional

personified, for a start, the contradictions of the Progressive

Movement,

led as

it

was by

and

capitalist trust-

in 1910.

He wondered

aristocratic reformers

busters like him.

Stimson ran for Governor of later,

whether,

if

New

York

he had been elected then, he might not have been

President of the United States in due course. "Victory,"

corded him

strong possibility

"would almost

House."* The thought was not first half,

State

dominated the country

far

New

Albany was automatically

in

is

not too

much

even the

York City and the Empire

more than they do

contender. But Stimson did not win.

toral politics. It

re-

surely have

idle vanity. In the first third,

of the twentieth century,

competent governor tial

Bundy

opened to him a of great advancement, even toward the White

as believing,

He

today, and any

a potential presiden-

was not

at ease in elec-

to say that as a lawyer in public

life,

following an old American tradition personified by his patron and part-

ner Elihu Root, Stimson was ambivalent about democracy. utterly

committed to the system

in theory,

He

was

though he preferred to

speak of "responsible government." In practice, however, he shied

away from the uncouth manipulations of the

political system.

He found

himself more comfortable in the quiet corridors of influence than on the hustings. In this, too, he certainly foreshadowed

two generations

of leaders in American foreign and national-security policy.

X. he faces,

Roman god

Janus,

and Stimson was

in

god of doorways,

many ways

is

portrayed with two

Janus-faced. Each stage of his

public career was characterized not by compromise or vacillation but

by ambiguity. His first major achievement as a diplomat was in Nicaragua. He was sent by President Coolidge to negotiate an end to a civil war there,

which he succeeded

in

doing in just one month.

He

quickly achieved

what he had been sent out to do, but his solution did not turn out as he had hoped. And an ambiguity lingers over his real purpose. Was he trying to extricate the United States from Nicaragua, or to shore up *On

Active Service, p.

25.

THE COLONEL

22 American

His

interests there?

Philippines, equally successful

Was he

term

as

Governor General

in the

surface, raises similar questions.

preparing the Filipinos for independence, or trying to distract

their attention

As

later

on the

from

it?

Hoover and as Secretary of War under Stimson bridged two sharply different ideas of what

Secretary of State under

Franklin Roosevelt,

American foreign policy ought to

be.

For four years under Hoover, he

kept his balance on the plunging circus horses of isolation and intervention, disarmament and collective security.

And

finally in his su-

preme job as the architect and arbiter of the American war effort in World War II, he had to balance atomic war and human decency, and the

moment

he turned

might be

he had consummated victory with the ultimate weapon,

his attention to the

built

ways

in

which

a

new

international order

without atomic arms.

Nicaragua and the Philippines, China and Japan, disarmament and national security, the rival claims of the national interest and the world

economy,

isolation versus intervention:

which Stimson grappled between porary look. There

The world

1927

and

1945 have an

oddly contem-

nothing coincidental or accidental about

of its designers.

its

He

from the

shape

ward, people

the same.

Henry Stimson was one

who saw

of the century, that the world would need

early years

like

is still

was one of the small group of Americans

American leadership and

that, until others

him were going

were ready to come

their perception

tion of the

time, and to whether shall

look at

and

it

stantial contact

war. But

will

how Henry

formed and developed, the Atlantic.

their actions are relevant to

way American

for-

to have to provide that leadership

within the United States. They were prepared to act on those

Both

that.

has changed a great deal in the intervening years, but in

important respects

clearly,

is

the specific problems with

beliefs.

any considera-

leadership has been exercised since their

be possible to exercise

Stimson's ideas and his

in a brief

it

in the future.

gifts as a leader

exposure to Latin America; in

We

were

a sub-

with the Far East; and in a long apprenticeship across

We

first let

shall see

how

they were used in the supreme

us turn back far

future American leader.

test

of

into the past, to the education of a

II

The Warrior Dream

The

central clue to Stimson's career

is

to be found in

the structure of American society. Born to respectability, trees,

educated

he quickly

provided effective en-

in schools that

made himself a

part of the

was not simply wealthy, but represented any group represented

group that in

so

far as

the American aristocracy.

it,

Eric F.

Goldman,

in

The New York Times

Book Review, October

My father fought at Chattanooga,

but these eyes have

seen nothing gorier than a presidential election.

never seen the lawless passions of battlefield.

And,

as a

i960

7,

men

let

I

loose

stoodent of humanity,

I

have

on

a

han-

kered for the experience. John Scantlebury Blcnkiron, the American agent

A

lthough

it is less

peaks twice as grand.

Montana

a

John Buchan, Greenmantle

than ten thousand feet high, no more than

Mount McKinley, Chief Mountain

half the height of

ern

in

It

is

has the aura of

freestanding, rising from the plains of west-

few miles south of the Canadian border,

like

an

officer

with drawn sword in front of the parading ranks of the main chain of the Continental Divide. Lewis and Clark saw 1805,*

and

called

*Or so Stimson has followed the

map

it

Tower Mountain.

believed. See trail

HLS,

My

it,

far to

the north, in

Later, in tribute to

Vacations, p. 54.

But

of Lewis and Clark, does not believe

my

this

is

friend

its

domi-

Dayton Duncan, who

possible.

From studying

the

Bernard de Voto's edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark it would appear that, if either of the two explorers ever saw the Chief, it must have been Meriwether Lewis on his in

return from the Pacific in 1806, a

detour into what

is

now

when he took

a

more northerly route than Clark and

Glacier National Park.

also

made

THE COLONEL

24 nance,

it

From the west, hump, snow-covered much of

was

called the Chief.

across a great

From

rock.

about

the south,

it

looks like a jagged fang, the west side rising at

forty-five degrees, the east flank steeper

way mark, and almost

enough

steeply

it rises

the year, to a wall of

vertical above.

than that up to the

But from the

east,

half-

looms

it

the rampart of a fortress of the ancient gods, sheer and indom-

like

itable.*

Certainly in 1892,

when Henry Stimson

saw

first

it, it

was thought

to be both unclimbed and unclimbable. That alone was

make him,

the age of twenty-five, want to climb

at

rustler called Fox,

who had

He made

it.

attack with an older friend, a Dr. Walter James; with a

enough to the

cook and horse

been with the Seventh Cavalry on the day

of Little Bighorn and had survived only because he was with the wagon

and with

train that day;

Indian

a

pure-blooded Blackfoot Indian they called

Billy.

round the campfire the night before their ascent, Indian told Stimson that only one Blackfoot had ever tried to climb the

Sitting Billy

Chief.

The

Blackfeet were plains Indians, uneasy in high places. There

though, that many years ago, before even the oldest brave

was

a story,

was

a boy, a great warrior

from the Flathead

tribe,

who

lived far to the

west in the high Rockies, had climbed to the top of the Chief to sleep his warrior sleep. lore,

That was the

special

time when, according to Indian

he would dream the dream that would be

his

guide in

life.

For

four days he had fasted at the top of the Chief, offering his pipe of

peace to the

spirit

of the mountain to smoke. Since then, no other

warrior had ever dared to venture there to meet the

The next

day,

attack the Chief 1,500 feet

from

young Henry Stimson and

from the its

east,

spirit.

face

of the rock rose

forested plinth. Halfway up, the

horizontally by a broad shelf. There, after

decided to

his friends

where the sheer

some

cliff

hair-raising

was

sliced

moments

getting around a place where their ledge dwindled almost to nothing,

200 sheer

feet

wall. Again,

up, the climbers ate their lunch below the second rock

it

was

less

formidable than

it

looked from below.

One

rock chimney led to a narrow ledge, then to a second chimney, 700

crumbling ridge of the sumwedged in the rocks, lay the mit. On the very highest place of all, small, weather-beaten skull of a bison. Even in the pure air of the

feet

of almost easy

staircase to the long,

*Stimson's account of climbing the Chief was publication of the

My

Vacations, to

Boone and Crockett Club,

which he added the

tale

first

in 1895-

of the

1913

published in Hunting

He

reprinted

sequel.

it

in

Many

in the privately

Lands, a

published

The Warrior Dream

2

mountaintop it had rotted away tal bone and the horns.

The Indian

frontal

tribes.

bone of

take first

their warrior

the buffalo skull.

had taken

it

was

a buffalo

The young warriors used

came time to dream

move

until there

They

but the fron-

little left

a sacred object to the western

dream. Stimson and

mountain

all

to reach safety, swinging

his friends did

those years before.

hand over hand on

any of the party had ever used, past the most dangerous

Twenty-one

It

did not

places.

Mary's Lake. Stimson,

St.

most distinguished lawyers on Wall and two

become

wilderness had

Street,

from

friends

to climb the Chief again "to see

No

the easier western side.

The afternoon

and

The

part of

if it

now forty-six and one of the

was accompanied by

his wife,

New York. Yet Stimson decided

would bring back the

feelings

old." As a concession to the years, though, he did agree to climb

eastern face since he

not

who

by hundreds of tourists every summer, and

Glacier National Park, visited

his cousin, his niece

The

he.

it

a rope, the

years later, in 1913, Stimson revisited the Chief.

West had changed, and so had motorboats plied

when

a buffalo skull as a pillow

respected the devotion of the warrior

to the top of the

them long

was

5

one,

it

his friends

it

of

from

seemed, had climbed the steeper,

had done so

in 1892.

before the climb, the Colonel, with his niece, rode

up the creek looking for some fishing. Suddenly they came upon two young men who had just broken camp and were packing their horses. The older of them was a theology student from Princeton who had spent the

come and

summer

fascinated

his friend

"That

is

Canadian border preaching, and had be-

across the

by the silhouette of the Chief. The previous day, he

had climbed

it

by the western route.

and explained that

a curious coincidence," said Stimson,

twenty-one years before, almost to the day, he had made the

orded climb by the eastern if

side.

And

first re-

he asked the young theologian

by any chance he saw among the rocks on the peak

a small buffalo

skull.

The young man's

face sparkled

with

interest,

and

lo

and behold,

he fished the skull out of his pack. So Stimson told him the story Indian Billy had told, and the upshot was that the student said that

he had

known

the story, he

would have had too much

if

respect for the

Indian to touch the skull. So the next day Stimson reverently carried the skull and buried

it

so deep

among

the rocks that

no

future tourist

would

ever

* During

the 1988 presidential election there were reports that George Bush's father, Senator

remove

it.*

Prescott Bush, had in his youth stolen the skull of the

Apache

chieftain

Geronimo and placed

THE COLONEL

26

JLhere had been Stimsons in America for

a

long time. The

first

emigrants came from England and settled in Massachusetts in the mid-

They were, as the tradition had been handed down to Henry Stimson, "sturdy, middle-class people, religious, thrifty, energetic and long-lived." They were also, if not pugnacious, at least accustomed to war. Stimsons fought in King Philip's dle of the seventeenth century.

War,

in the

French and Indian War,

in the

Revolutionary War, and in

the Civil War. In 1945 Stimson exchanged letters with a genealogist, Marjorie

Rood,

who

reported that "a George Stimpson or Stimson came over

from England before 1653" and that eleven of

his children

were to be

traced in the records of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Stimson replied that

"the traditions this

my own

in

family are that our

country was George Stimson

1636.

He

King

Philip's

who

first

ancestor

coming to

landed in Massachusetts about

or another ancestor was supposed to have been a soldier in

war

the Revolution,

.

.

.

the family lived in Massachusetts until soon after

when they moved

to Albany and then to the Catskill

mountains."

A later George Stimson, Army, moved some

after carrying a

forty miles southwest

musket

in the

Continental

from Albany to become the

in Windham, New York, in the Catskills. It was his grandHenry Clark Stimson, who moved— not out west as so many of

first settler

son,

the middling folk of

New

England, upstate

New

York, and Pennsyl-

vania were doing in the middle years of the century— but off the land, first

to take advantage of the industrial revolution that was transform-

ing the eastern seaboard, and then to take his place in the very vortex

of the

capitalist

excitement that in thirty years

after the Civil

War trans-

New York City into the greatest marketplace on earth. Henry Clark Stimson left the family farm at Windham and worked

formed

it

in the Skull

and Bones

hall in

New

Haven. Skulls of other famous Indian

reported, had also been stolen by Bonesmen.

The

chiefs,

it

was

reports are unconfirmed, and counterstate-

ments were made that these exploits were imaginary. Still, the possibility is raised that the was an admired exploit, possibly even an initiation

stealing of skulls, especially Indian skulls,

is tempting to wonder whether Stimson was intrigued by the discovery of the buffalo on the Chief because it had a special meaning for Bonesmen. Might he not have enjoyed the subtle amusement of telling an anecdote that would have one meaning for the general reader and a special meaning for the initiate?

test. It

skull

The Warrior Dream first

in a

27

locomotive shop in Paterson,

New

If to a

Jersey.

modern

reader that has overtones of proletarian deprivation, they are out of place.

For Stimson's wife, Catherine Atterbury, had inherited

enough

trust fund,

him to wipe the oil off his hands on the New York Stock Exchange. for

buy himself

a seat

years during

and immediately

as a

after the Civil

father

Leonard Jerome was one of

still.

a small

good and

In the hectic

War, he won

broker with a cool head, which was rare enough,

scrupulously honest, which was rarer

for

a reputation

who was

also

Winston Churchill's grand-

his clients.

The buccaneering

Jay

Gould was another, and a third was the imperious Commodore Vanderbilt. By 1867 the senior partner of Henry C. Stimson & Sons, of Wall Street, was a known and, to all external appearances, a solid man; known, for one thing, for the imperturbability with which he had managed the legendary Prairie Dog Corner, a successful operation to drive up the stock of an obscure railroad called the Prairie

8

du Chien. The solidity was more apparent than real, at least in the psychological domain. Henry Clark Stimson hated the stress of the stock exchange and suffered from nightmares and what were probably psychosomatic ailments as long as he worked there. "He damned speculation," it is recorded, "and frequently said he wanted to get out." Before long, circumstances enabled him to do so. He lost much of his fortune in the panic of 1873 but was lucky enough to keep sufficient money, when added to his wife's trust fund, to enable him to retire from the market and still live in solid Victorian bourgeois comfort on East Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan. If the future Stimsons were

always a

little

better off than they pretended,

it

was

in part because

the founding grandfather had been careful not to risk everything in the market, partly because they were

spent as

if

all

as careful

about what they

they had been poor.

Henry Clark Stimson had four sons and three daughters. The eldest son, Henry, became a minister, like so many of his ancestors before him. Frederick became a lawyer, and John, in defiance of all Stimson tradition, became a painter of not particularly notable canvases. Kitty

and

Julia eventually married.

Mary, known

as

Minnie, did

not, with results that were fortunate for the subject of this book.

the second son, Lewis Atterbury Stimson, had ciding

what to do with

with distinction in the

his

life.

He

Army of

some

had done well

Only

difficulty in de-

at Yale,

then fought

the Potomac. Less than a year after

THECOLONEL

28 the Civil

War

ended, he met Candace Wheeler, the beautiful daughter

of a cultured though not opulent American family at

home

and

in the artistic

intellectual elites

Europe. Impetuously, Lewis Stimson followed

went to Venice

like a

and married her

Two 1867

Henry James

at the

his

Candace when she

in Paris in

wooed her, November 1866.

Henry Lewis Stimson

second Candace, two years

his sister, a

were equally

heroine, impetuously

American embassy

children were quickly born:

and

who

of the United States and

in

September

later.

He

Lewis Stimson 's happiness was short-lived.

disliked being a

stockbroker even more than had his father, saying he would rather

live

on "roots and berries." Shortly after the birth of her daughter his wife became ill. To the doctors of the time the disease was mysterious; it may have been diabetes. At any rate in 1871 Lewis Stimson sold his seat on the exchange and on the proceeds took his wife to Europe. They lived in

modest

hotels,

first

in Berlin,

then in Zurich,

finally in Paris.

In Switzerland, Lewis Stimson, perhaps impelled by a desperate wish to alleviate or at least to understand Candace 's condition, began to

study medicine. In Paris he worked with Louis Pasteur for a year. In 1873

New

he returned to

York to take

College and then worked as a surgeon, later as a professor at

New

degree at Bellevue Medical

a

first

at Presbyterian Hospital,

York University Medical School and

attending surgeon at the Chambers Street

House of

Relief.

wife's death in 1875 he sold his house, slept in a rented

threw himself into "constant grinding work" tal,

which brought him

far

room, and

an emergency hospi-

in

lower rewards than

as

After his

a

doctor of

his ability

could have earned from private practice.

man of

Dr. Stimson was a

great sensitivity,

One of his

with an outer crust of hardness, even cynicism.

example, was that thing,

and you

it

will

was

as well

be more on

"to think a par

evil

with the

rest

illness

when

his

that he had to

his

son was sharing

go out of town, and

it

sayings, for

of everyone and every-

never recovered from the blow of his wife's fifteen years later,

which he protected

of the world."

He

and death. One day,

house, he announced

transpired only later that he had

spent the afternoon visiting his wife's grave.

Henry Lewis Stimson and spectively,

were sent by

their grandfather

his little sister,

then eight and

this grief-stricken father to live as

and grandmother

in the

six re-

orphans with

brownstone on East Thirty-

fourth Street. Their unmarried aunt Minnie looked after them with selfless,

overflowing affection. "She

really

mothered them," one of her

The Warrior Dream

29

brothers remembered, but she had the tact never to try to be a sub-

mother. For

stitute for their real

though, the shock of can be

on

his

little

mother's death and

doubt that

his character;

stoical side

it

this

her good sense and kindness,

all

boy must have been

little

cruelly bewildered

his father's

may have

may

It

also

apparent rejection. There

event was one of the formative influences contributed to a certain hard, reticent,

of his personality and perhaps

for affection.

by the double

also to a timid, reticent search

have caused certain of

his

psychosomatic

symptoms. For

five years

Henry Stimson grew up

looking forward to his father's fort

and reassuring

in his grandparents'

surrounded by the austere com-

visits,

certainties, the velvet upholstery

oppressive morality of such a

home

house,

at

such a time.

and occasionally

He went

first

to

various local schools, then to study Latin and Greek at the Sanver

School of Languages

in,

of all

places,

Times Square. The school seems

to have been unsatisfactory. Certainly,

when he was

thirteen, his father

decided abruptly to send him away to boarding school, to the

most

Phillips

as

it

happened

patrician school in America.

Andover, then Yale College, then the Harvard Law

School: the progression

is

the classic cursus honorum of the American

came to mean much to Stimson. It is worth describing what those storied educational institutions were— and what they were not— at the time Henry Stimson attended them. The Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, stands in a unique relation not just to the New England tradition but to the upper

class,

and

history of the

can Eton,

it

United

it is

States as a whole.

Sometimes

called the

Ameri-

one of the best known of the expensive and famous

boarding schools to which prosperous Americans have sent their adolescent sons for seven or eight generations.* For has

turned out,

all

the radicals

it

however, from Percy Bysshe Shelley to George

Orwell, Eton has always been an aristocratic school, a nursery of servants of

Church and Crown, but

also the traditional seat

of education

no doubt an almost for those born equally high proportion of Andover students have come from to hereditary wealth. In practice,

comfortable backgrounds.

But the tradition

American academy being revolutionary *And now

in

its

is

very different,

origins, Puritan in

the its

their daughters. Early generations of Andover graduates might be more surprised to young women on the campus than to see black students, since at least one of the handsome Federal houses there was a station on the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves.

see

THE COLONEL

30

"high thinking and plain living," downright Spartan

instinct for its

in

habits.

As

for

its

revolutionary credentials, George Washington,

who met

the founder, Samuel Phillips, during the Revolutionary War, sent his

nephew Howell Lewis go

there,

of seven Washingtons to

first

not to mention the two sons of Richard Henry Lee. The

"My

song

to Andover, the

Country,

'Tis

of Thee!" was written

at 147

Main

Street in

Andover by the Reverend Samuel Francis Smith, and the silver seal of the Academy was made by Paul Revere. Two of the school's buildings were designed by Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Massachusetts

House

State

Boston,

in

who completed Benjamin

and

place, feel

a

Andover

Latrobe's design for

numinous boy would have to be thick-witted indeed who did not

the Capitol in Washington.

Hill

is

a spacious and a

himself there to be in a special sense the heir of the founders and

champions of the United

early

and

States,

in personal contact

with

its

central tradition.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an Andover boy and recorded journal "the debt of myself and in those years

of

New

How and

like a

Sabbath peace

is

this!

how

all

that

is

Washington dwindles before

Princeton as

altars

of

this

same old

burning cedar and sandalwood pine."*

in his

brothers to that old religion which,

country population

in the

England, which taught privation, self-denial and sorrow.

dignified

in

dwelt

still

my

A

.

.

.

called talents

...

it!

fire,

.

.

.

in Paris

value Andover, Yale and

though

I

fear they

have done

and have learned to use chips and

garland of surnames suggests

New

I

and worth

how

the school's history was

more than a hundred years. The school opened on April 30, 1778, less than two years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and more interwoven with that of

than

five years

England

at its richest for

before the end of the Revolutionary War. Josiah Quincy,

son of the famous patriot, was in the father of Henry

first class.

Wadsworth Longfellow, was

Stephen Longfellow,

a student.

So were Charles

Lowell, father of James Russell Lowell; Charles Pinckney Sumner,

fa-

ther of Senator Charles Sumner; Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Autocrat

of the Breakfast Table (who was "subjected to the severest castigation ... in the annals of punishment in that institution") and father of the

Supreme Court justice; and Samuel Morse, the inventor of the The famous first words Morse transmitted by this newfan-

telegraph.

*May

4, 1841,

William

P.

quoted

Bundy

in Bliss Perry (ed.),

for this reference.

The Heart of Emerson's Journals.

I

am

indebted to

1

The Warrior Dream

3

gled technology from Washington to Baltimore breathed the very

of New England and of Andover:

The

"What

Samuel Phillips's two academies, Hampshire (founded three years later

inspiration for

New

and

at Exeter,

not

in fact the great

at

all

of which were

in a state

Andover

in 1781),

Anglican foundations in England such

Winchester or Westminster,

spirit

God wrought!"*

hath

as

was

Eton,

of more or

less

benighted decadence in the 1780s, but rather the dissenting academies

founded

in the course

formists, that

The

of the eighteenth century by English noncon-

non-Episcopalians, and Scots Presbyterians.

is,

physical conditions

were quite

tough

as

on Andover

on the other hand,

Hill,

those in any medieval English public school.

as

Most boys, including Henry Stimson, boarded with approved families on the Hill, Stimson with the head of the classics department, Edward Austin Coy, lived in

known

to generations of boys as "Eddie Greek." Others

two sordid ranges of buildings known

Commons

as English

and Latin Commons. These weatherbeaten structures had, one nostalgic historian maintains, "an indefinable atmosphere of romance,"

when

wind howled through the cracks in the carpentry and boys huddled for warmth round the stove. "As the two rows of commons stood on the north-west slope of Andover Hill facing the distant New Hampshire hills on the horizon," Stimson himself reespecially

called,

"winter

the

life

there was neither soft nor enervating."

by modern standards, hygienic. Before the tubs,

1890s there

no showers and no washstands. "The

to the boys entirely," wrote

Nor was

were no bath-

of the rooms

care

it,

is left

the great reforming principal Cecil F. P.

Bancroft in 1879, just before Stimson arrived, "even to the removal of

waste water and ashes, the sweeping, bed-making and cleaning. part of a boy's education to build his

own

fires,

no doubt; room."

it

It is

may be

to black his boots, bring his water, and sweep his

The same

principal

was the recipient of

from "a prominent statesman" to Andover.

He

who was

my

a

is

fellow

See also Scott Paradise,

member of

biography.

said, 'Well, sir, this school

well, if a touch

twentieth-century headmaster, Claude Fuess,

School.

he

is

boy!'

*The ethos of nineteenth-century Andover by

dubious compliment

"smelt the unedifying odors and saw the unattractive

sights; then, turning to Dr. Bancroft,

the place for

a

considering sending his boy

Men

the Ausable Club.

Men

pompously, caught

of Andover and

An

in

two books

Old New England

of the Old School. Fuess was a friend of Stimson's and a He corresponded with Stimson in 1945 about writing his

3

THE COLONEL

2

" 'Good,' replied the principal. " 'Yes,' continued the visitor, 'any

which can keep

institution

Andover has, and yet lodge its students in such disreputable barracks, must have about it some miraculous qualitv which I want my son to learn to know.' "* the fine reputation which

was perhaps

It

just as well that Dr.

Stimson had arranged for

his

son to board. At thirteen, Henry Stimson was neither outstanding nor

When

robust.

he

left

Andover, aged seventeen, he weighed no more

than 120 pounds. But by that time a remarkable transformation had taken place in both school and pupil. Samuel H. Tavlor, "Uncle Sam," principal

from

1837 to 1871,

was an "unmitigated despot"

flogged the Bible, Latin and Greek into the boys;

dug

a

who

literally

"deeplv rutted

route" from Andover to Yale because he suspected Harvard of being too Unitarian; and considered that "our vicinity to the

one of the most exposed, "t rence

is

city

of Law-

of irregularity to which we are

fruitful sources

Narrow and old-fashioned he might have been, but it was "Uncle Sam" who established Andover as a national institution. By 1871, the year in which he collapsed in the middle of a Bible class, there were 228 boys in the school, 68 per cent of them from outside

There followed institutional

crisis

and then

New

England.

institutional regener-

At first, freed from Taylor's heavy hand, Andover floundered. The low point in numbers came in 1877, three years before Henry ation.

Stimson arrived, with only

177 students.

Debts were growing. The

fu-

ture looked bleak.

Salvation tive

came from

Principal Bancroft,

High Victorians who were

moral tone and raising

money

one of those

brisk, effec-

equally at ease preaching with a high

or chairing a buildings committee. Ban-

Academy, then went to study in Germany (like Daniel Coit Gilman, creator of the first modern graduate school at Johns Hopkins, and Charles W. Eliot, creator of modern had taught Latin

croft

at Phillips

Harvard). Wisely, the trustees brought him back in

1873-

He

raised

money, put up new buildings, hired excellent new teachers, paid them well, and left them alone. The cornerstone of a new chapel was laid, and

was not long before

it

a

new

chemical laboratory had been built

Enrollment grew, faculty grew, so did the endowment, the number of options in the curriculum, and the number of books in the

as well.

library. •Claude M. Fucss,

(Tuck,

op. at.,

An

p. 264.

Old New England

School:

A

History of Phillips Academy, Atuimrr, p. 06.

The Warrior Dream

3 3

At Andover, in fact, Henry Stimson was not only at a school whose ethos and traditions stretched back literally to the Revolution and to the Founding Fathers, but he was also being taught by men

who

were

touch with the roaring

in

intellectual revolution

of the

late

nineteenth century, with the onslaught of science on religion and with

new

about economics and

ideas

Although "School

life,"

Academy was one of the best-known

Phillips

the country, the boys

society.

who went

there were not for the

Stimson himself remembered

extremely simple and inexpensive.

The

schools in

most

part rich.

sixty-five years later,

cost of tuition

was

"was

sixty dollars

a year."

was much younger than any other boy in the school, but the new surroundings were like heaven to a boy who craved escape from city life. I have heard the discipline of Phillips Academy of I

those old days described by an alumnus as "perfect freedom,

Of the outdoor life

tempered by expulsion." was

There was

a fair description.

Andover

cricket at

walking over the

in

hills

about

of the students that

football, baseball

[it

replaced

skating, bobsledding

i860],

and

and woodlands of northern Massachusetts.

Henry Stimson enjoyed himself at the time. Once he built a specially perfected bobsled, and on another occasion an electric telegraph that sent messages across the campus. And he remembered Andover with an unusually deep affection for the rest of his days; he was as

from 1902

a trustee

"one of the

until 1947,

and he described the school's welfare

greatest interests in

my

life."

days was unusual even in his generation.

Such devotion to school

It is

perhaps an illustration

of a true judgment made by a very perceptive biographer* that life

"all his

he was to respect those in authority and to wish for their

approval."

At Andover he studied in 1883.

father

He

of

He

and

He

spent a

sister,

feel

ready to go there

persuaded his father that he would be looked on "as

kid"t and that

a

for a year.

father

and was graduated comfortably

had been before him, but he did not

straightaway. sort

effectively,

followed the "deeply rutted route" to Yale, where his

took

it

would be

month special

in the

better to put off going to Yale

summer of 1883

coaching in

in France

with

his

New York for several months,

*Elting E. Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, p. 60, to whose careful research and sensitive interpretations

I

am

ilbid., p. 28.

indebted throughout this book, and especially

in this chapter.

THE COLONEL

34 then went back to Andover

w

hen h

as a special student,

taking courses in

the spring of 1884.

scientific subjects, in

Stimson

finally

reached

New

Haven,

Yale, too,

was

in

midstream. The "simple, bucolic Yale" of colonial and antebellum days was slow to pass away.

arching elms

.

.

where the

.

so that the smell of

dows."* cle

Sam

Its studies

Taylor,

its

It

was, wrote one historian, "a place of

were

was cut by scythe,

grass in the college yard

new-mown

hay drifted in

as traditional as those at

recreations "sitting

on the

win-

at the college

Andover under Un-

fence outside college

hall" or, for the adventurous, the deliciously dangerous

company of

the college widow, a lady described as "an enchantress in illusion and a specialist in the heart,

In the

last

"t

two

third of the nineteenth century

great

movements

were transforming American higher education: the movement for tive studies for

undergraduates, and the

new

idea of a university as a

place of postgraduate specialist study, focusing

on worship accorded

in

German

elec-

on the

respect verging

universities to the doctorate, earned

by the preparation of a dissertation based on original research. Yale was late in

In

welcoming both. 1871

the fellows rejected Daniel Coit Gilman,

Johns Hopkins, and chose instead guarantee,"

it

by the

and win

social scientist its

all

battle

until Stimson's junior year

who went

president

Noah

still

off to

Porter,

"a

to preserve

its

the educational questions."*

Henry Stimson

until the vear before

ner, fight

new

has been said, "that the college was

conservative attitude in respect to

faculty, led

as a

Not

arrived as a freshman did the

and polymath William Graham Sum-

with Porter over elective courses, and not

was the name of the institution

officially

changed from Yale College to Yale University. The election of Timothy Dwight, grandson of

a

former president of Yale, to succeed Porter

Stimson's sophomore year,

1886,

meant

that Yale

came

in

to adapt, slowly

and gradually, to the profound changes that were sweeping through other American universities in those years. Overall, as George W. Pierson, one of the most eminent historians of Yale, records, "the picture

of Yale College education remained depressing. The faculty except •Brooks Mather Kelley, tlbid., p. 230. tlbtd., p. 233

ff.

Tale:

A

History, p. 224.

for

The Warrior Dream a

few were aloof

3 5

The

disciplinarians.

symptoms of a deeply

much of

[cribs]

cribbed

many of the They used 'ponies exams when they could and Some later remembered their

students betrayed

1

disloyal subject population.

the time. They stole on them when they could not.

days at Yale with hot anger."

What

Yale and Yale

men

cared most about, at least after

country and Yale," was sports. Athletics and athletes

both Harvard and Yale

prestige at

when

were held

athletics

League

called the Ivy

still

enjoyed high c

and

official

"de-

World War II. But the highest esteem in what came to be

emphasis" of football did not come age

until the 1930s,

"God,

in

until after

was between 1870 and

universities

1917,

before

the pragmatism, professionalism and sheer numbers of the great Mid-

petition.

them out of serious comYale was "the power in college sports";

Walter

1885

western, Southern and Western schools took

was

a

And in those years Camp was coach from

to 1910; and especially in 1883-98 Yale

phenomenon, with nine Yale

football teams undefeated

and three

not even scored against! Against Harvard, Yale was so dominant that

"Cambridge men began to think of while Yale

men had

nothing but muckers,

Yalies as

serious doubts about the manliness of the Har-

vards."* Yale was above success. "It

this

is

all

a shrine to

marvellous

good de

esprit

fellowship and a school for

corps, this

habit of always pulling

together," wrote Buchanan Winthrop in 1892. "Nothing could be

more American than Yale," wrote George Santayana, Harvard in the same year."t "Here is sound healthy

a Spaniard

from

principle but

no

overscrupulousness, love of life, trust in success ... a democratic amiability."

that

And

the college inspired a loyalty in

was conspicuous and impressive. Yale men

such records that

it

its

sons, wrote Pierson,

in post-college

was suspected they were working

for

life

made

one another.

In short, Yale in the 1880s was: "a thoroughly conservative institution; traditional in

habits, religious in

its

atmosphere, conforming in tion. [Yale

ments,

men

fiercely

its

its beliefs,

earnest

and moral

opinions, old-fashioned in

its

in

its

educa-

were] open in their manners, square in their judg-

competitive but wholeheartedly loyal."*

*See George Pierson's two-volume History of Tale College; Brooks Mather Kelley, Tale: A History; Reuben A. Holden, Tale: A Pictorial History. For the Yale ethos, I am indebted to Robin W. Winks, Cloak and Gown. For some hints about the senior (secret) societies, see Maynard Mack,

A

History of Scroll

tQuoted *G.

W.

in

& Key.

Holden,

Tale:

A

Pictorial History, introduction.

Pierson, History of Tale College, vol.

ii,

p. 9-

THE COLONEL

36

That passage might have been written with Henry Stimson in mind. While he was an undergraduate, his fierce competitiveness took the form of going out for any prize he thought he had any chance of

winning.

He won

the Junior Exhibition, a prize awarded for compos-

ing and reciting a piece which began, apparently to the

amusement of

"When men sang, they sang the songs of year he won the De Forest Prize for a study

roommate,

a less-intellectual

Beranger," and the next

of the English seventeenth-century Roundhead (and governor of Massachusetts) Sir

most

Henry Vane. He

on

articles

topics

my

The

Lit," in spite of submitting careful

from Mazzini to Charlotte Bronte.

he wrote, he could rejected

however, to be elected to the

failed,

"The

prestigious society,

"still feel

when you

suit."

rejection

was blotted out by

a success,

tance that was to have an extraordinary effect

perhaps a considerable

on the

effect

however, an accep-

on Stimson 's

membership

in the secret senior society Skull

was given to saying

in later

life,

life

and

future style, not to mention per-

sonnel, of the American foreign-policy establishment. to

Fifty years later,

the pang of that winter day

He

was elected

and Bones.

It

was, he

"the most important educational ex-

perience of his life."*

Few

subjects have been

wrapped

in

paranoia, than the Yale senior societies.

cation

is

deepened by

their

more mystification, not to say To some extent this mystifi-

members, who tend to

react to

any inquiry

by simultaneously professing the supreme importance of membership for themselves, else.

There

is

of the secret

and the utter

nothing new

insignificance of the subject to

in this.

As

early as 1858 a Yale observer

wrote

societies there that "their great apparent desire to have

their very existence ignored

is

only equalled by their intense desire to

have their existence brought into view. a

anyone

.

.

.

No

reflection

would

strike

deeper pang into the hearts of members than the conviction that no

one puzzled

his

head about them."

Ironically, in

against

view of the

them and the

affinity

between the suspicion directed

suspicion with which Freemasonry

is

regarded in

many circles, the senior societies owe their origin to the Anti-Masonic movement that swept the United States in the 1830s. In 1832 the AntiMasonic movement attacked the secrecy of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, and Edward Everett,

a Massachusetts statesman

*Morison, Turmoil and Tradition,

p. 34.

whose

obliterating fate

The Warrior Dream it

was to speak

first

37

and

at length before

Lincoln

at

Gettysburg, was

sent to Yale to argue against the academic fraternity. In protest, Wil-

H.

liam

members of his

thirteen other Scroll

of

Russell, valedictorian

1833,

class to

and Key, came into existence

persuaded Alphonso Taft and

form Skull and Bones. The

in 1842 as a result

rival,

of a feud between

members of two junior societies, Alpha Delta Phi and 1856 the Bonesmen had their hall, much smaller than the homes of Scroll and Key and WolPs Head had

Upsilon. By

Psi

today, and

it is

come

also

into

existence.

In the early 1880s—just before

ven—the junior

class

succeeded in

Henry Stimson arrived in New Haprevailing on the seniors, who had

previously held elections to their societies in private, to inaugurate the ritual

of Tap Day. As the

Thursday a

May, the

in

man would

bell tolled five in the

juniors

would

afternoon of the second

be hit between the shoulder blades

room! so that

a formal offer could be

was supposed to pick

social, convivial

now and then and told, Go to your

mill around,

made

to

him

and

in private.

"Keys"

men, WolPs Head "a congenial

prep school crowd," which might or might not be a euphemism for

boozy snobs. Bones, achievement.

It

the

one

classic

account, "almost invariably bet on

tapped the football captain for

man of the News Lit.

in

accomplishment,

for his great

his a

prowess, the chair-

manager or two, the

chairman and perhaps the Record chairman," and so on.* last

man

tapped was the greatest honor of all, because

sheer personal merit,

undocumented by the winning of

or the holding of significant

something

office. If social

in election to Skull

more. Although

it

a Taft

To

be

betokened

great prizes

connections counted for

and Bones, achievement counted

for

was one of the founders and President Taft

member, several Tafts, including Senator Robert Taft,

Jr.,

a

were not

tapped. Three generations of Bushes in Skull and Bones are an excep-

The chance of being chosen by Bones drove many underclassmen, among them young Henry Stimson, to unremitting competitive tion.

effort.

Years

later,

Stimson confessed to

his fiancee that

struggle for prizes, so to speak, has always been

elements of

my

would be if I are no prizes to

mind, and

I

one of the fundamental

can hardly conceive of what

ever was put in a position or situation in

Of course *Maynard Mack,

A

"the idea of a

life

my

feelings

where there

struggle for."

there are always prizes in

History of Scroll

& Key, passim.

life

to struggle for,

and Stim-

3

THE COLONEL

8

son

won

his share at Yale.

The

fiancee

who was

the recipient of that

one of them. She was Mabel Wellington socially prominent New Haven family* whom

confession, or boast, was

White, daughter of

a

he met in the impeccably correct setting of a whist party

Whitney's house. But the Whites were— to use

a

at Professor

word such

self-assured

would have shrunk from, though it expresses the New Haven— not quite "grand" enough for the Stimsons. Henry Stimson and Mabel White became engaged in his senior year at Yale; but public announcement of the engagement

provincial notables

New

York attitude toward

was to be deferred

until the fiance could prove that he could support

himself and a bride.

were married, and son made

someone

it

It

was to be more than

plain that he

more

a little

five years

before the couple

in that time, in a perfectly civilized

would

greatly prefer

sophisticated and a

good

way, Dr. Stim-

if his

it

son married

deal better

endowed

with the world's goods than the withdrawn, correct, provincial Miss

White. The son was unshaken, and the father eventually withdrew

his

objections.

In the meantime Stimson had discovered the joy of another contest, different

from both the manly emulation that could

included in the august

company of Bonesmen and

of New Haven drawing rooms. pleasure in the sufficiency

life

noeing

white water, and

He

in the

rough

self-

learned to love camping out,

efficiently killing big

boy" who went from Andover

man who

wooing

through rough country, riding and climbing and

trails

tain,

the genteel

discovered what was to be a lifelong

and landscape of the West and

of the Great Outdoors.

following in

He

lead to being

to Yale

became

game. "The slim a wiry,

cacity

unsqueamish

own words, "at home in forest, prairie or mounmy own horses, kill my own game, make my own my own meals. "t

was, in his

could pack

camp and cook At the end of his freshman year at Yale, when he was seventeen, he met by chance an experienced hunter called Alden Sampson, who took him to the Middle Park, as it was then called, in northwestern Colorado.

It

was, Stimson remembered years

later, "like

an Eden into

which man had not yet entered." The deer were so tame that a doe with a fawn would not bother to run away from them. Such trusting animals did not long survive. "According to Drew Pearson, Washington Merry-Go- Round,

on the Mayflower.

tOn

Active Service, p. xvi.

p. in,

Mrs. Stimson had an ancestor

The Warrior Dream

The next

3

year he

New

went into the

Brunswick wilderness with

an Indian guide, living only off what they could there shot his

first

bear,

9

fish

or shoot, and

"a great walloping he-bear." In

1887,

back

in

up most of the night with a gun across his knees "tough a or would-be tough"— a classic Stimsonism— drunk because from Denver had threatened to shoot him during the night. Even more alarming, there was an outbreak of Indian fighting. A band of Ute had left their reservation, and the National Guard had to be called out to drive them back. There was a good deal of fighting and a number of ranchers and their families were killed. Stimson had met men whose friends and relatives had been tortured by the Ute and the CoColorado, he

sat

manches. So

was frightening to learn that the Indian band was headed

it

for the very spot

and worse

still

where Stimson and

to see four or five

hunting alone. Through Indians.

gun

He

rifle

back. But

its

men

Sampson were hunting,

and stood behind

if

when one was

approaching

Stimson could see they were

his telescope

pulled out his

lying across

his friend

his

mule with the

the Indians had planned to attack,

they thought better of it. In 1888 and 1890 he was back in western Colorado, and in 1889 he

returned to the Nipisiguit. Grinnell, editor of Forest ness, to ask

Only two

and Stream and

a great expert

on

the wilder-

unexplored country was to be found.

really wild,

of the frontier in

he looked up George Bird

in 1891

Turner was to celebrate the

years later Frederick Jackson

significance official

where

Then

a

famous

lecture, taking as his text the

statement in the census report of 1890 that the frontier of

tlement in the United States was closed for the

first

set-

time. Inexorably,

hunters were destroying the once inexhaustible resources of game in

one part of the Rockies after another, and tourists, following them like infantry mopping up behind armor, were never far behind. True, untrodden wilderness was getting harder to find each

However, Grinnell told

his

young

yet unreached by the railroad which

year.

visitor, there

still

was one area

had mysteries to

as

yield up.

This was the Blackfoot Indian reservation in Montana. Grinnell suspected that the source of the glaciers there.

Park.) Grinnell

He

(He was

right;

St.

Mary's River might

we know

in the great

the area as Glacier National

was planning an expedition there that very summer.

took Stimson and another young

ard, Jr.,

lie

man from

grandson of Lincoln's Secretary of

were able to explore

glaciers previously

Yale, William

State,

H. Sew-

and together they

untrodden by the foot of man

THE COLONEL

40

and climb mountains— including the one thev called Mount Stimson*— whose mere existence was unknown to the white man until thev got there. As he left to go home, waiting in the earlv morning for the

work

train

earning

awa\\ Stimson

men and

would

Railway, which

first

take

materials to build the Great Northern

him

to the passenger railhead 150 miles

saw the jagged silhouette of the Chief and swore

come back next year and subdue it. The outdoor life not only transformed Stimson from an underweight weakling into a tough, self-reliant man, but gave him a passport to

who

to a group of people

were to be something more than

friends.

Amos

Pinchot

George Grinnell was one. The brothers Gilford and

And

were more important.

Stimson's relationship with General Leon-

Wood played a crucial part at two turning points of his career. Most important of all, of course, was his friendship with— indeed virtual hero-worship of— Theodore Roosevelt. What these men and many

ard

common was that thev were all Eastwho had become fascinated with toughness. Many of them were to be

others in Stimson's circle had in erners of

good

family and education

West and with the

the

cult

of

members, as Stimson was, of the Boone and Crockett Club of New York, which celebrated the bag of the big-game hunter. Some, like Grinnell and Gifford Pinchot, later chief forester of the United States,

were among those

who

helped to found the

movement

for the pro-

tection of the environment. It rails

was natural

of empire swept westward and

that, as the tide

brought the imperial domain of

ter ever closer to the

growing

prairie,

mountain,

of the East,

cities

to experience the adventure of the West. After

West

is

the great American epic.

It

forest

city folk all,

steel

and wa-

should want

the winning of the

has always gripped the American

told in the measured periods of Park-

imagination, whether the

story- is

man's The Oregon Trail

in the racy pages

of Zane Grey, or on the

Hollvwood horse operas. What w as different about the appeal of the West to voung men of Stimson's generation and class was exemplified bv the transformation of Theodore Roosevelt.

screen in countless

•Mount Stimson.

miles south of Red Eagle Pass near Nvack Creek,

io,i>6 feet high, lies three

according to the National Park Service. There in tact

was

A

W

There was

Tinklam. a brief

a

rush

or'

from the Indians until the National Park was

is

doubt about whether

this

is

the same peak that

man to visit the area, according to government surveyor, who ascended Nvack Creek "by

Stimson discovered. The

first

white

the Park Service, mistake'" in

185;.

prospectors after copper was found in 1890. The land was not purchased

1896, four years after

opened

in 1910.

Stimson's

\isit.

and there were few

\1s1tors before

1

The Warrior Dream

He

had

4 been sent out West by

originally

his family

poor health. Rarely has medical treatment worked so

because of his

An

well.

asth-

up among worried females in brownstone luxury, was transformed into a young bull of a man who wrestled and rode, shouted and shot and reveled in every physical trial matic, narrow-chested boy, brought

of strength. Roosevelt's friend William Roscoe Thayer could "recall

my

astonishment the

years, to find

and stalwart

time

first

I

saw him,

him with the neck of

of the city-bred,

chest, instead

after the lapse

of several

and with broad shoulders

a titan

slight

young

friend

I

had

known."* Roosevelt was nine years older than Stimson and was trying to

make

a

go of ranching

man was

still

at

South Dakota Badlands when the younger

in the

Andover. In

when Stimson was

1885,

Hunting

Yale, Roosevelt published his classic its

a

Trips of a

a

freshman

wonderfully appealing descriptions of life outdoors on the range

Dakota summer, and

logs roar

and crackle"

at

Ranchman, with in

indoors in the ranch house "while the pine

life

in a

Dakota winter;

monotonously compla-

its

cent chronicles of the slaughter of wild creatures; and

its steel

engrav-

and ferocity. of the West caught the

ings of encounters with grizzlies of legendary size

Roosevelt's book, his example, and his idea

imagination of a whole generation of more or

The other at

determined not to be always been.

soft.

What was new

men— thoroughly

like their fathers

Hard,

Americans there have

self-reliant

in the 1880s

was

to have fought

was that they were

a generation

of young

versed in French symbolist literature and

philosophy, with

idealist

wealthy Easterners.

young men too young

idea that obsessed

Gettysburg or Chattanooga

less

homes

in

Boston or

New

German

York that were

proud of their luxury and refinement— who set out to make themselves artificially tough and self-sufficient. And nowhere was this cult of virility,

Western-style,

more

influential

than

In his book Old Money, Nelson

of several plutocratic prove

itself

clans, talks

W.

at Yale.

Aldrich,

Jr.,

himself a scion

of the American upper

class's

need to

with three ordeals in particular: the ordeal of boarding

school, the ordeal of nature, and the ordeal of battle.

Henry Stimson

passed unscathed through the ordeal of school. Indeed, having lost his

mother school

of eight, he probably found the companionship of

at the age

more than

* William R.

Thayer,

a

compensation for

Roosevelt., p. 57.

his loneliness. If he

was unhappy

See also David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback.

THE COLONEL

42 at

Andover, he never

said so,

wasn't his style or that of his

but then he wouldn't have

He

class.

said so; that

was eventually to encounter,

indeed to invite, the ordeal of battle. The ordeal of nature, an part of the education of an

went not only

American gentleman

successfully but with real

and

essential

he under-

in his day,

lasting pleasure. This

was

young man who found he did not mind killing beautiful animals or even gutting them. As his friend Amos Pinchot said, half-teasing, he must 'continually be killing some poor damned animal or other, a

'

and when he was out

after grizzly bear, the

nate to his paramount object— a dead bear.

whole camp was subordi-

Nobody could

rest

till

he

got it."*

To

see Stimson's passion for

insensitivity selves

too simple.

is

by encounters with nature

Some climbed mountains,

big-game hunting

Some of as

his

as

evidence of mere

contemporaries tested them-

in small boats, as his father

he did.

Some went

had done.

exploring in places

more dangerous and more exotic than the future Glacier National Park. Teddy Roosevelt himself, once freed from the cares of office, in 1909, went off to shoot big game in Africa. In a sense, too, as Aldrich acknowledges, these

men were

after

bagged with Colonel Roosevelt's

even bigger game than could be

Winchester or Colonel Stim-

45-75

son's favorite ammunition, imitated from a cartridge— he liked to recall— "recommended by Sir Samuel Baker, the Englishman

famous

for his shooting in Africa

in the English Black

who was

and Asia," and imported from Eley's

Country. t The romance of the West offered a

whiff of the psychic satisfactions of empire. Indeed, in the

late nine-

teenth century Americans freely spoke of their land empire. There was a sense

of

rivalry, too,

American upper

and

a whiff

of envy, half-admitted, when the

of Teddy Roosevelt's generation contemplated

class

the European empires, whether the old, familiar British Empire, or the

newer, brasher imperial enterprises of France, Germany and

Italy.

wish to see the United States the dominant power on the

Ocean," wrote Roosevelt weaklings and eager to

we

do the

in 1900.

"Our

face the future high

great

work of a

"I

Pacific

people are neither cravens nor

of heart and confident of soul

great world

power." The same love of

adventure, the same desire to prove one was neither a craven nor a weakling, which after the Spanish-American quasi-imperial outlets,

must

*Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, ^

My

Vacations.

in the 1880s

p. 89.

War found imperial man West.

send a young

or

The Warrior Dream

43 young Henry Stimson followed

In yet another respect,

his

hero

Roosevelt. Like others of their generation, they were fascinated and

not

by war. "If it wasn't wrong," Roosevelt wrote

at all repelled

private letter in 1896, "I should say that personally

welcome ...

I

war"; and again the next

a foreign

should welcome almost any war, for

I

would

in a

rather

year, "in strict confidence I

think the country needs

one."* Independently, in the West, Stimson had come to exactly the

same conclusion. A war "would be a wonderfully good thing for this country, "t This was by no means an unusual opinion at the time.

As an ordeal tournament

lists

in in

which he could prove his manhood, then; as the which he could prove his membership in the

knightly class in America; and as the training ground in which America

was being made ready for competitive struggle and, the

West was important

level, too, there

for Stimson.

religious instincts in a

would make him draw on all these the wilderness. But first he must take another

In the end,

more

a deeper,

was perhaps something about the heroic

of the West that spoke to almost

in

At

if necessary,

life

himself to the hard discipline of a

less

war,

instinctive simplicities

young

Puritan.

lessons he learned tack,

romantic but

still

and submit

demanding

school.

o,

'ne "dreadful

evening" three years before he climbed the Chief,

Henry Stimson took "the most dismal, hopeless journey" from New York to Boston to study at the Harvard Law School.* His later career as a lawyer was so long and so distinguished, and he himself took on so

many

*Howard

lawyerlike characteristics, that

K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America

tMorison, Turmoil and Tradition, the State,

pp.

270-88,

a

brilliant,

America. So-called because

"basically politics

it

easy to forget that he was

to

World Power, pp. 49-50. Huntington, The Soldier and

40. See also Samuel P.

p. all

Hamiltonianism." From roughly 1890 to in

it is

too short sketch of what Huntington 1920,

calls

"neo-

he argues, the neo-Hamiltonian school flourished

shared Alexander Hamilton's view of international politics as

among independent

nations with interests which not too infrequently brought

Among

the first generation Huntington counts Theodore Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, Albert Beveridge, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Herbert Croly, Leonard Wood, Brooks Adams and Henry Adams. Neo-Hamiltonianism re-emerged briefly in 1940-41, Huntington says, in the persons of Henry Stimson, Robert Patterson, Grenville Clark and others; some would say the tradition is still alive. *For the decision to study law I have in the main followed Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, pp.

them into

conflict

with each other."

Roosevelt,

40-49. For the Harvard Sutherland, The

Law

tory of American

Law.

Law School and American legal education generally, see Arthur E. Law School; and Lawrence M. Friedman, His-

at Harvard; Robert Stevens,

THE COLONEL

44 initially reluctant

ambiguous

Twenty

commit himself

to

feelings

years after law school Stimson told a

"the profession of law was never thoroughly because the

life

and

to the law,

judgment

after

had

life

New

of the ordinary

group of friends that

satisfactory to

York lawyer

two decades, but

it is

me, simply

primarily and es-

is

devoted to the making of money." That was

sentially

his

all

about the private practice of law.

a considered

interesting that even before going

"The course which I think my Aunt Minnie, "is precisely the one

to law school he had the same doubts. father desires for

of which

I

me," he wrote

to

stand in most deadly horror, viz that of a successful

York lawyer."

Interestingly, like so

many of his

ancestors, he

felt

New

drawn

to the ministry, but he was not sure that he had a strong

enough would make a doctor. must not forget that the

vocation. Uncle Fred, the lawyer, thought he

His father did not think so and law

is

a

said,

"We

noble profession," and so, reluctantly,

was to law school

it

that he set out.

Many

years later, Stimson's friend

the reason he went to Harvard

Law

Harvey Bundy explained that

School, rather than to any other,

was quite simple: when one thought of law schools, one thought

first

of Harvard.* But

was

in the 1880s Harvard's

not universally acknowledged. Indeed, School was then 1870

Barr

in the

and 1910— under

Ames— one 1967. It

like

this field

Andover and

Yale, the

a drastic transformation. Between two deans, Christopher Langdell and James

middle of

its first

historian of legal education has said,

changed, in degree and kind,

and

pre-eminence in

far

more

rapidly than

it

"the School

did between 1910

"t

was not coincidence that each of the schools Stimson attended

was changing

rapidly.

American education,

like

American

institutions

of every kind, was adjusting to the dynamic transformation of society

and the economy during and

after the Civil

War, changes that can be

labeled as expansion, the industrial revolution, urbanization,

mass im-

migration and the triumph of capitalism, and that in truth scoured and invigorated every corner of the American world, from the Blackfoot reservation to the elm-shaded campuses of New England.

son was a Victorian. But Victorians were not, ined, stuffy, conservative people.

as

is

They were the

Henry Stim-

sometimes imagchildren and the

worshippers of progress, their stern creed of self-denial and self-control *

Harvey H. Bundy, Oral History, Columbia Oral History

tSutherland, The

Law

at Harvard, p.

162.

Project.

The Warrior Dream

45

a structure they felt they

needed

racing tides of technological

Before the Civil

War

if

and

they were not to be swept away by

intellectual change.

the vast majority of American lawyers were

trained in the office of an established lawyer. Such law schools as there

were, such as the Litchfield School in Connecticut, were

than crammers. Harvard had

was Columbia University, under Theodore

expand

university law schools began to

professor

went so

far as to call

new

W. Eliot, Law School.

or at least adapting, the "case disciple

James Barr

leagues at the

Ames— but

cases.

As

a

when

Langdell

is

famous

method" of studying not, for some years, trial

method of teaching

it

the universi-

appointed Christopher Columbus

Law School— abandoned

lecturing in favor of studying

for inventing,

law.

He

the time-honored

and appellate decisions was

first

and

his

their other col-

method of in specific

derided, then widely and

eventually universally copied in other American law schools.

member of the

when

an eminent Yale

"the very West Point of the profes-

it

president, Charles

Langdell as dean of the

Yet

appointed

set the pace

in the 1860s;

sion."* Harvard's pre-eminence dated from 1870, ty's

in the 1830s.

W. Dwight,

run the School of Jurisprudence there, that

in 1858 to

more

professor of law as early as 1826,

its first

and undergraduate teaching of law there was popular it

little

A

senior

law-school faculty, Ephraim Gurney, wrote President

Eliot after a sleepless night, to express his fear that the

method, and

Langdell's preference for inexperienced, academic law-school teachers,

would bring judges into disrepute, and the Boston University Law School was set up as a response to the hare-brained methods in use on the other bank of the Charles River. Those methods, however, had one advantage of which President Eliot was well aware; the case method was cheap. It required only one professor for every seventy-five students!

That was not why Langdell was an enthusiast for the however.

He

case

method,

"and all the materials of The student's task was whereby he could master the

believed that law was a science,

that science are contained in printed books."

to isolate and analyze a few principles infinite complexities

of judge-made law. Paradoxically,

at a

time

when

more and more students were going from the Harvard Law School into the commercial practice of law on Wall Street or in Boston, the new method did not at first impress practicing lawyers. What it did do *Benjamin Silliman, pioneer of the natural sciences

at Yale.

THE COLONEL

4-6

was create

of great

a sense

He

initial

autumn of 1888, just over a Harvard Law Review. Five years before,

arrived in the

ing of the

moved

and seriousness which bafflement, was to share.

intellectual excitement

Stimson, after a brief period of

year after the found-

the

into Austin Hall, built to the designs of

with $135,000 given to Harvard by

a

Law

Boston merchant. This was

massive stone castle in Richardson's bold Romanesque

huge open

School had

H. H. Richardson with

stvle,

a a

the library and wild boars and dragons luxuriantly

fire in

caned on its hardwood beams. (What was the librarv is now used for "moots," simulated trials: the fireplace survives, though the fire, alas, does not.) It

would be another seven

quired for admission to the

was

years before a college degree

Law

time college graduates were beginning to predominate. That in set

Harvard off from most of

until just before

World War

I

its

was

rivals,

ceeded

a "technical school serving

Ames, LangdelPs protege and

imposing

in

itself

since the typical law school

graduates and usually with a second-class status/'* until 1899 that

re-

School, though alreadv in Stimson's

And

it

under-

was not

successor as dean, suc-

a three-year residential course for the

Bachelor of

Laws degree. So Henry Stimson studied with an LL.B. but with unfavorable.

"They

vou have to studv

a

at

Harvard

two

for

years

Master of Arts degree. His

first

and

left

not

reaction was

'

he wrote home, "and

in self-defense for there isn't

another blessed thing

give

you the

best facilities,'

to do." Gradually, though, he began to join in the debates of an institution called the

such

men

Brandeis.

as

He

the time to

Pow

Wow

and to

trv his wits in

Ezra Thayer, later dean of the also

do

found

it

possible to

Law

moots

do what he would not have had

which was to take courses in philosophy— you please, of his roommate, who w as the Harvard

in a later age,

at the urging, if

football captain— with such luminaries at the College as

Palmer, William James and Josiah Royce.

He

bv

June 1890, with

a

at Yale

and two

•Stevens,

Law

School.

at

He

graduated high

in

grade point average of ~6 (brought

down

memoirs, Stimson passed an

inter-

a 63 in equity pleading). In his

esting comparative

George H.

did not, however, allow

himself to be distracted from his main purpose. his class in

against

School, and Louis D.

judgment on the

respective effects of his four years

Harvard. In the

Law

School, he wrote sixty years

The Warrior Dream later,

itive

47

"the whole atmosphere was argument,

electric with the sparks of competand the teaching, he concluded, "created a greater power of thinking than any teaching that I got from

1 '

my

revolution in

Yale, while the faith in

Haven was

greater

mankind

that

I

learned

on the campus

and stronger than any such

faith

at

New

achieved at

I

Harvard."

xTLis mind thus sharpened by disputation with some of the brightest

minds of

author of The the Beloved

ton to friend,

his generation

and broadened by contact with the

of Religious Experience and the prophet of

Varieties

Community, Henry Stimson now went home from Bos-

New

York to practice law. He began in the office of a Yale Sherman Evarts, son of one of the greatest New York lawyers

M.

of the previous generation, William

Evarts,

Johnson from impeachment and then served In spite of these antecedents, the at 52

Wall

Street.

His chief

Railway Company, which ster,

New

owned

York; Stimson 's

on the

right

saved

Andrew

Attorney General.

Evarts had a modest practice

was the

New

York and Northern

the track from 155th Street to Brew-

experience largely took the form

first legal

of defending the railroad against accidents

young

client

who

as his

brought by those involved

suits

of way. The work was not

in

intrinsically interest-

ing to a student of Christopher C. Langdell. Being mainly the defense

of

a

wealthy corporation against poor people,

the student of Josiah Royce,

the world.

And

who had wanted young

for an ambitious

it

to

was not edifying to

"do good work"

in

fiance with a special reason to

be impatient, there was not enough of it.

For

a

moment Stimson was who cannot throw

in the frustrating position

nopoly player

zoom round

the board while he

as so often in

his

life,

is still

immobilized.

He

connected friend. Buried inside every successful lie

so often the case in Stimson's

name

the opportune connection

or the alumnus of an

envious are apt to put success

down

even the most august— indeed,

least

a well-

career, like the chicken

networks of contacts. When,

life,

Mo-

a

was rescued,

by the providential intervention of

wire inside a plaster sculpture,

the bearer of a famous

of

and has to watch others begin to

six

elite

as is

was

with

school, the

to privilege, forgetting that not

of

all

the most august— are likely

to offer help unless they respect the beneficiary. In this instance, the

help came from none other than William C. Whitney, then in the

THE COLONEL

48

process of founding one of the great American fortunes in investment

and

Whitney was

street railways.

a friend

of Dr. Stimson,

who was

Camup house with his father. Dr. Stimson confided in a George Dimmock, who in turn talked to Whitney,

well aware of his son's frustration, because Henry, since leaving bridge, had set

Yale classmate,

who announced

abruptly at a dinner party that he had the answer to

young Stimson's problems: send him to work for Mr. Root. Whitney happened to be Elihu Root's biggest client. His recommendation

carried weight.

and on November

On

October

22,

he showed up for work

1

Clarke, looking out over "a beautiful

Stimson was interviewed, at the offices

sweep" of the

city's

of Root and rooftops to

the Brooklyn Bridge from the fourteenth floor of the Libertv Mutual

building at 32 Nassau Street.*

He

with significant interruptions,

as

The

office

was proudly

was to practice law

we

shall

in that

building—

see— for more than

fifty years.

was high-ceilinged and old-fashioned.

said to resemble that

lawyer's chambers. It was heated by cavernous coal

New who

atmosphere

fires

and cooled

a large central

used to express

his

contempt

wages to law clerks by shouting,

for the

newfangled practice of paying

"Now

where

is

that paid clerk?" In

even the most advanced Wall Street firms, wall phones only arrived the early 1880s and desk phones not until nearly 1900.

dence was

in

summer heat only by the breeze from the ocean. room for the clerks, led by Joseph Kunzman,

York's steamy

There was

Its

of an eighteenth-century London

in

longhand

until the mid-i88os,

and

in

Most correspon-

women

stenographers

replaced male "type- writers" only around 1900.

Beyond the general office where these antiquated practices were still in force, young Mr. Stimson and another, slightly older law clerk worked in a way that had changed even less since the time of Alexander Hamilton— in the law library, studying for the New York bar exam, which they both duly passed with ease, looking up cases for Mr. Root and Mr. Clarke, and occasionally going to court with one or another of them to pass them references and learn how the craft was practiced by masters.

The other new

clerk, also hired

ney, was Bronson Winthrop,

counselor and

friend.

lationships with the

On

on the recommendation of Whit-

who was

to be Stimson's partner, trusted

the same day, therefore, Stimson began

two people who,

apart from his wife, his father

•See Morison, Turmoil and Tradition; Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam Firm, privately published,

New

re-

&

Roberts,

A

History of a

York, 1980; Arthur H. Dean, William H. Cromwell.

Law

The Warrior Dream

49

and perhaps Theodore Roosevelt, would have the his

on

greatest influence

life.

Elihu Root was, with Joseph Choate, the acknowledged leader of the

New

York

that, while

man whose

bar, a

money and

exemplified Stimson 's instinct

life

of

a great deal

it

could honorably be made

the titanic struggles of corporate litigation,

on

yielded the true glory. Descended Burrick, the major of Minutemen

who

it

was public

in

service that

mother's side from John

his

gave the order to

fire

the "shot

heard round the world" at Concord, Root's family were long settled in Clinton,

New York.

taught mathematics

graduated in

Law

1845.

His

father, inevitably

Hamilton College

at

Root then studied law

School before setting up

his

Henry Stimson was born. He

own

known

there, at the

as

"Cube" Root,

from which

New

law firm in

his

son

York University

1868,

the year after

rapidly established himself as a formi-

dable and successful advocate at the bar in a Golden

Age of advocacy,

many of the best minds of the legal profession had been tempted more lucrative practice of corporation counsel. Root was known for his prodigious memory, his meticulous preparation and, before

to the calmer and

perhaps most of

No

his grasp

all,

one held

against

it

of every

detail

Root when he worked

one of Boss Tweed's defense counsel, and Attorney for the Southern District of that not

uncommon

of an action.

New

in 1883

as

an assistant for

he served

York. In

as

U.S.

he was

politics,

hybrid of conservative Republican, opponent of

the machine, and lawyer

of those very corporate

whose

practice involved his representing

interests

many

which younger, more progressive ReBy the time Stimson met him,

publicans stigmatized as "the Trusts."

Root had a

a craggy, deeply lined yet curiously boyish face, the face

man who had

spent

all

but on the open range. ity" was legendary,

he could not

easily

his time,

not in law

What Stimson

offices

of

and courtrooms,

called his "constructive sagac-

and not unpleasantly tinged with worldliness, as if be surprised by anything men and women might

do, and found their shortcomings on the whole amusing rather than tragic.

When

Stimson went to work for him, the most remarkable

achievements of Root's as senator

him and openly

No man

life,

as Secretary

and elder statesman, were treated

him both

of War and Secretary of State, ahead of him. Stimson revered

as fatherly adviser

and

as a role

model.

can be sure of following another man's career at the highest

level in public life as closely as ilarity

all

Stimson followed Root's. But the sim-

was not perhaps wholly accidental. "Mr. Root,"

as

Stimson

THE COLONEL

50 called

him meticulously, was the counselor

took every major decision of

his

He

life.

to

was

whom also an

the younger

man

exemplar of what

good and useful life might be and of what might be achieved by worldly wisdom, self-control and hard work. the

There was, however, that, too,

was to be echoed

versial action

of

and most important and most contro-

a less attractive side to Root's character,

in the

his protege's

life.

When Root

was sounded out on

President McKinley's behalf about becoming Secretary of War in 1899,

he said the appointment was absurd; he knew nothing about war and

nothing about the army. McKinley sent word back that he didn't want

anyone

who knew about

ernment of the Spanish

war; he wanted a lawyer to direct the gov-

islands the

United States had recently acquired:

Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Root was

in favor

independence to Cuba, though he personally drafted,

of granting

in a letter to the

military governor, Leonard Wood, what became known as the Piatt Amendment, which left the United States free to intervene in Cuba if it thought either Cuban independence or United States interests were

threatened.

Root's experience of the Philippines soon corrected his ignorance

of war and of the army

in

important respects. The United States was

faced with a rebellion there, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and in 1899 had

army under General Arthur MacArthur to put it down. Soon disturbing reports of atrocities by the U.S. army began to filter

sent out an

back to the United States, through soldiers' newspapers. Root,

as Secretary

letters

home and

to the

of War, was accused of covering up

massacres, the killing of civilians and prisoners, torture (especially but

not only the notorious "water cure"*), concentration camps and policy that that an

No

amounted

a

to genocide in certain areas like Samar, the island

American general swore to turn into "a howling wilderness."

one ever suggested that Root encouraged such

did do was to defend the army, and

atrocities.

What

in specific incidents that

he

meant

defending the perpetrators of abuses. In a speech at Peoria during the 1902 midterm elections Root, as

biographer Philip Jessupt put

his

it,

"rallied to the defense

of

his

army." Instances of torture had occurred, he conceded, but "exceptions in a uniform course of self-restraint, humanity and

client, the

only 'The him

as

victim's

feel

mouth was

forced open with a gag and water was poured into his throat, making

he was drowning.

tOn Root

generally, see Philip Jessup, Elihu Root, 2 vols.,

Scott, Elihu Root, vol.

ix in

the

"American

New

York,

Secretaries of State" series.

1938;

and James Brown

1

The Warrior Dream

5

Democrats, anti-imperialists and those who were shocked by the atrocity reports redoubled their attacks on Root. The most

kindness.'

effective lian

'

was

pamphlet commissioned from Moorfield Storey and Juby a Boston committee headed by Charles Francis Adams

a

Codman

and Carl Schurz.* Root claimed that "substantially" every report of atrocities had been promptly investigated and found to be "cither unfounded or grossly exaggerated." Storey maintained, persuasively, that on the contrary there had

been no serious

effort to

punish brutality in the army. The

and sentences, often

farcical,

he

and the

generals, he charged,

said,

mere reprimand,

a

derisory.

had been more eager to punish informants than those on

were

trials

Root

whom

they informed; a war of terrorism and extinction was consistently

waged;

if

Root was not aware of all

that was going on, he grossly

ignored his duty as Secretary of War; torture was applied systematically to extort

information, both by American soldiers and by

Macabebe scouts

the

serving with the American forces. This and

much more was supported by

quotations from the testimony

before a Senate committee which had investigated the conduct

of the war.

.

.

Mr. Root

.

.

.

was

.

of certain

silent in the face

knowledge and by his silence he made himself responsible for all that was done with his acquiescence. Mr. Root, then, is the .

real

defendant in

.

.

this case.

Root's admiring biographer maintains that Root "neither in-

nor approved, nor countenanced

spired,

mits that the important question

is

atrocities,"

but even he ad-

whether he did everything possible

to check them, and that "the answer

is

probably no."

It is

hard to

avoid the judgment that Root did know that things had gone very badly

wrong

in the Philippines,

and that he used

his lawyer's skill

with

words to deny charges that were in substance true. There

who

is

more

to

it

than that, however. Root was an imperialist

defended the United

did not conceal that

States' presence in the Philippines,

among

that Filipinos were inferiors, as

his reasons for

"but

little

doing so was

and he

his conviction

advanced from pure savagery,"

he wrote to Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama in July 1902,

"[with]

many of the

characteristics

of children, "t

That was what Root believed; and with great hardness, *Moorfield Storey and Julian Codman, Marked

tQuoted

in Jessup, Root, p. 343.

Severities in Philippine

willing the

Warfare, 1902.

5

THECOLONEL

2

end, he willed the means.

more than

a friend

and

son was put to the

a

It

was

law partner; he was

test in his

When

icans.

of Asian people

for

Henrv Stimson

a beau ideal.

second term

showed the same hardness, the same inability to think

man who was

this

When

Stim-

of War, he

as Secretary

nationalism, and perhaps the same

he would have thought of Amer-

as

he faced the army's demand for the forcible evacuation

of the Nisei from California

when he confronted on so manv previous

his

at the outbreak of the Second World War, supreme decision over the atomic bomb, as

occasions in his

scious of the spirit of Elihu

life

Stimson was no doubt con-

Root looking over

Where

his shoulder.

would ask, "What would Colonel Stimson have done?" no doubt Stimson asked, "What would Mr. Root have done?'' The honest answer he would have had to give himself was that, if Mr. Root

others later

was the soul of Yankee sagacity and rectitude, he was

way

as

hard

JLor married.

pany

was

It

a pleasant

household. Dr. Stimson

but he found time to

his

Law

three years after he was graduated from the Harvard

School, Stimson kept house with his father and his

as ever,

also in his quiet

as nails.

sail his

sister,

still

who

worked

never

as

hard

boat, Fleur-de-Lys, and to accom-

son and daughter to the theater. Family tradition,*

as

we

have seen, suggests that the doctor subtly tried to use his influence to persuade Henry to marrv someone grander and richer than Mabel.

Henry was

firmly

pushed into the world of the Four Hundred, of

Astors and Whitneys, their excellent champagne and their marriageable daughters.

"He

can't bear for

me

said the unsocial son, "irrespective It

not to be

at the

top of the heap,"

of what kind of heap

it

may be."

was not the most respectful way to speak of Ward McAllister and

Mrs. Astor.

if

Both Henrv and Mabel, however, had made up their minds, and there was anyone more determined than he, it was she. Counting

to

months when Henry had been persuaded by his family withdraw his engagement, and then the two years' separation while

lie

was

the upsetting

part

in

Cambridge, they had waited

of that

time, Mabel had been

chosomatic complaint. *As recorded

in

On

interviews with

January

ill

i,

for five

1893,

members of both

Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, pp.

50-61.

and

a half years.

with what was very

During

likely a psy-

Stimson was made

a partner

the Stimson and White families used by

The Warrior Dream

5 3

of Root and Clarke with a guarantee of $2,000 in annual income. (The previous year, the three partners had shared $98,000 in the firm

between them.) At the age of twenty-five, he was support his wife, and he

Haven on

no

lost

He

time.

in a position to

New

married Mabel in

July 6, 1893. Fifty-four years later Stimson wrote in the con-

ventionally reticent style of his generation that she had been "ever

devoted companion and the greatest happiness of

and cultivated

in her tastes, strict

and formal

manner, Mabel Stimson was surprisingly enjoyed accompanying her husband on

my

in her social style

fishing,

and

and adventurous. She

active

his expeditions to the

Canada, Europe and the Orient. She trained herself to be

both shooting and

my

life." Literary

West,

efficient at

and she became an excellent horsewoman.

After ten years at the bar, Stimson could afford, with financial

help from his father, to buy a hundred acres of land in Huntington

Township on the North Shore spine of Long Island. He bought it for the view, which stretched from the Sound and the Connecticut shore to the shining ocean, just visible twenty-five miles to the south. At first they squatted in a little farmhouse on the property, which had no running water, no plumbing except a shallow well with a hand pump, and no telephone.* Over the years the Stimsons, with the help of a devoted farm manager, John Culleton, from County Carlow in Ireland, transformed what an early visitor proclaimed "a desolate spot" into a gentleman's country estate, complete with farm and stables.

Stimson built

a big, plain

extended

later

it

to

frame house which he called Highhold, and

accommodate

his library.

At Highhold Stimson played the

Meadowbrook hounds from

ants, entertained lawyer friends

bors. It

as

and

a

was an additional pleasure, and

the

Long

Island gentry,

a consecration

when Theodore

he often did, from Sagamore

The Stimsons' marriage was one: they were

with the

growing band of nephews and

and presided over the annual Highhold Games

nieces,

among

He hunted

squire.

1903 until well into the 1920s, shot pheas-

for his neigh-

of

his standing

Roosevelt hacked over,

Hill. idyllically

happy

in every

unable to have children. Apparently this

respect— save

was

a conse-

quence of an attack of mumps that Henry had suffered shortly before the wedding. While they were the last couple in the world to discuss their feelings

*HLS,

My

on such

a matter, they

Vacations, pp. 165-80.

overcame

their disappointment

THE COLONEL

54 by becoming more and more closely involved

went by, in entertaining White kin.*

as the years

especially,

On

January

i,

1893,

a

and

in each other,

also,

growing clan of Stimson and,

Elihu Root had acquired not one but two

law partners. The other was Bronson Winthrop.

He

was

in

many ways

who

an exotic creature. Lineally descended from that John Winthrop

urged

upon

first

that they

would be "a City

governor of Massachusetts Bay and described

a Hill," first

"the

remember

his fellow colonists to

new

great American, "t

educated in Britain

Bronson Winthrop was born

as

in Paris,

Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and so first met him, Stimson, no

at

cosmopolitan and elegant that when he

uncouth provincial himself, used to he entertained with "the

elor,

and had

him "the Exquisite."

call

silver

of four generations on

a fastidious taste in literature

A

bach-

his table"

and an encyclopedic knowledge

of both American and European history.

At

first

drawing

young

the

partners did the hack

work of general

practice:

corporate agreements, collecting debts and de-

wills, drafting

fending accident cases. Later they graduated to doing the more routine

work

for the firm's

many

large corporate clients, including Continental

Rubber, Astoria Power and Light, Mutual Life Insurance, and many,

many

expresses

acted

As the law

others. it,

this

was the

firm's privately published history delicately era

Sherman Act caused an

for utilities, railroads

and

of "trust-busting," and the recently enarray of legal

and organizational problems

companies.*

industrial

Winthrop and Stimson both became well-known Wall Street lawyers. Winthrop "became especially learned in the law of wills, estates and estate management," while Stimson

Under Root's

major

specialized in

Lawyers

leadership,

litigation.

country play

in every

a

prominent part

there are few parallels to the extraordinary

diplomacy of partners

in a

dozen or fewer Wall

handful of similar firms in other

American international 'For

a

relations

cities.

in politics,

dominance

in

Street law firms

Most of

but

American and

a

the great names in

were lawyers from Wall Street or from

cautious discussion of the possible emotional consequences ofStimson's

infertility, see

below, Chapter IX.

tBy Hugh Brogan,

in

Longman

History of the United States, p. 41.

Roberts:

A

with the

History of a late

Law

I

Firm, as well as

Kingman Brewster,

a

&

have drawn on Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam on Morison, Turmoil and Tradition, on conversations former partner, and on a lengthy interview with Peter Ka-

For the history and practice of the law firm,

mincr, former managing partner of the firm and

now of counsel.

The Warrior Dream

5 5

Boston or Washington: one has only to think of Root, Stimson himself, Dean Acheson* and John Foster Dulles, not

similar practice in

to mention dozens of lesser figures, from Cleveland's Secretary of State

Richard Olney and Wilson's Robert Lansing to George Ball in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, William Rogers in the Nixon administration,

and Cyrus Vance under Jimmy

Of course

Carter.

not every qualified lawyer, not even every lawyer

has practiced in

New

York, ought to be counted

as a

who

"Wall Street

lawyer" in the sense that Root, Stimson or the Dulles brothers merit that description. If one considers only those

York the

for a substantial period before

New

York bar was limited but very

of World

War

II,

who

practiced law in

New

going to Washington, the flow from influential until the

beginning

then became a flood during the war, and has been

steady since then, though

less influential in

policy-making since the

time of the Dulles brothers.

When

Stimson was working for Root in the Liberty Mutual build-

ing, the practice

of law was undergoing

a transition as

marked

as that

which American higher education had passed through, more or

unremarked by young Stimson,

a

few years

earlier.

One

less

key change

was that law firms were starting out on that trajectory which has made

some

more important than lawyers. At the turn of still small. The Cravath firm, for example, though its antecedents ran back to the 1820s and it numbered the Bank of England, the second Bank of the United States, John D. Rockefeller and the House of Morgan among its clients, had no more than five partners in 1900. As the banks, railroads and industrial corporations headquartered in New York became bigger (and incidentally from the them

in

respects

the century, they were

1890s

began to hire their

specialized in acting for

own

in-house lawyers) the law firms that

them had

to

grow

too.

So where once the lawyer was all-important, and law

firms

formed

and dissolved according to the likes and dislikes or the career vicissitudes of individuals, gradually around the turn of the century the law firm began to be the primary entity to which lawyers felt loyalty and potential clients tended increasingly to turn. But that process was by Washington firm of Covington and Burling; Olney from Boston. James Rowe, Joseph Rauh, Clark Clifford, Lloyd Cutler, Harry McPherson and Joseph Califano, who came to Washington for government service in the first place and then stayed to practice law, the number of truly active Washington lawyers who have been participants in foreign-policy-making, other than Acheson and Paul Warnke, has been small. *

Acheson was

Excluding

a partner in the

men

like

THECOLONEL

56

no means completed when Stimson went to work. For example, after Root and Clarke was transformed, as we shall see, into Winthrop, Stimson,

it

was resurrected by Root's son

and Howland, which was another

classic

later transmogrified into

the

York bar to great

century those

men

Ballantine,

William Seward or David

like

mention two names almost

Field, to

New

Dewey,

Wall Street firm.*

Since before the Civil War,

Dudley

Root, Clarke, Buckner

as

who

offices in

at

random, had gone from

government. At the end of the

were practicing law there included former President

Chester A. Arthur, former and future President Grover Cleveland, and

Thomas

Speaker

B. Reed,

"Czar" of the House of

Representatives,

who would have become a partner in Root and Clarke if Samuel Clarke had not won his case for him and kept him in the House. What was new was that where even the mightiest firms had once stooped to

legal

drudgery, such as debt-collecting,

firms were beginning to specialize in national

was

national business.

It

national

few

affairs, as

if

in part

Washington) in

in the

who

of leading

and increasingly

in inter-

home

in inter-

because they were

any lawyers

Louis could be, that partners

a cluster

at

practiced in Chicago or St.

Wall Street (and to

a lesser

degree

firms began to be natural choices for international

work

government.

Algernon Sydney Sullivan and William Nelson Cromwell, aged twenty-five, formed a partnership in four at J.

Broad and Wall P.

Morgan,

E.

streets in 1879.

rooms

in the

H. Harriman, Henry M.

Flagler,

and the power

A

But Cromwell's practice was also an international one. of the investment going into American expansion, roads, was age, says

coming from Europe,

Drexel Building

Before long they were acting for

particularly

utilities.

high proportion

especially into rail-

from London. At an

early

Cromwell's biographer, Arthur Dean (himself director of the

Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under

President Kennedy),

he had gone to Europe to confer with leading lawyers and bankers.

*For

house

this

He became

fully versed in English

and continental under-

account of the growth of the Wall Street law firms

histories, e.g.,

I

have relied on several of their

Ralph Canon, Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Sunderland

& Kiendl:

A

Background

H. Dean, William Nelson Cromwell: An American Pioneer in Corporation, Competitive and International Law; Otto E. Kocgel, Walter S. Carter, on the founder of Hughes, Hubbard & Reed; Robert T. Swaine, The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors. See also Martin Mayer, The Lawyers; Martin Mayer, Emory Buckner; Paul Hoffman, Lions in the Street; Charles with Figures; Arthur

Warren, History of the American Bar.

The Warrior Dream writing and

5

financing

methods and the

relevant

connection with the early financing of American

and

ities

industrial concerns he often represented

American ests in

Cromwell

securities.

Cuba, French

also represented

Dutch, En-

Stimson was one of those

The point was

who

sugar inter-

.

.

[which]

.

who was

that a group of lawyers was

could earn a great deal of money,

having to depend on the exiguous

to criticize

Panama, but that was

who

volunteer for public service in national or international

who had come

.

American people.*

severely Cromwell's behavior in relation to

the future.

.

the relation of developments in

foreign lands to the interests of the

certainly did.

.

and Panama

interests in Brazil

made him more conscious of

existence

In

railroads, util-

French and German banks or bond syndicates purchasing

glish,

They

law.

7

coming were

affairs

in

into

free to

without

such service offered, and

salaries

to have an international perspective very untypical

among Americans of their

generation.

In 1899 Elihu Root received that "absurd" invitation to become

To

amazement he handed over his practice to his two young partners, Stimson and Winthrop. They were then aged respectively thirty- two and thirty-six, and Root had left them, as Stim-

Secretary of War.

son graphically put

their

it,

"pie-eyed with the best practice in

and everybody trying to get

knew what

it

away from us." Stimson

the rough end of life in

New

York can be

New

said he

until

York

"never

saw these

I

people grab business away from us." In 1901 they changed the firm's

name

Winthrop and Stimson. Deprived of Root's name but "sustwo young partners prospered modestly, grew in reputation and stature and became as close as two such reticent Victorians could bring themselves to be. Only on the fiftieth anniversary of their first meeting could Winthrop bring himself to write to Stimson of the "respect and love which somehow I never to

taining the best of his reputation, "t the

expressed before."

For practice

fifty years,

Bronson Winthrop was to remain

of law. But Stimson chafed. As

grumbled about "such place as

New

York."

tion as a lawyer

a

A

poky profession dozen

a

as

the law in such a stationary

years of practice established his reputa-

and made him comfortably

*Dean, William Nelson Cromwell. ^Winthrop, Stimson, Putnam

faithful to the

young unknown he had

& Roberts: A History,

p. 19.

off;

between

1898

and 1906

THECOLONEL

58

he earned between $8,000 and $11,000

Root or the other such good causes

leaders

which was

far less

than

of the bar commanded. Charitable work

Workroom

the

as

a year,*

for Unskilled

Women

coln Hospital, for which he was unpaid legal counsel, helped to viate his frustration

on

its

his

life.

for

or the Lin-

with ordinary practice, which focused not so

alle-

much

on what he considered its lack of ethical purpose, its sordid selfishness. From about 1900, when he was thirty-three, Stimson began to suffer from lumbago and rheumatism and from the insomnia that plagued him for the rest of tedium (he found

it

enough)

interesting

as

when the great wave of patriotic excitement over the Spanish-American War had "caught me napping," Stimson had quickly In 1898,

joined Squadron A,

Troop

learned to ride, and to love

from

relief

2,

of the

it,

and

New

in the horse exercise

symptoms, whether or not

his physical

emotional. In due course he bought his

He

York National Guard.

first

he also found

their origins

were

horse, Bouncer, from the

Ninety-fourth Street Armory. Loving the companionship and the cipline

of military

during

a strike

he enjoyed

life,

among

his period

the workers building the reservoir at Croton-

on-Hudson, and took an almost boyish

on the

site

From

of the

Civil

dis-

of duty keeping order

War

battlefield

delight in the 1904 maneuvers

of Bull Run.t

the routines as well as the dedication of the military

life,

his some men do, profound life. Unlike Elihu Root, Stimson knew something of the army, though nothing of war, and he was ready when the call to public service

he took,

satisfaction for the rest

as

of

came.

A,

.s

it

happened,

the shape of a Western

it

came

form— to be specific, in December 1905 inviting him

first in civilian

Union telegram

in

to "take lunch" with the President of the United States. After the

meal, Roosevelt sounded Stimson out about taking the post of United States

Attorney for the Southern District of

straight

him

New

York. Stimson said

out that he was interested in the job, but the President warned

that he could not yet

make

a definite offer.

Others, including

Charles Evans Hughes, a future justice of the Supreme Court and Secretary

of State, and James Rockwell Sheffield, were under considera-

•Morison, Turmoil and Tradition,

tHLS,

My

Vacations, pp. 114-23.

p. 75-

The Warrior Dream

And

tion.

Senator

5

Thomas

Piatt,

whose approval, under the

c

of 'senatorial courtesy, " would be required, had

9

tradition

a candidate

of

his

own.* Stimson's interest in the position was not something that Roosevelt

could take for granted.

The

post of U.S. Attorney for the Southern

Manhattan, was then,

District, including

as

it is

now, one of the key

jobs in the entire American legal system. In one respect

more important than called "trusts"

was

much of

staked

a

it

is

key

it

was even

now: The problem of what were loosely of the day, and Roosevelt had

political issue

his political credibility in his

campaign speeches

veighing against the "malefactors of great wealth" seen as strangling the

economy and bleeding

ing these malefactors

fell

who

in-

were widely

the consumer. Prosecut-

to this particular U.S. Attorney; moreover,

the job had been held by lawyers of great distinction in the past, in-

cluding the President's kinsman James R. Roosevelt and Stimson 's it had fallen on bad times. incumbent whose impending retirement had created

mentor, Elihu Root. But in recent years

Not

that the

the vacancy was in want. Quite the contrary:

Henry "Lighting Eyes"

Burnett was reputed to have earned more than $100,000 a year in the job, a majestic

income

in those days, because the tradition

up of awarding the U.S. Attorney eries in

customs

An

cases.

had grown

a substantial proportion

attorney like Burnett,

who

of recov-

took an easy-

going view of the dictates of financial propriety and the public could distribute the actual work of these lucrative cases to split

the fees with them, and trouser the recoveries.

of work was such that

it

was thought impossible

The

interest,

his friends,

sheer

for the

volume

Attorney to

appear in court himself, so overladen with administrative work must

he be.

And

the physical arrangements of the office were inadequate to

the verge of squalor.

Roosevelt and his Attorney General, William H.

Moody,

a

doughty trust-buster from Massachusetts, were determined to reform this bastion of ancien regime jobbery. It was essential to their strategy of compelling the

by an energetic,

obey the law that the job should be held and high-minded young lawyer, and Stimson

trusts to

skillful

press service of the day

fitted the part perfectly. Roosevelt,

one

mented, knew that he was choosing

a clean-cut

*In

my

account of Stimson's term

as

U.S. Attorney

Yale A.B. honors thesis by John D. Viener, States Attorney: 1906-1909."

"A

I

man of proven

com-

fidelity

have used extensively an unpublished

Sense of Obligation: Henry Stimson

as

1961

United

THE COLONEL

60 and

and ready acquaintance with the most intricate cases of Samson had that firmness of character, that general knowledge of affairs, and that ability to catch the significance of new integrity

practice.

legal

:ions steadily ansing for the adjudication of the courts, that

him not only

allow

even to advance

would

to maintain the high reputation of the office, but

it.

This paragon took the oath of

on Februarv

office

i,

was

1906. It

agreed that he would work for Sio,ooo a year. Unlike Burnett (or for

Root

that matter

he would take no commissions on work given to

.

other lawyers and would do no private work while in the government service.

Stimson found the

swamped." he wrote

one

"assistants, clerks, witnesses

gether, and

I

am

friend,*

men. even

and criminals

he commented,

are necessarily

a

vear

Stimson quickly

you did not

in staff

and

its

'

mediocre quality.

get the ablest and

more

installed a

for witnesses

most dedicated

office space.

modern

filing

system, a card index,

and complaints. In time, he managed to

But

key

his

move was

voung law-school graduates and willingness to

for verv low

w

ages,

learn to get excellent

:han one would need to pay older but

find

to introduce to public

service the practice, well established in private law firms,

bition

jumbled to-

in 1906.

and dockets a bit

Moody

and to

in constant anxiety lest valuable papers be \o>:

Even more senous were the shortage For $7jo to S1.5CC

was "completely

office in a deplorable state. It

to

of hinng bright

counting on their amwork out of them for

less

talented

men

with

family obligations.

Onlv

a few

crat Alfred

with

vears earlier the brilliant half-German British bureau-

Milner had used the same pnnciple to surround himself

a first-class staff

after the

when he went out

Boer War. Milner's voung men.

posts in British politics, public versities,

came to be known

remained

a cohesive

Not onlv

vears.-

and

life,

as

to administer South Africa

who went on

to the highest

journalism, business and the uni-

"Milner's Kindergarten." and they

influential

lobby

in

Bntain for more than forty

did " Stimson *s Kindergarten*" have

a

comparable

A Sense of Obligation Henry L Stimson as United States Attorney," p. 19. citing Knox Taylor. ~HLS to J. Knox Taylor. December 12. 1906; to W. H. Moody. April 5- 1906. ;See Sir E\ehn Wrench. Alfred Lord Milner The Man of So Illusions. The Kindergarten included :

letter to

J.

Geoflrev Dawson, editor of The Times of London; John Buchan, novelist and Governor General

1

The Warrior Dream

6

continuing cohesion as a like-minded group of lawyers with fluence in political

and

but the

legal circles;

of

idea

much

in-

a public servant

surrounding himself with a surrogate family of enthusiastic younger

one that appealed to Stimson, the more so because of his own childlessness. In the Second World War much of his effectiveness helpers was

in the

War Department was

with

group of

a

come from his ability to work closely Bundy, McCloy and others— whom he

to

men— Lovett, whom he could

and with

trusted

and even

discuss troubling matters of policy

ethics in the informality

of

his

home,

in the

he and Mabel opened Highhold to the young lawyers

work for the U.S. Attorney's office. Soon after taking office Stimson wrote notably to Ames at Harvard, asking them best students

and the very best of

suggestions and from his

own

same way that

who came

to several law-school deans,

names of their very

for the

their recent alumni.

From

roughly half of them more or

Emory Buckner

assistants,

out of law school. They

less straight

(himself U.S. Attorney in the 1920s and one

of the founders of the Dewey, Ballantine law (later a

their

contacts at the bar Stimson assembled a

remarkable group of young men. Altogether he hired sixteen

included

to

firm),

Thomas D. Thacher

partner in another major Wall Street firm, Simpson, Bartlett

and Thacher, judge of the United States

The

New

Solicitor General)

York

State

Court of Appeals and

and— last but not

a

least— Felix Frank-

Supreme Court justice was to become one of Stimson's close friends and a devoted admirer, a self-appointed publicrelations man and the marriage broker who made the last and most important stage of Stimson's career possible by introducing him to furter.

future

Franklin Delano Roosevelt and insisting, over Stimson's suspicions,

must be friends. Stimson's young men had

that they

Island, played baseball at

a lot

of fun. They went

sailing off Fire

Highhold, held play readings and wrote each

other comic doggerel. They also worked furiously hard, and for

far

longer hours than the U.S. Attorney's office in the old Post Office building had been used to working. Stimson himself set them an ex-

ample.

He

soon organized the

he collected nine times cessor

had collected

of Canada; Philip Kerr,

as

office so efficiently that in his first year

much money

in eight years.

later

Lord Lothian,

By

British

in

customs

fines as his prede-

1908, in spite

of the warnings

ambassador to Washington; the

philosopher and student of comparative constitutions Lionel Curtis; and many,

many

political

others.

THE COLONEL

62 that he

would never be

able to get into court, he

his annual report to Moody's successor

as

was able to boast

in

Attorney General that he

had "tried personally during the past year seven important

j^iry cases,

personally prepared the briefs for and argued the six demurrers in the rebate cases,

and argued the demurrer

in the

New York Herald case."* New York

James Gordon Bennett, editor and publisher of the Herald, was

one of the most powerful

the Golden

Age of

allowed,

New

journalists in what was perhaps York journalism. Unfortunately he had also

not encouraged,

if

paper to increase

his

its

verv substantial

column small ads of a dubious nature. The ads might say: "Would young lady in blue suit who noticed gentleman at 53rd and Madison please write Herald 321. Admirer"; or "Will lady in blue on platform Broadway Car, 40th Street who noticed profitability

by accepting in

its

personal

gentleman, address admirer, Herald 146."

To

a permissive or sentimental

mind, there may be something poignant about the

faint

echo of those

passing glances of almost a century ago. But Stimson was neither senti-

mental nor permissive.

It is possible

son's sexual puritanism;

it

was

in

newspaper and those responsible

that the ladies in blue offended Stim-

any case certain to

for

it

his

mind

that the

had been breaking the law.

The Herald had been publishing such

ads for years, but

had cared or dared to prosecute. Stimson did, and he got

no one

a conviction

from Judge Hough. The Herald was fined $5,000, and Bennett was fined $25,000, the judge remarking that he had maintained "for more years than

I

can remember ... a potent aid to local libertines, and a

directory of local harlots."

Stimson may have derived however, was

far

from taking on so Most of the U.S. Attorney's work,

a certain pleasure

formidable an opponent as Bennett.

more humdrum. He argued

successfully to sustain

the conviction of a captain held guilty of negligence by a lower court in

the case of the ferry General Slocum, concerning an accident in which

close to a

thousand

New

slavers, counterfeiters

aliens into the

municable

way

Yorkers died.

and

He

prosecuted smugglers, white

heartless immigration agents

who

brought

United States suffering from trachoma and other comwho exploited immigrants on their

diseases, as well as those

one notable action he compelled the railroad H. Harriman and his banker Otto Kahn to divulge infor-

to the West. In

magnate E.

mation about their operations. *HLS, 1906,

Report

to

the Attorney-General,

was Charles

of Westphalia.

J.

August

14, 1908.

The Attorney General,

after

December

Bonaparte, grandson of the Emperor Napoleon Vs brother Jerome, King

The Warrior Dream

The

63

heart of the task Stimson had been set, however, was to

assault the

power and

behavior of the

illegal

trusts.

combination that had dominated American business forty years since the

In the advisers in

end of the

Civil

War was now

The for

reaching

process of

more than its

climax.*

up to about 1879, businessmen and their lawyer got together in what were called "pools" and— less accurately,

first

phase,

view of the ethics of many of those involved— "gentlemen's agree-

ments." Between roughly strict

1879

sense of the word, to

companies.

And from

and

own

employed

1896 they

trusts, in the

the assets of nominally competing

about 1906 the fashionable device was

1896 until

company." In two years alone, from 1899 to 1901, more than two hundred large industrial combinations were formed, with an the "holding

aggregate capitalization often billion dollars.

movement the They were in any

Against this titanic

seemed

feeble indeed.

of the Progressives

efforts

case divided

between those

who wanted to split the trusts up into their components and those who sought only to make them behave in a more restrained and publicspirited fashion.

The

1887 Interstate

Commerce

Act, ineffective as

it

was, was then further weakened by the judgment in the E. C. Knight case

of

1895,

which held that commerce did not include manufacture,

but "succeeds to manufacture and

is

not part of it." Three years

Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the charter of sequent antitrust action, but one that was

even

less

often effective. Indeed

at first rarely

all

later

sub-

invoked and

has been said that the courts' inter-

it

pretation of the antitrust laws had

"more than

established the legality

of large consolidations; they had encouraged them."t President Roosevelt had nailed his political colors to the antitrust

mast. But at the time Stimson took over as U.S. Attorney in the district

where the

largest,

most powerful and most

flagrant consolidations

tended to be concentrated, the Roosevelt administration had

two

significant victories.

One was

solving the Northern Securities J.

P.

Morgan and James

J.

ambitions of E. H. Harriman.* The

*See Purdy, Lindahl and Carter, Corporate Concentration and Public

M. Keezer and

S.

only

Hill to protect their northwestern railroad

interests against the predatory

tlbid., D.

won

Supreme Court's decision disCompany, a trust put together by the

May, The

Public Control of Business

,

Policy.

New

York,

1930, eited in

Viener.

op. cit., p. 63.

^Morgan went to the President and complained that he had not been warned of the suit. "That just what we didn't want to do," said Roosevelt. "If we have done anything wrong," said Morgan, "send your man to my man and they can fix it up." Morgan assumed that the Attornev General of the United States would be available to come to New York and work out

is

THECOLONEL

64

Roosevelt government's only other significant victory was Congress's passage of the Elkins Rebating Act in 1903. in court to prove to the trusts that

it

badly needed a victory

It

meant what

it

said,

and would

not merely pass legislation against abuses of business combination, but press for

and obtain convictions under the new

As U.S. Attorney

in

New

laws.

York, Stimson was bound to be the

spearhead of that attack. Even so, of his three chief prosecutions, the

on which his reputation as a lawyer rests above all else, only one was an attack on trusts as such. The other two were prosecutions litigation

of frauds carried out under cover of the trust form of organization.

One of

the ironies of Stimson 's career as a trust-busting govern-

ment attorney clients

that

is

two of his major

targets as a prosecutor

had been

of his law firm before he went to work for the government.

To

made no difference whatsoever. One was the American Sugar Refining Company, the other the National Bank of North America, controlled by Charles W. Morse, well known for his him, of course,

combinations

this

banking and

in

Morse's raiding of

as the organizer

of ice and shipping

trusts.

two main banks, the National Bank of

his

North America and the Mercantile National Bank, was thought to have contributed to the Panic of 1907. But bank inspection at the time was neither sophisticated nor tenacious. Inspectors went through the

books of Morse's banks

after the panic

and found nothing. By Novem-

ber 1907 Stimson was writing to Attorney General Bonaparte that he

was unhappy about "a number of run very close to the

acts

of grossly bad banking, which

of criminal misapplication of the bank's

line

funds."* In January 1908 he reported that he had found evidence that the National Bank of North America, through several of

"had gone concealed its

into speculative enterprises its

books."

interests in

He

put in

took more than

dummy

a total

a year to

of

beyond

loans,

five

its

its officers,

corporate power, has

and has so reported them on

bank inspectors of

his

own, who

accumulate the evidence he needed for

a

successful prosecution.

There was

a

of trusts. In 1907 in the

cumulative

effect to

Stimson 's

assaults

on the misuse

he had successfully prosecuted an associate of Morse's

copper pool, one Fritz Augustus Heinze. In the process he had in bad

succeeded in getting the court to establish that "a loan made

a

compromise with

his attorneys. Sec

p. 141.

*Viener,

op. cit., p. 67.

Andrew

Sinclair, Corsair:

The

Life of J. Pterpont

Morgan,

The Warrior Dream

6

with intent to defraud or injure the association,

faith

but a fraudulent act and,

act,

strictly

is

not an unwise

no loan

speaking,

5

at

all

but

a

misapplication of the funds of the bank."* Stimson found out that

Morse had skimmed money for himself by making bogus loans to his broker's office boy and to his own secretary, as well as in more ingenious ways. Alerted to the progress of Stimson's relentless investigation, Morse fled

abroad; he was captured, and returned to face

trial

voluntarily

when

he learned of the arrangements Stimson had already made for extradition.

He

was indicted

in

in November of misapplying money through improper loans falsely re-

August and convicted

the bank's and his depositors'

He

ported in the books.

was sentenced to

fifteen years in prison,

subsequently contrived to be released by feigning

but

health.

ill

"I spent eleven months to get Morse copper-fastened," Stimson

wrote proudly to

much

been

His

satisfaction

was

To

it

would have

who

acted under

have succeeded in

one of the wealthiest and most notorious of the malefactors

collaring

achievement, and

a substantial

other two main cases brought him

more

justified.

"when bank

easier to get the subordinates in the

his direction."

was

his friend President Roosevelt,

solid recognition

it

was noticed

less

Stimson's

as such.

public popularity, but even

from Progressive Republicans and from the

legal

profession.

In the early 1900s most of the sugar consumed in the United States,

whether on the

in industry,

sugar,

it

table, in cakes or confectionery, as alcohol or

came from the Caribbean and

was estimated, accounted for

westward

freight

as

from Cuba. Bulk

especially

much

40 per cent of the

as

out of New York.

Like other industrial giants, the Sugar Trust, controlled by the

American Sugar Refining Company, was involved arrangements with the

railroads.

in secret rebating

What happened was

that the big ship-

would work out a secret rebate with one or more railroads. He would then pay the full rate for freight; but he would be paid back a rebate by the carrier, which meant that he could effectively undercut per

smaller competitors in inland markets. Rebating was Interstate

Commerce Act of 1887, but

it

was not

illegal

under the

until the passage

of

the Elkins Act in 1903 that the government was able to exact fines large enough to deter a major trust. As soon as his new antitrust bureau was working, in early 1906,

Brief

and argument by

HLS

in U.S.

v.

Fritz

Augustus Heinze, cited

in Viener, op.

cit.,

p

68.

THE COLONEL

66 Stimson

Com-

both the American Sugar Refining

filed suits against

pany, which controlled about half the market for sugar in the United States,

and against nine

railroads

of which the mighty

New

York Cen-

The difficulty lay in proving instances of illegal rebating, because the company disguised the rebate bv pretending that it was demanding legitimate repayments for sugar damaged in transit. By subpoenaing and correctly analyzing an enormous mass of freight tral

was the

leader.

records,

bank

able to

show how

drafts,

board minutes and correspondence, Stimson was

the Sugar Trust forced the railroads to agree to

rebate. First he successfully prosecuted the nine railroads carrier.

Then he turned

informer in the company's its officers

guns on the Sugar Trust

his

office,

Stimson was able to prove,

were well aware both of the lawful

and of the

illegal

and one other

itself.

Then he

rebating arrangements.

lowed the money through the complex

tariff for

illegal

Using an that

first,

shipping sugar

painstakingly fol-

system until

it

ended

up with the American Sugar Refining Company. And in a steamrollering summing-up he laid the whole case out, starting with the reasons

why

equality

lessly

is

so important in commercial law, and arguing relent-

through to the individual guilty responsibility of Heinze and

his

right-hand man, one Palmer. As he scrawled in his characteristic big

handwriting

in his trial notes,

"Astonishing

umentary evidence." Faced with and mercilessly carried out

case, Secret crimes,

this assault, as meticulously

as a big

German

offensive

Front in the Great War, the Sugar Trust fought for

up the white

flag.

Doc-

prepared

on the Western

a while,

then ran

By December 1906 Stimson was able to inform the

court that "I have been approached by the representatives of that

Company

.

.

.

and have been informed by them that they

plead guilty to

A

all

are ready to

of the indictments."

year later, reflecting

on the implications of the

case to Attorney

General Bonaparte, Stimson concluded that the surrender of the American Sugar Refining

Company upon

all

of the indictments pending was obtained by the policy of pushing to tained.

trial as .

.

.

rapidly as possible the successive indictments ob-

The Sugar Company

convictions by juries.

fourth

trial

It

held out during three successive

then came to

me on

the eve of the

and surrendered unconditionally.

Not content with railroads into granting

operating a vast

them

illegal

secret rebates

scheme to pressure the

and so give them

a critical

The Warrior Dream

67

competitive advantage over

all

other refiners, the

men who

ran the

Sugar Trust were also cheating the government. They did so on such a scale, over a period of time and by a method at once so bare-faced

and so ingenious, that muckrake.

it

became one of the

classics

of the age of the

Shortly after the rebating convictions, Stimson was alerted by a

newspaper investigation to the

possibility that the

Sugar Trust was

defrauding the customs. United States Treasury agent Richard Parr

became convinced that

this

was

so,

and Stimson put him on the

case

together with James O. Brzezinski and a former employee of the American Sugar Refining

Company, Richard Whalley,

Sugar was weighed on the large scales.

At each one,

together in a

sat

little

therefore next to the

New

as a special agent.

York waterfront on seventeen

a company checker company man on the left and upright column of the scales. As Whalley, Parr a

customs inspector and

house, with the

and Brzezinski watched, they noticed that every time there was a load of sugar on the scales the company checker would drop his left hand in a strange It

motion.

turned out that the Sugar Trust had been cheating the customs

since the passage

the

first

such

of the Dingley Tariff

four years, the

as bribing

customs

company had

in 1897, ten years before.

officials, falsifying

records and using light trucks

to underestimate the

amount of customs duty

one had thought up

a better

way.

For

stuck to conventional methods

On

payable. In 1901 some-

each of the seventeen

scales, a

one quarter of an inch in diameter, had been bored, and was inserted a tiny piece of steel from a woman's corset, strong

small hole,

into

it

enough to counter the weight of the

ward pressure of a few pounds' weight by the checker's register as several

pounds

less

weight of sugar. By

Stimson was eventually able to prove the American Sugar Refining dealers far

more sugar than

it

downhand would

sugar. In this way, a tiny

from

in court

Company had was on record

this

left

simple

trick, as

own

records,

its

succeeded in selling to as

having imported into

the country. In six years, Stimson demonstrated, 75 million pounds of sugar had escaped duty, and in the end Stimson collected $3.5 million in

unpaid duty and penalties, the

by the government on

largest

sum,

it is

said, ever collected

a similar claim.

Stimson carefully defended the U.S. Attorney's ical

demands and

pressures during his tenure.

were the traditional ones: for him to use

his

office

from

Some of these

polit-

pressures

power of appointment

to

THE COLONEL

68 help deserving Republicans. "I

would

like

vou." wrote

Re-

his friend

publican congressman Herbert Parsons. "in more ways than one to help the Republican party." "I do not intend to appoint anvbo.

Sdmson

weeks later, "'on purely political recommendado not want you to recommend anyone whom I cannot implicitly rely upon to refuse a Sic bill when an Italian offers it to him, as will happen almost even* day."* As we shall see. Sdmson replied a few

...

tion.

I

not free from the conventional ethnic prejudices of his

class

and

generation.

He

can. however, be charged with \ielding to a

political pressure: the

who had

insidious

temptation to defend and support the President

appointed him.

wanted to count

more

whom

as a friend. In

he so

two

much

admired, and

whom

Sdmson can be

incidents

he

rairiv

charged with taking Roosevelt's side in quarrels w here his usual caution

might have urged him to stand

er's

aside.

The first incident arose out of reports published in Joseph PulitzSew York World. What happened was that the Indianapolis Xnrs.

edited by one Delevan Smith, alleged that that the United States

had paid,

at

much of

the S±2 million

Roosevelt's insistence, to buy the

nght to build the Panama Canal, had gone, not to the French government or French holders of claims, but— indirectly, through the agency of the House of Morgan— to a syndicate of Amencans. mcluding William Nelson Cromwell one founder of the august Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell Charles Tart and Roosevelt's brother-in.

law Douglas Robinson. Challenged to reply to these charges. Roosevelt said they in

were

'false''

and "too absurd to be discussed." The

which he gave that replv was published

in the

Sew

York World,

which accused the President of "deliberate misstatements of fact ialous personal attack on Delevan Smith." The World, was not

Panama but "the

veracity

letter

issue,

in his

said the

of the President of the U:

State-

Roosevelt was funous. and he was right to be. ever uncovered anv support for the charges

Xews and endorsed by the World. :n directing his .st

*HLS

*

made by

Where he was

Attorney General to bring

No

research has

the Indianapolis

arguably

less jus:

suits tor criminal libel

those responsible for the Xews and World attacks. The federal

to Herbert Parsons. April 10. 1906.

'See Elting E 1*15-16.

Monson

ted

>.

The

Uacn

tf

TbetUn Bmscwch (Cambridge

190-5*). vol. vi,

The Warrior Dream

69

government was able to

on

by claiming jurisdiction

act in this case only

the unprecedented and dubious grounds that the

libel

had been

published on federal property, for example at West Point. The cases

were never brought to court because the judges refused to accept the federal government's claim to jurisdiction. Stimson was

all

in favor

of the prosecutions to

start

with, in part

apparently because he was resentful of the power of the press.

he

first

became Secretary of

news could be tity

of

his

released without his personal approval. Given the sanc-

weekends,

not work. Later

this did

in

life

Stimson earned

the respect of reporters and developed respect in turn for

more

(When no

State in 1929 he issued an order that

cultivated

and responsible members of the

was never enthusiastic about the barons of the yellow Pulitzer, Hearst

He does seem

and Bennett.)

some of the

craft; nevertheless

such

press,

he as

to have developed doubts

about the wisdom of the prosecutions, and he did have the courage

him that they might look "queer" and would be seen as reviving the crime of lese-majeste or the Alien and Sedition Acts. Even so, he went along to a certain degree

to write to Roosevelt warning to hint that they

with the unwise attempt of an angry President, personally involved the case, to go out of his

way

to punish a

low blow by

in

op-

political

ponents.

The other

case reflects even less credit

on both Roosevelt and

Stimson. In 1906 three companies of black soldiers from the Twentyfifth

Regiment were assigned to Brownsville, Texas, where they were

unwelcome

to a section of the public.

A number of instances occurred

of harassment of the soldiers off duty, culminating in an incident on

August

13

when

shots were heard, one white

another wounded. Suspicion

came to the conclusion

fell

on the

man was found dead and

black soldiers, and Roosevelt

that they were guilty.

the elections, he delivered a message

On November

condemning them

and ordered the dishonorable discharge of the

5,

after

in strong terms

entire regiment. It ap-

The

pears from subsequent investigation that Roosevelt was wrong.

incident had been a provocation, and the soldiers were not guilty.

Roosevelt eventually accepted that this was so, reinstated some but not all

of the

soldiers,

insisted that

and retracted some of his

first

statement. But he

he had acted rightly and constitutionally.

An

still

action—

Reidv. U.S.— was brought to test the point. Although the incident had

taken place or

far

beyond

less unofficially,

his jurisdiction,

Stimson agreed to

as the President's lawyer.

He

act,

more

based his case on

THECOLONEL

70

the executive prerogative the Constitution gives to the President as

Commander-in-Chief.* The subordinate's eager willingness to justify an ugly outburst of temper on the part of his leader leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

The probable explanation for Stimson's actions is that the limelight that played on him in the U.S. Attorney's office had begun to awaken not only

great admiration for

ambition of following him,

up the Hudson River urging him to run for

if

not

as

Theodore Roosevelt but far as the White House,

this

or that public

Nor was he

office.

now

out of

office, to

draw what he

an

at least

to Albany. Stimson was surrounded bv

indifferent to personal publicity as he liked to pretend.

asked Roosevelt,

also

men

quite as

Stimson himself called

"the case

of the seventeen holes" to the attention of the magazine which Roosevelt edited,

The Outlook. Other papers took up the story about the

sugar fraud, and Stimson became a celebrity, albeit one in

anything but

the time and later in his memoirs that he had the fact

is

governor of

In

no

political

at

ambitions,

that within about a year of resigning as U.S. Attorney, he

considered running for mayor of for

who behaved

flamboyant way. Although he often maintained

a

New

York

we

retrospect

New

York City, and agreed to run

State.

can see that the fastidious Stimson was wildly life

of electoral

he had been enthusiastically involved in the

Good Gov-

unsuited for the cut-and-thrust, hail-fellow-well-met politics. Still,

ernment movement effective in his

work

in

New

He

York.

had proved conscientious and

for his Republican club.

And

he had been

a

howl-

ing success, in both substantive and public-relations terms, as U.S.

Attorney. His work in that office had been varied, but

was

directly related to the hottest political issue

its

main thrust

of the day: the

trusts

and what should be done about them. He had made a good record. He had had a good press. And he had won the good opinion of powerful members of the Progressive wing of the Republican Party and of its

leader,

So

it

Theodore Roosevelt. was

entirely natural that his Republican friends should ask

him to run. He personally a purely personal

about running

in

September

"U.S. Constitution, Art. the

manner

in

disliked the idea

view," he wrote to

II,

Sec.

which Roosevelt

2.

did.

1909,

But there

it

is

of a

his father

would be no

explicit

political career.

when he was ct

a great

"From

canvassed

misfortune to

power there given

to intervene in

1

The Warrior Dream run for Mayor and with

still

man

this for

who had come

Root,

more

to be elected." Dr. Stimson sympathized

but thought

it was his duty to run. "I would not you," was the message he transmitted through Elihu

his misgivings

choose

7

to consult him, "but

when

duties

come

to a

he must not dare to refuse them."*

Nothing came of the wanted

a

man

about the mayoralty: party workers

common

touch. But in

and further agonizing on the

party debate didate,

talk

with a more

New

more

part of the prospective can-

Stimson could not escape being chosen

didate for the governorship of

1910, after

York.

It

as the

was

Republican can-

clearly

understood,

by Roosevelt, by Elihu Root and by Stimson himself, that he was

"a good

in

But Roosevelt wanted a liberal Republican to men. As President William H. Tart said, "if you were to remove Roosevelt's skull now, you would find written on his brain '1912.' " Roosevelt had never been reconciled to Taft's occupancy of

for

licking."

rally his

an

office

he thought of

thought or for

as his; Taft

meant

pushing forward Stimson to run

said or did, including his

governor of

New

York, was conditioned by

ambition to run for the presidency in run on the "Bull

that everything Roosevelt

Moose"

1912.

his

unacknowledged

In the end, Roosevelt did

third-party ticket, further intensifying the

deep divisions in the Republican Party between "regulars" and insurgent Progressives, and letting the Democrats into the White House.

So Roosevelt argued to Stimson,

way that the what they

in the self-interested

greatest political leaders have of convincing themselves that

want

is

good

for their friends, that

necessarily hurt

Stimson 's

"a good

fight

with a licking won't

him."

style

was not bespoke

for the hustings.

accent," wrote one not unfriendly observer years

"His cultured

later,

"his uneasy

platform presence, his cold personality, almost every detail of his man-

ner betrayed his birth and breeding, gave his electorate an impression

young aristocrat who condescends to rule, and who, though he The opposition press called may be a good ruler, condescends. him 'the human icicle.' "t Unwisely, Stimson felt the need to spend

of

a

.

much of

his

.

.

time assuring reporters that he was not an icicle— a

self-

defeating task. Party workers tried to inject "ginger" into his cam-

paigning, but

what he wanted to do was to

and the need

for reform.

The

party was indeed hopelessly

*Elihu Root to

tCited

in

Drew

HLS, September

18,

1909,

quoted

in

talk

split.

about

The

112.

theory

regular organization

Morison, Turmoil and

Pearson, Washington Merry-Go-Round, p.

political

Tradition, p.

132.

THE COLONEL

72

was unavailable, so Stimson surrounded himself with young, able enthusiasts, some of whom— like Joseph Cotton, later Under Secretary at the State Department, and Felix Frankfurter— were to friends.

One of his

friends supplied a

manner of the day

to sing at his

If

become

lifelong

ditty in the cheerfully racist

little

rallies:

Stimson came from Africa

If he

was

If he

wore

Zulu chief

a

a feather in his hair

And dressed in a fig leaf We'd vote for Henry just And carry out the plan

the same

Because he's Roosevelt's man.*

His friends were but he did get

fight,

The Democrat, "rough-and-tumble

him

ambition for

such a man.

men of

themselves there

is

But the

loss

as

could even go so

two

to

the

was

a

a disgrace,

and

it

prob-

approval

On

or

portant for Stimson's defeat did not do

life

as the

it

distasteful to offer

of the electorate.

which may give 1910 in

New

to

him a

York was so im-

victory

would

strong possibility ofgreat advance-

ment, even toward the White House. At the least

made him a commanding [My italics.]

Still,

a reader pause.

simple fact that he did not win.

him any important damage, but

almost surely have opened

did not act like

to say— in spite of Wadsworths and Root-

found

rejection

Active Service

He

far as

Roosevelts, Tafts,

Nothing about the campaign of The

was not

Jr.,

with 689,700 votes

much. I say pvbably, because ambition is Henry Stimson did not look like a man with

his class, in his generation,

a passage in

won

and he

a career in elective politics.

And one

counterexamples such that

good

a

that

an unfathomable thing. a private

put up

his best to

paper-maker named John A. Dix,

a

political fighter, "t

against Stimson's 622,229.

ably did not hurt

Stimson did

right.

a licking.

it

would have

national figure at a very early age.*

Whether or not Stimson nurtured a secret ambition of "great advancement, even toward the White House," he did not have to wait *I

owe

this

endearing

if

Ubid. t()n Active Service, p.

25.

lamentable doggerel to Morison, Turmoil and Tradition,

p.

142.

The Warrior Dream long for the

7

to national service in a form that was far

call

more

3

suited

than Albany to his talents and his interests. President Taft was well

aware that Theodore Roosevelt was preparing to attack him

in 1912. It

would be no bad move to break up the coming assault bv bringing some of Roosevelt's bright young men into the Taft administration. So when the Secretary of War, Jacob Dickinson, resigned, the President offered the job to Henry Stimson, and Stimson, with very little hesitation this time, accepted.

He

consulted just four people, in

his father,

and one was

his

fact.

One was

his wife,

one was

law partner, Bronson Winthrop. The fourth

was Theodore Roosevelt. Stimson was aware, of course, that

relations

between Roosevelt and Taft were already hardening into something like

enmity. But Roosevelt "warmly and strongly urged

me by all means

to accept the position," and later repeated his blessing in a

Teddy Roosevelt, though, was he

may not have been

he said he was.

It is

a complicated

so delighted at his

the measure of how

temperament that he may not have

young

little

realized

sented his going to work for Taft in

1911.

human

friend's

letter.

being, and

promotion

Stimson had the

how much

as

political

Roosevelt

re-

Certainly in 1912 a strange

When

Moose campaign was at last openly under way, Stimson, as a member of the Taft Cabinet, decided not to join Roosevelt. He felt obliged to make a episode suggested something of the kind.

speech in Chicago explaining his position.

And

the Bull

with

his usual scru-

pulousness in personal relations, he sent the relevant passage in his

speech to Roosevelt, with an almost agonized

I

am

a

I feel

ming I

am

He

poor hand

very a

much

good

deal

at

letter:

keeping quiet and balancing on a fence. But

as if

and

the horizon of it is

my

little

world was swim-

hard to look forward to a time

when

not working or thinking with you.

received a bluff profession of untroubled friendship, begin-

"Dear Harry: Heavens' sake!" But in fact Roosevelt did not forgive. For the next three years the two men did not meet. In his ning:

memoirs Stimson used emotionally charged language to say how glad cc he was that eventually a new common cause brought them together, and when the Colonel died, in 1919, Stimson lost a friend as close as the one he had lost in 1912."* *On

Active Service, p.

52.

THE COLONEL

74

Otimson found into the old

morning

the

life

of a Secretary of War pleasant.

Shoreham Hotel

a black

gaited horse chosen for

its

H

and

at Fifteenth

Myer would

trooper from Fort

Streets,

He moved and even-

bring over a Tennessee

sedate manners bv his predecessor, Judge

Dickinson. Wishing for a more adventurous mount, Stimson would

Potomac Park or Rock Creek between six and seven in the morning. Almost the only other horseman out at that hour was a little man perched on a big horse. It was General Charles Francis Adams, grandson of one President, great-grandson of another, and a Civil War officer. Stimson would ride up alongside him, and Adams would sav in his gruff voice, "Stimson, do vou know anv other man in Washride in

ington

hour

at

the age of seventy-eight

who

is

such a fool as to ride

After a time the Stimsons rented a house

the ntual of his

down

at this

mid-winter?"

in

morning

on Sixteenth Street, but which he would walk the State, War and Navy

ride continued, alter

the street and across Lafayette Park to

House with would spend the morning under his who building next to the White

his Airedale terrier,

When

desk.

Punch,

he went across

who did not like dogs, Punch would come too, and was supposed to be looked after by the reporters; but Punch knew his way to the President's room, and could not be the road to confer with President Taft,

kept away.*

The gone

surface of

life

since the time

surface the world air as

went on

was changing

the Progressive

TafVs Washington much

in

as

it

had

of General Adams' grandfather. But under the fast.

Movement

There was

political tension in the

challenged both major parties, and as

Roosevelt prepared to challenge Taft.

The War

Office was a specially

tense place.

After the Civil War, the U.S.

Army had

retreated into peacetime

"Dark

obscurity so profound that the period has been called the army's

Ages." But scholars have pointed out that great militarv creativity. t

this

was

Abruptly driven back on the

also a period

humdrum

lems of the profession after the years of glory, American career in the last third

which *HLS.

it

My

of the nineteenth century

was possible to build the

vastly

laid

Vacations, pp. 124-^0, 144-4* tSec Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, pp. 229-61.

officers

the foundations

expanded armies of

of

prob-

on

1917-18

The Warrior Dream

7

5

and 1942-45. This was the period which saw the founding of the Engineer School (1866), the Artillery School (revived in 1868), the infantry

Army

and cavalry school

at

War

Nevertheless, as the twentieth century approached,

College

(1901).

Fort Leavenworth

and

(1881)

the

finally

the old army that had patrolled the frontier and fought the Indian

wars was

all

but obsolete

world of Prussian militarism,

in the

and French imperialism, and the United

Some of the between the While the

States as a

major power.

army's internal troubles sprang from the

stafT

corps and the general

line officers served in

list

of army

British

rigid division

officers

of the

dusty forts in the West, the

line.

staff offi-

some style in Washington and enjoyed a monopoly of promotions and power through their carefully cultivated relations with

cers lived in

congressmen. In the

War Department,

as earlier in the

Department, Henry Stimson followed

who

had become Secretary of War

law and

later in the State

in the footsteps

in 1899.

of Elihu Root,

Root had

led a partially

successful fight against the staff corps system; in 1901, at his urging,

Congress broke the

from the

line

monopoly by

staff corps'

must be sent on four-year

ending the privileged isolation of the

German

military professionalism

admirer of

legislating that officers

details to the corps,

staff corps.

thus

Impressed both by

and by the writing of an American

German methods, Spencer Wilkinson, Root

set

about

in-

troducing reforms, embodied in the General Staff Act of 1903, which reflected his thinking

on these abstruse but important

hierarchy. Abolishing the traditional

tween the President,

as

Commander

issues

of military

direct-command relationship be-

and the Commanding

in Chief,

General, the act substituted a system in which the President's com-

mand

would be "exercised by or in the name of the Secretary a Chief of Staff. " At the same time the chief of staff was given wider powers of supervision over the bureaus. As Stimson put it, Root struck the first blow in a campaign to end forever the grip on American military policy of armchair generals who had never authority

of War, through

commanded

troops.*

And

successor, ten years later,

The two ficers,

*On

man

Stimson saw

was to

it,

his chief task as

after

Active Service, p.

33.

as

it

Root's

finish that job.

schools of military thought were personified in

both of them,

of staff, a

as

two

of-

happened, former army doctors. The chief

Root's heart

who was

to

become one of the

objects

THECOLONEL

76

of Stimsorf s admiration, was Major General Leonard Wood, old Indian fighter and commander of the Rough Riders, as much an advocate of vigorous national

self-assertion as his friend

Teddy Roosevelt. The opposition was embodied

and

singlestick^ sparring

partner

eral

in the adjutant general,

Fred C. Ainsworth, a master bureaucrat

Wood

was determined to

as

much

Wood was

corridors and lobbies of Capitol Hill as

Major Gen-

home

at

fighting

Ainsworth

assert his authoritv,

in the

Comanches. as deter-

The confrontation came, as it so often does, on an Wood's proposal, supported by Stimson, that the bimonthly muster roll be supplanted by a more modern administrative system. Ainsworth rejected Wood's proposal in a memo that mined

to resist

it.

obscure technical

issue:

spoke of "incompetent amateurs." grossly insubordinate that as

soon

the time for drastic action had

The

first

It

was, Stimson decided,

he read

as

it

"so

Stimson realized that

come." 4

person he consulted was the Judge Advocate General,

who

General Enoch Crowder,

advised that General Ainsworth could

be punished either by administrative action or by court martial, and

recommended

the former course as

said in his

dirty job

sulted

good-humored way, "Stimson,

it

one of those predecessors, Root, who hit

"when

a

man

pulls

has fallen to

who

you to do

a

said in his less easygoing

your nose there

is

nothing to be done

him."t

Stimson called Ainsworth 's rather than stand

meeting.

He

said Stimson,

consulted Taft,

which your predecessors ought to have done." And he con-

fashion that

but to

No,

less explosive.

he meant to bring him before a court martial.

The

trial.

at

and Ainsworth elected to

Stimson learned of the news

President asked

telephoned Root

bluff,

him

if this

at a

retire

Cabinet

was acceptable. Stimson

the Senate and asked whether he should accept

"By all means," said Root. "Best possible result." came back into the room and said Ainsworth would but would not apologize. Stimson said he would waive the

the retirement.

The

President

retire

apology.

Stimson 's victory was decisive

in part because

Ainsworth 's sup-

porters were demoralized by their leader's willingness to surrender. also reveals a characteristic style with

himself in political fights for another third of a century. *Ibid., pp. 33-37-

Mbid., p.

35.

It

which Stimson was to handle

He

was ada-

The Warrior Dream

77

mant on the point of

principle,

but with

cally flexible,

a

of a confrontation looking

The Ainsworth where the

Hill,

Wood

had to

fallen

touchy on the point of honor,

tacti-

shrewd sense of who was going to conic out best.

make trouble

fight did

hero

still

had powerful

fight for the reforms they

for

Stimson on Capitol

friends,

and Stimson and

wanted and

for their appro-

But there were compensations. One lay in the fact that the Secretary of War was, in effect, America's colonial secretary. Stimson found himself responsible for the Panama Canal and for the Philippriations.

pines,

and so

policy

and

laid the basic

foundations of his understanding of foreign

strategy in the empire-building tradition of Roosevelt

Root, of Leonard

Wood

and George

Goethals.

he enjoyed most, though, was in

travel

He

traveled in the

Cuba and Santo Domingo.

Caribbean, where he visited

The

W.

and

his

beloved West.*

Stimson responded to the masculinity and companionship of Wood,

who own

"gloried in courage and fitness," and to the reputation of his

Captain Frank McCoy, who had killed the Moro leader Dato Mindanao with his own hands. He was delighted to make friends with young men like McCoy, who became his aide in the Philippines aide,

Ali in

and

a lifelong friend,

and George

of the Upperville foxhounds

S.

in the Virginian

celebrated for chasing bigger game.

these military heroes in

Sam Houston,

in

Patton, then the boldest follower

some of

He

of

all,

and

out with

later

their

own

trials

of strength

At Fort

.

San Antonio, he insisted on galloping over the jumps

with the cavalry, and he took a Springfield firing range

Hunt Country and

was proud when he could match

rifle

from

hit a disappearing silhouette target at

McCoy and

a trooper

an Apache scout named

recognized the tracks of a grizzly and

knew how

to

on the

long range. Best

Chow

make

Big, he

the Indian

sign for bear.

"The

Secretary," said

Chow

Big,

"he good scout," and thirtymoment,

seven years later the Secretary recorded proudly that at that

"I had

won my

spurs in the southwest!"

In 1912 came the break with Theodore Roosevelt. teristic

it

political bread,

was characteristic of Roosevelt

find Stimson 's behavior correct

*HLS,

was charac-

of Stimson that, although he idolized Roosevelt, he

having eaten President Taft's

And

It

My

Vacations, pp. 124-44.

that,

felt that,

he could not desert him. although he pretended to

and admirable,

in his heart

he regarded

THECOLONEL

78 it

as ungrateful betrayal

by

a

man

he had thought of as one of his own.

The episode sevelt.

also reveals another difference between Stimson and RooStimson was adventurous enough physically, happv tQ jump all

the fences and hunt

all

the bears in creation, but politically he was

on the other hand, brought to his political camthe dash and bombast of his outdoor exploits. Where Stim-

cautious. Roosevelt,

paigns

all

men he had to deal with carefully before making up mind, Roosevelt hardly seemed to look before he leaped, taking it

son watched the his

for granted that every

seems

man's eyes would be on him. In retrospect

Stimson would not have got on

likely that

as well

it

with Theodore

Roosevelt as he was to do with his cousin Franklin. But he regretted all

his life that

he never got

a

chance to

trv.

Otimson's unsuccessful campaign for governor of New York in 1910 was not the last of his ventures into state politics. In 1915 he played one of the leading parts in a drama of some lasting significance: the New York constitutional convention.* it

The movement for constitutional reform, or "reorganization," as came to be called, sprang from many sources. One was the frustra-

tion that reform-minded Republicans

the state's

by the legislature,

affairs

felt at

itself

the long domination of

dominated by the Republican

machine, inherited from Roscoe Conkling by Thomas erated

it

until his death in 1910.

Another was the growing

it

And

was time

for

more

effective

power to be given

was the resentment of the Democrats

a third

from the previous convention resulting

op-

feeling that with the

expanding complexity of government and the rapid increase get,

who

Piatt,

with imperial authority from 49 Broadway for twenty years

in 1894

and

split

house and the

to the executive.

in particular at the

way the with the

in 1912,

by Roosevelt, the Democrats captured both the

legislature,

bud-

at their exclusion

apportionment favored the Republicans. But

Republicans

in its

state-

and immediately took action to move up

the date of the convention.

The

election of delegates, however, was a disappointment for the

Democrats;

116

Republicans were elected, and only

The Republican delegates, moreover, were They included men \Scc

Thomas

Governor; also

Schick, The

On

like Taft's

New

52

stalwarts.

quality.

Attorney General, George Wickersham;

York State Constitutional Convention of

Active Service, pp. 56-78.

of their

men of impressive

191$

and

the

Modern

State

The Warrior Dream

79

Columbia and Cornell universities, Seth Low and Jacob Gould Schurman; and Elihu Root and Henry L. Stimson. the presidents of both

After his defeat for the governorship in 1910, Stimson had read

widely and thought hard about state government. His central theme

was what he

called "responsible

government." Responsibility, he

could not be divorced from authority. "Irresponsibility was

of scattered authority and divided power;

result

ernment had

led to untrustworthy

"more power, not

have

fear

of too

government." Elected

said,

a direct

much

officials

gov-

must

less— only so could they be held accountable

McKinley Day speech

for success or failure." In January 1911, in a

in

Cleveland, Ohio, he expounded his practical conclusions. State gov-

ernment should be reorganized

in

such a way

as to

strengthen the chief

executive. Governors should be given a longer term, say four years;

they should choose their

them,

own

cabinets,

and should be

was the President of the United

as

expected to produce their

own

legislative

States;

remove

free to

and they should be

program, which would have

priority over other measures.

Some time

in 1913,

it

seems, Stimson

won Root

over to his way of

thinking about the need for reorganization, and in the event Stimson

and Root came to work

as a

team, but

now

with Stimson

as the

mov-

ing spirit and Root, in a reversal of their longstanding relationship, as the lieutenant. There were three measures, in particular, that had long

been advocated by the supporters of reorganization and that Stimson

and Root were determined to get the convention to

pass.

One was

the

consolidation of the dozens of boards, commissions and other administrative agencies created cies

by the

legislature into a small

number of agen-

over which the governor could exercise control. The second was

the "short ballot," meaning that the

be drastically reduced so

power over the few

give third

as to

number of elected

officials

should

weaken the hold of the machine and

offices that

mattered to the voters.

And

the

was the introduction of an executive budget, necessary not only

for executive control but also for reasons

State of

New

York was spending

now

that the

hundred million

dollars a

of

close to a

efficiency

year.*

ily.

At the convention, the executive budget amendment passed easThe most intense debate was on the short ballot, on which Elihu

Root, speaking with a passion and an emotional eloquence that were

*$94 million

in 1915,

up from $24 million

in 1901.

THE COLONEL

80

scarcely his usual style, carried the day. Altogether,

Stimson and Root both had reason to be proud when the convention disbanded, on

September 118

to

33.

new

having approved a

10,

The Empire

to deal "intelligently, scientifically

complicated,

constitution by the clear vote of

Wickersham put it, was the first and courageously with this vast,

State, as Charles

inartistic,

unscientific,

expensive,

wasteful

system of

government which has grown up in our midst."* Up to this point Root and Stimson had every reason to congratulate one another on the skill with which they had managed the con-

Now

vention.

reorganization had passed with flying colors. All that

remained was to secure

November would

carry

2.

One

ratification

by the voters on Election Day,

new

leading reorganizer guessed the

of the constitution are rapidly improving with every day. carry,

and very

likely

by

much

a

larger vote than

to one: 910,462 to 400,423.

stunning defeat are perhaps

less

I

think

it

will

we expect."

He was wrong. The voters of New York rejected more than two this

constitution

by 50,000 votes. Stimson himself wrote that "the chances

The

the constitution by

detailed reasons for

important here than the

light

it

throws

on Stimson's attitude toward politics and toward mass democracy. In terms of what they would have called statecraft, Root, Stimson and their friends

had done their work

prepared,

skillfully

well.

prepared oratorical barrage. In

Too

little

The convention had been

managed, and

finally carried

by

meticulously

assault after a well-

political terms, the story

was very

different.

trouble had been taken to publicize the convention, so that

one delegate complained that his neighbor in New Rochelle, "not a particularly unintelligent or uninformed man," had not the faintest idea that a convention was taking placet This public-relations failure

was exacerbated by the great events that were taking place simultaneously in the world: President Wilson, for example, had declined an invitation to address the convention because the Lusitania had just

been sunk, and the

by the war

in

New

York City newspapers were more absorbed

Europe than by the convention

in

Albany.

With all the publicity in the world, however, Stimson and the champions of reorganization, "responsible government" and strengthened executive authority would not have persuaded the voters unless they had paid more attention to the realities of New York politics. For "Quoted

in

tCharles H. p. 64.

Schick,

Young

op. at.,

p. 100.

to Herbert Parsons, Herbert Parsons papers, quoted in Schick,

op.

cit.,

1

The Warrior Dream

8

one thing, they made

a tactical error in insisting that the voters accept

amended

or reject the

constitution as a whole, thus ensuring

And

tion of minorities against their handiwork. ties is just

what they found arrayed

come mostly from

the convention had

of minori-

a coalition

against them.

a coali-

The opposition

in

upstate conservatives, led by

Edgar T. Brackett, and opposition of that kind was to be expected

The Democrats, on the other hand, went along with the amendments to the constitution at the convention because the one issue that mattered to them was reapportionment— to give from some

New

voters.

York City

population.

proportion to

political representation in

When

it

came to the

Tammany

vote,

blocking the constitution, in the hopes of getting a

terest in

vention with strengthened Democratic representation

reapportionment would be on the

The

had

a specific reason for

State Federation of

new conwhich

at

table.

Organized labor, with considerable at the time,

growing

its

Hall had every in-

political influence in

New York

opposing the new constitution.

Labor had asked the convention

for various

armed

safeguards for trade unions, notably for a guarantee that where forces

to

were brought in to break

by military

trial

gerated. little

a strike, strikers

concern

tribunals. This

may

would not be

subject

well have been exag-

But the convention, dominated by conservatives, showed

or no concern with labor's

ference by using

its

fears,

and labor punished that

indif-

influence against the constitution.

Yet another source of opposition to the reorganization forces came

from those Republicans

who

were suspicious of Elihu Root and of

presidential ambitions for 1916. In the circumstances,

it

his

was unwise to

make a stem-winding speech the day before the vote on second amendment, which sounded all too much like the opening

allow Root to the

salvo of a presidential campaign. It is fair

were

in

to say that Stimson,

many ways ahead of their

a considerable extent a

for the

new

model

for

constitution which

Root and the reorganizers of 1915 What they created became to reorganization in other states, and

time.

New

York

finally

adopted

in 1926.

Beginning with Illinois, the convention's historian records, "state after state

adopted some form of consolidation, short ballot and executive

budget."* By 1929 every

and by *Schick,

1938 twenty-six

op. cit., p. 134.

state

but Arkansas had the executive budget,

had consolidated

their agencies

and

in

most

THECOLONEL

82 cases also introduced the short ballot.

Even

more senRoot and Stimson might have neutralized or weakened each of

sitivity

with

so,

the different kinds of opposition to reorganization.

underestimated the need to do

To

so.

a little

It is clear

that thev

the extent that the reorganizes

were concerned with modernizing the machinery of government and

making

its

no doubt

functioning more rational and more effective, there can be

that the defeat of the constitution

York. Yet considered

as

was

does highlight what were to be flaws in both political personalities:

misfortune for

a

an episode in Henry Stimson's

and

his

New

political life,

it

his followers'

an instinct to brush aside the complexities of

and

legislative politics as obsolete

and

self-interested,

impa-

a certain

tience with the tedious business of electoral democracy.

Vjf eneral Adams was not the onlv Civil War veteran with whom the youthful Secretary of War made friends in Washington. At dinners Stimson used to see Adams with Mr.

there,

Justice Oliver

Wendell

Holmes. After dinner was over, when the smoking began, he would the old

listen to

Many Stimson

own

men

years later,

said

refighting their war.

Holmes asked Stimson

something that

is

he used to turn "green with envy" reminiscing.

in a bigger

to

sit

"Now

World War. He

war than you have served as you

The old judge roared with man, good man."* 1913,

and

in,

and swap yarns with you

In

Stimson was

are

laughter,

forty-six.

tell I

you that

am

in the foreseeable future.

fallen in love with the army,

He

I

have served

with me."

and

"Good man, good

said

His party had

split,

Wilson had

political office for

was bored with the law.

and with

how

recalled

therefore as qualified

been elected, and there seemed no prospect of high

him

ice,

he listened to Holmes and

as

have come to

I

break the

very revealing about the motives for his

decision to volunteer for the First

Adams

To

to tea.

soldiers.

He

had

But the ultimate pur-

is

war, and of war he had no experience

deficiency, however,

was to be rather quickly made up. In

pose of armies and soldiers whatsoever.

The

1914 Stimson's belligerent friend General at Plattsburg,

*

My

Vacations.

New

Leonard

Wood

set

up

a

camp

York, to train volunteers to eke out the pathetically

The Warrior Dream

8

3

inadequate ranks of the regular army

if war should eome. Stimson's sympathies were with the Allies from the beginning of the war, and as it

ground on, he became

increasingly sure that the United States

He

have to become involved.

was appalled by the

ferocity

would

of German

warmaking, and even more so by the ruthlessness of that Prussian

which saw war

statecraft

as the ultimate justification

of the almighty

That philosophy, he believed, would have to be fought and beaten, and it was neither wise nor decent for the United States to

state.

count on others to

fight

it

"Into such

for her.

a struggle,' '

he

said,

"a man or a nation may well go with lofty faith and burning ardor." Stimson visited Plattsburg in both 1914 and 1915, and in 1916 actu-

At the age of

enrolled there.

ally

was proud that "he

forty-eight he

succeeded in shooting so well that the doctors, waiving both

him

age and his near-blindness in one eye, pronounced

fit

his

for active

service."*

The American a speaking

declaration of

war on April

6, 1917,

the country, where he defined the issue as he saw

America

is

we have is is

because

we

realize that

upon

active service abroad.

For

the battlefields of Europe

ex-Secretary of War

and not

knows

masters, so Stimson's success

just into uniform,

but into

purpose he pulled strings shamelessly.

this

a lot

not prepared to do favors for

may

of generals, but generals

as a rule

any of their former

political

just

as

an expression of the

First

he got a commission

be taken

esteem in which he was held by the military. in the

may

declared, he threw himself into the not-so-

easy task of getting into uniform,

are

attacks

the future of the free institutions of the world, t

The moment war was

Any

meant German

shipping], gross and unbearable as that injury

at stake

as

struggle raging across the water,

suffered an incidental injury [he

on American be. It

it:

not going to war with Germany merely because,

one of the accidents of the great

there

found him on

tour of the Middle West, the most isolationist section of

Judge Advocate General's department through the good

offices

of his friend General Enoch Crowder. Then he got himself assigned to the all

War

College and spent a "strenuous

day, getting

up and

*HLS, My Vacations. The West when he was young.

tO«

Active Service, p. 89.

summer" working

drilling first thing in the

sight defect

in

an

office

morning, and then

seems to have been caused by

a

shooting accident out

THECOLONEL

84 studying

all

evening.

He

name onto

got his

the

list

personally by President Wilson's Secretary of War,

who

of

officers for

chosen branch of the service— only to have

artillery— his

it

the

removed

Newton D.

Baker,

somewhat insultingly, in a personal interview which Stimson demanded, that he did not want a lot of political generals like those in the Civil War. By chance, or perhaps, as children say, "by accident on purpose," as Stimson left Baker's office after a somewhat explained

door to the

abrasive encounter, the

Hugh

General

Scott,

was open.

office

He

was

of the chief of

Major

staff,

"an old

a congenial spirit,

and fellow-lover of the West," and he promised to help. Through his intervention Stimson found himself, on the verge of his friend

fiftieth

birthday, training with the Seventy-seventh Field Artillery Reg-

iment

at

Camp Upton, on Long

preparatory to going to

Island,

France.* In the event, he got there even before the Seventy-seventh, as-

signed to the school for general staff officers at Langres, in Burgundy.

Before that, he was attached for a

army's

British

officers,

battle fire

Fifty-first

and

for their kilts

holding

month

in

January-February to the

Highland Division, known to the Germans,

their ferocity, as a sector

"the

ladies

from hell." The

British

they had just successfully defended in the

of Cambrai, "had an attitude towards both bombing and

which seemed to Stimson unreasonably casual."

shell-

He found

"characteristic" that they took off their steel helmets just

when

it

they

were needed. But "the Scots knew their trade." The Highlanders

thought the sector of the

line

son was with them in the

wrote back to

I

where they happened to be while Stim"phenomenally quiet." But Stimson

line

with satisfaction after

his sister

have seen the Bochc popping

tant trench lery

and seen him get

was turned on him and

I

the front side of our trench

have seen and

(little

as

[Grand

it

felt real

was) than

Army of the

looked up.t *On Active Service, tHLS, Papers, reel

p. 73. 50,

pp. 363

ff.

days in the trenches:

head up warily from

down

hastily

again

his dis-

when our

artil-

have flattened myself in turn against

when

whistle of his approaching shell. I

his

five

war

many of

.

I .

heard the very unpleasant

.

now and the

civil

Republic] variety) to

been under more

war "patriots"

whom we

fire

(GAR

have so long

The Warrior Dream

8

5

The remark is revealing. Their father had fought in the Civil War, and men of Stimson's generation had spent almost fifty years, literally wondering how they would match up to the test of Henry Stimson welcomed that test, and he passed it with flying

whole

their

battle.

lives,

Regiment into the

colors. In July his battalion led the Seventy-seventh line

with Colonel Stimson in temporary command.* "For the next

"he was wonderfully

three weeks," he confessed to his biographer,

happy," because "the only thing worse than the tlefields

the fear of fear that

is

fills

fought." His unit was only in the

fear that

fills all

men who

the hearts of

line for those three

bat-

have not

weeks, but in

"he saw enough of war and danger to be able he was a good soldier; this knowledge was impor-

that time, he reckoned,

to feel certain that

him." For the rest of his life, he recorded with pleasure, " 'Colonel' was a title that his close friends often used," and it was one which gave him great pride. tant to

In a longer passage in his memoirs he spelled out more fully his reasons for joining the army:

.

.

the basic one was that, after preaching preparedness for years

.

and war

for

ian.

Though

fifty

to

could

months, he could not in

become

feel

some ways a soldier,

it

it

remain

in conscience

might be quixotic

was the only way

comfortable in his mind.

And

for a

in

man

a civil-

nearly

which Stimson

of course

it

was

also

combat soldiers for many years; he reJustice Holmes and Gen. Charles F. Adams,

true that he had envied

men like whose Civil War reminiscences ton, had known a part of life alized that

twenty years he had free to

he often listened to in Washinghe wanted to know. For nearly

felt a certain

regret that he

go to the Spanish-American War, and

not propose to be

left

Yankee boys from

had not been

this

time he did

behind.

Phillips

Academy,

like

the Flathead braves of

the Continental Divide, dreamed their warrior dreams, especially their fathers

United

had fought

States, after

all,

at Petersburg. is

so short.

A

The modern single

life

if

history of the

spans the interval

between Grant's Peninsular Campaign, in which Dr. Stimson fought and from which Henry Stimson derived his nostalgia for battle, and *On

Active Service, pp. 91-100.

THECOLONEL

86

the somber culmination of Hiroshima. Stimson had his virtue

and

military glory.

He

lived to see

fill

mysterious transformation that he himself was one of the

prehend,

at the

end of

his

life:

of military

both of them devalued, by

In one and the same

first

to

a

com-

moment

the

nuclear transformation conferred power and took away the possibility

of using it— just

as

nature has ordained that

if a

bee stings,

it

dies.

Ill

The

Latin

Experience:

The Thorn Tree

at

Tipitapa

o

n

May

4, 1927,

Henry Stimson

sat

down on

the banks of the

Tipitapa River in the remote Central American republic of Nicaragua to negotiate the surrender of a wild bandit Jose Maria

shade of

army with

Moncada. To escape the intense

a large

blackthorn

The

tree.

a certain General

could hardly have been greater. Stimson was a private very

model of the

successful

New

correct, invincibly conservative.

under the

heat, they sat

two men citizen and the

contrast between the

York lawyer of

Moncada was

a

his day,

impeccably

backwoods school-

teacher turned banana-republic general with unusually loose morals

even for that easygoing world. his followers

were

little

He

called himself a liberal;

short of revolutionaries and

than bandits. In a few hours'

talk,

some

but some of little

better

Stimson persuaded Moncada and

THE COLONEL

88 his ragged soldiers to turn in their arms.

The meeting was

a

turning

who had own Liberal

point for both men. In under two years, General Moncada,

not previously been even the acknowledged leader of

Pam% became Stimson,

president of Nicaragua. Also in under

his

two

Henry

who had

lawyer in private practice

a fifty-nine-year-old

years,

not

held public office for thirteen years, was sworn in as Secretary of State.

The events that led to that meeting under the thorn tree of Tipitapa composed the first lesson in the postgraduate education of Henry Stimson: the southern chapter.

±.n the

fall

of

1911,

on

his

way home from

a

tour of inspection of

War with his friends Frank McCoy, Henry Stimson

the western army posts as Secretary of

Wood

Leonard

and Captain

and crossed the Rio Grande to Juarez,

for a few hours in El Paso

"where the recent heavy

General

stopped

fighting had taken place the preceding spring,

resulting in the killing of a

number of Americans

in El

Paso by stray

bullets."*

That

is

the only contemporary reference in Stimson's diary to an

event of incalculably great long-term significance for the United States: the Mexican Revolution. Between 1910 and 1920 Mexico underwent an extraordinary convulsion, sometimes heroic, sometimes comical, often brutal

and always chaotic.

was, as the Mexican painter Miguel Co-

It

varrubias has written, "a sort of musical

comedy

nation, where brow-

beaten peons periodically rose in revolt against their Spanish grandee masters, and were led by bandit generals with magnificent mustachios

and

oily

complexions, whose ruthless and sanguinary exterior con-

cealed a patriotic heart of gold." t

more rites

serious; the birth pangs

of

a people

colonial rule

The Porfirio

It

was

at the

same time something

of a modern nation, the painful

growing up

and postcolonial

fighting in Juarez in

after the

initiation

long enforced immaturity of

sloth.

May

Diaz and the opening of

1911

marked the

this struggle.*

fall

of the dictator

Like the reformist

ministers of the last years of the tsarist empire, Diaz had impressed

*

My

Vacations.

tMiguel Covarrubias, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec pp. xxi-xxii. *For this sketch of the Mexican Revolution I have drawn on a number of standard works, ,

especially Peter Calvert, Mexico;

Hubert Herring,

ard F. Cline, Mexico: Revolution

to

A

History of Latin America, pp. 299-375;

Evolution; Anita Brenner,

The Wind that Swept Mexico.

How-

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa foreigners with the progress he had

made

in

89

modernizing

shackle domain. Public order was imposed, if necessary with tality.

The currency was

tidied up. Railroads

house were

rambru-

reorganized, and the national finances were

and government

and

offices

magnificent opera

a

Yet this was a mere facade, or rather

built.

his

some

a shining crust

over stagnant and in certain respects poisonous waters. The country

was getting

but

richer,

tween the bustling

was

it

still

desperately poor.

The

and elegant avenues of the

streets

contrast be-

capital

and the

dusty plains of the countryside was no greater than the gap between,

on the one

side, a

thousand to cientificos,

few hundred hacendados

a quarter

who

each

owned from

of a million acres together with

millionaire industrialists with fat

fifty

few thousand

a

bank balances, and on the

other the millions of landless, hungry peons

who had no

alternative

but to work for them. Under Porfirio Diaz, what was more, that gap

was getting wider. Emiliano Zapata bellion

is

when he observed how much

said to have

better

been driven to

housed were

re-

his master's

racehorses than his peons. It was a land divided racially, too, between

the few

who

were of European descent and the great majority

were of mixed Indian and European or pure Indian descent. land where the hold of the

Roman

It

who was

a

Catholic Church was deep but the

hold of pre-Columbian culture and religion even deeper. Finally, Mex-

had been— before, during and ever

ico

of the most unpredictably but savagely violent Abruptly, in

1910, the year

conquest— one

since the Spanish

when Diaz

societies

on

earth.*

celebrated the hundredth

anniversary of Mexican independence and his

own

eightieth birthday,

violence exploded in political upheaval. Los de abajo,^ "those

down

below," the landless peons of the southern provinces, rose without warning under their leader Zapata. The next year Diaz

and was replaced by the

Two

years later a

was shot by This Its

plot

as a

is

is

new

idealistic

dictator, Victoriano Huerta,

took over. Madero

his guards, while not trying to escape.

not the place to trace the story of the Mexican Revolution.

as

complicated

Kung-fu movie. But

as a its

the pieces

on

three-volume novel and

On

bloodstained

the surface, politicians

the chessboard of European politics

and countermoves: cynical

as

course was a fiction that faithfully imitated

the reality of Mexican society. like

fled to Paris

but unworldly Francisco Madero.

men of the world

made

like Porfirio

who their

looked

moves

Diaz, ideal-

*To this day Mexico has one of the highest murder rates in the world. tThe phrase was used as the title of a 1916 novel by the Mexican doctor/novelist Mariano Azuela.

THE COLONEL

90 istic radicals like

Francisco Madero, proto-fascist

men

of violence

like

Victoriano Huerta, parliamentarians, bankers, foreign concessionhunters, and the eternal lawyers. But the

not chess. Mexico was not European,

still

game they were playing was less North American. Under

the crust of imitation politics, imitation law and imitation business there lived the Mexican people, in their authentic suffering.

the time the peons were

fatalistic,

beyond the boundary stones of their the word.

Then suddenly, under

noble

stoically

they caught

Villa,

boss's hacienda. Long-suffering

fire,

and

is

their farouche, bewhiskered leaders,

Emiliano Zapata or cunning and savage

like

Most of

unaware of anvthing that happened

their tiny armies, in

were mounted on burros, armed with stolen

like

Pancho

which even the generals rifles

and the machetes

they had used to cut cane, set the dusty plains alight

like a

match

in a

strawstack.

So with

was

Porfirio Diaz's successor, the dictator Huerta,

his

enemies

in every quarter

of the land:

in the

left

to cope

south Zapata,

in

the north Pancho Villa, in the northeast Venustiano Carranza and in the northwest Alvaro Obregon. deserts

of Sonora,

men

From

the jungles of Yucatan to the

fought, burned and killed, and their leaders

bargained, looted, crossed over and double-crossed.

The Rio Grande,

across

which those

few weeks before Henry Stimson

the United States shares with a Third like

Stimson, born in the

have been

more

a

had trespassed

a

marks the only frontier

World country. To an American

nineteenth century, Mexico could hardly

exotic or distasteful place; a land of dirt, poverty,

Roman

violence and

late

stray bullets

visited in 1911,

Catholicism, a land unblessed by

thrift, progress,

Puritan morals, democratic institutions or what William James called

the religion of healthy-mindedness.

Yet

it

was never

keep entirely

clear

likely that the

United States would be able to

of so chaotic an upheaval on her southern border.

For one thing, American business had become heavily involved in Mexican investments and especially in Mexican oil. Petroleum production

boomed

from 10,000

9200 million

at

an exponential rate

barrels a year in 1901 to

barrels

by

13

in the first fifth

million barrels in

of the century, 1911

and almost

1921.

In 1914, in characteristically moralistic fashion,

Woodrow

helped to inflame the revolution south of the border.

Wilson

The United

had imposed an arms embargo on Mexico. Wilson lifted it, and thereby left Huerta naked to his enemies. That same spring Wilson

States

1

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa landed Marines at Tampico, and then

he sent the U.S.

when a

fleet

to Vera Cruz.

the fierce Pancho Villa invaded

when two of them were

World War

I,

arrested,

Two years later, in March [916, New Mexico, the President sent

lumbering column under General John

national hero in

9

J.

Pershing, soon to be the

him back

to chase

across the border.

There was nothing unprecedented or surprising about such punitive expeditions or operations to

show

the

flag.

Between

1898

and

1920, U.S. Marines or soldiers entered the territory of Caribbean and

Central American states

of

1898

on twenty

separate occasions.* After the

war

with Spain, Cuba had been occupied for four years, then gov-

erned under the Piatt

Amendment by

a species

of "indirect rule" of

the kind the British used to control princely states in India. This doc-

ument, which the Americans

Cuban

insisted

should be actually incorporated

power of the Cuban government to contract treaties or to borrow money, promised naval stations on Cuban soil to the United States, and contained a clause that baldly in the

constitution, limited the

"Cuba

proclaimed,

consents that the United States

right to intervene for the preservation

may

exercise the

of Cuban independence, the

maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property

and individual

liberty." t

On

different occasions in the

of the twentieth century, U.S. forces varying periods in Haiti, Santo

also

first

quarter

landed and remained for

Domingo, Panama, Honduras, and

Nicaragua.

While Mexico was undergoing up, in

fact,

a radical

upheaval from the bottom

the United States was both becoming

more

active in the

Caribbean and Central America, and also staking bolder theoretical

Under Theodore Roosevelt the United States built the Panama Canal, appropriated a strip of land on either side of the waterway and claims.

asserted virtually sovereign rights there. Roosevelt justified this practice

Monroe DocMonroe Doctrine,

with a theory called the "Roosevelt corollary to the

The argument went like this: Under the European powers were to be excluded from the Western Hemisphere. trine."

Unfortunately Central and South American governments were only

too

likely to

behave in such ways that European powers had money

*Capt. Harry A. Ellsworth, One Hundred Eighty Landings of U.S. Marines, 1800-1934, 2 vols., mimeograph, Library of the U.S. Dept. of the Navy. tThe Piatt Amendment, probably written by Elihu Root, was introduced by Senator Thomas C. Piatt of New York, and was enacted by Congress February 27 and March 1, 1899. A text is printed in Henry F. Guggenheim, The United States and Cuba, p. 58.

THE COLONEL

92 claims against them.

The Europeans could

by seizing

But only the United

territory.

territory in the

Western Hemisphere.

It

vindicate these claims only

was allowed to

States

followed that, as

seize

TRput

it

to

the Senate, "the United States then becomes a party in interest."

Because the

Monroe

ers to collect

that

followed

it

Doctrine, in other words, forbade European pow-

debts or secure justice in the region, Roosevelt believed as a logical corollary,

or obvious consequence, that the

United States was entitled to intervene wherever and whenever

it felt

intervention was desirable.

did so

It

interference

many

on

by

a

various grounds. At first, one reason was to forestall European power, which might be either Britain, Ger-

or even France. As

late as 1916,

Domingo

to be sent to Santo

it

was argued that Marines had

for fear that otherwise

European power might take advantage of chaos World War, there was little fear of that. Sometimes the Marines went in to protect and other foreign were happy to

though the British

nationals. (After 1918

let

British,

Washington perform

some meddling

there. After the First

the lives of American

most European governments this service

on

their behalf,

with colonies throughout the Caribbean and with

Honduras and various trading

interests elsewhere

on the main-

land of Central America, sometimes liked to send a warship of their

own

Sometimes they were there to protect local mines, coffee, banana and sugar plantations and other

for old times' sake.)

property, such as businesses.

Sometimes

the government

it

was

a

question of protecting loans made to

or the collection of the customs dues

And

loans were secured.

then the Panama Canal

itself

on which the became an ad-

The point was powerfully urged— by Stimson when he was Secretary of War, among others— that it was imperative to prevent the canal's falling into hostile hands. Not ditional

until

argument

much

strategic

later

right

for U.S. intervention.

was

it

suggested that the United States had a general,

to control

what happened

in

its

Central American

"backyard," though some such assumption could well be inferred from the

way Washington

behaved

actually

in the region.

In this whole changing, dangerous world of Latin nationalism and rebellion

and of growing Yanqui economic and

Henry Stimson took no Yet very

this

is

part.

strange. For

men who had

military assertiveness,

Stimson was an intimate associate of the

taken the lead in the

new American

the Caribbean. His admired friend General Leonard

imperialism in

Wood

had been

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

Cuba

the American proconsul in

after the

93

Spanish-American War. The

Amendment was largely written by his partner and role model Elihu Root. And the hero of the Cuban expedition, the man who Piatt

boasted, "J took the Canal

Zone and

let

Congress debate,' the author '

of the corollary in whose name the Marines were dispatched hither and

was the man Stimson idolized before

thither,

Theodore

others,

all

Roosevelt.

The

explanation,

no doubt, was simple; Stimson was otherwise

preoccupied. Be that as

may,

it

it

was not

came

Latin American brief, so to speak,

been more remote,

in every sense

until 1926 that the very

his

way.

first

could hardly have

It

of the word. But the

client, this

time, was the President of the United States.

From

when he

1913,

left

the

War Department,

mentions Latin American

scarcely

affairs in his

until 1926

Stimson

and was

certainly

diary

never involved there in any public or private capacity.

From

New

with

1913 until 1917,

York

he was busy with the private practice of law,

and with the campaign

state politics,

paredness. After his eighteen

turned to the law, though

months

now

in the

with

less

army

for military pre-

in France,

he

re-

enthusiasm, his partners

noticed.

A,.lthough

it

was well over

a

decade— what with war,

public office— since Stimson had practiced law,

it

to re-establish his reputation and his practice.

did not take

He

Cement Manufacturers

and

him long

was retained,

quick succession, in three important actions.* In the sented the

politics

first,

in

he repre-

Protective Association, which was

prosecuted by the government under the Sherman Act. The cementmakers, said the government, used their association as a "gigantic

scheme"

for concerting action.

Not

so,

argued Stimson. They were

the victims of the public tendency, in a time of inflation, to look

around

for scapegoats. After his usual meticulous preparation, he

came

armed with elaborate charts showing the industry's producand pricing. His arguments were good enough to overcome the presumptions raised by the cement industry's curious habit of always allowing Lehigh Cement to announce price changes and

into court

tion, finance

then gradually *See

On

vol. vi,

falling in

behind

it.

The

Active Service, pp. 107-10; Morison, Turmoil

though these

are unusually

skimpy on

jury split seven to five in his and

this period.

Tradition, pp. 253-66;

HLS,

Diaries,

THECOLONEL

94

A

favor.

and

was

in turn,

on

year later,

civil suit,

same record, the government brought

this

a

judge ordered the association dissolved. (That order,

a

overthrown by the Supreme Court

finally

in 1925.)

become involved in the celebrated Emily Southmayd was a wealthy old ladv who in

Before then, Stimson had

Southmayd will case. 1911 made a will leaving $150,000 In

when

1915,

nephews and

nieces.

her brother died, leaving $900,000 to be divided

among

them, Miss Southmayd made

ews and

nieces, to

which

her executor, Allen

new

Evarts.

this

second

tary capacity"

will

without bequests to her neph-

will

in 1919 she

the age of ninety-three,

1921 at

puted

W.

a

to each of several

added

When

a codicil leaving

some of the

on the grounds

nieces

that she was

and

holds, as Stimson established in a preliminary clarity

of mind

nephew

a

in

dis-

"not of testamen-

and that she was unduly influenced by

vided a person demonstrates

$30,000 to

Miss Southmayd herself died

Evarts.

memorandum,

The law that pro-

in relation to the nature

of the act of bequest, the amount and character of the property to be bequeathed, and the identity of the potential

of eccentricity tics

in

other respects

may

beneficiaries,

no amount

invalidate the will. Stimson's tac-

were to admit, indeed bring copious evidence to prove Miss South-

mayd's

eccentricity.

She disliked the telephone and central heating. cats.

She burned her clothes and personal

wash

dollar

She feared dogs and even possessions,

and

liked to

bills.

understood her investments and business letters to

her lawyer about

how

Very

affairs,

well.

But she also

and wrote

intelligent

she wanted them managed and

how

she planned to dispose of her assets after her death. With remarkable

single-mindedness, having prepared that position, Stimson stuck to

He

it.

did not even bother to listen to his opponent's closing speech, for

fear

it

might tempt him to depart from

of the effectiveness of Stimson's method persistence.

He

gradually built

up

his plan; as

and he won.

Much

an advocate came from

in the jury's

mind

his

that his version

of the truth could be trusted.

The

third major case was very different; in a way,

it

reverted to

the sort of work Stimson had done for the cement-makers, except that

now

were bituminous coal operators. There had been national shortages of coal, caused in part by bitter strikes in 1919 and 1922. President Harding had set up a United States Coal Commission, and his clients

Stimson's brief was to act as counsel for the coal industry and to prepare a report for submission to the commission. Stimson accepted in

December

1922

on the understanding

that his clients

wanted

tc

a

con-

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa structive solution for all." In the

voluminous

9

briefs

5

he submitted to

the commission he argued that the bituminous coal industry would be stable

and prosperous were

it

not for "abnormal conditions and

arti-

obstructions": the war, government interference, and above

ficial

Mine Workers. Stimson

the United terms: as

... by

described the

UMW

all

in strong

"an arrogant minority— challenging the American Republic

its

attempt to fasten an irresponsible

class

supergovernment

upon American political institutions." He chose to focus on Herrin, Illinois, a town where strikebreakers hired by the South Illinois Coal Company had been murdered by gunmen. The Coal Commis-

UMW

sion did not wholly accept Stimson's argument, finding that the Herrin

massacre was caused by a climate in the industry for which Stimson's

Stimson was outraged by what he saw

clients

were

as the

undemocratic violence of the union, and

largely responsible.

standard applied by "self-proclaimed

also

'liberals'"

by the double

who

were quick

enough to complain of force by the owners. But he seems to have felt that he had gone a little too far, to judge from a letter to his old friend George Wharton Pepper, in which he admitted that his friends might

become "a hard-boiled old reactionary," and defended himself by saying that he had to make a lot of the Herrin massacre so as to keep his clients united, so that he could get them to accept think he had

"progressive and constructive" policies.*

The

truth was that, although Stimson was not altogether en-

chanted with the practice of the law, and certainly liked to think that his cases related to public policy,

he wanted to win them. His deter-

mination, as well as his perspicacity in thinking through his courtroom strategy

and

his passion for preparing his cases,

leading

trial

lawyers in

New

York within

less

made him one of the than

five years

of

his

return to practice.

His practice brought him in a large income: on average, about $50,000 in the 1920s, whereas he had made some $20,000 a year before the war. (Winthrop, Stimson was, consciously, a gentlemanly firm

where the partners did not work long hours and never interrupted their

weekend

sports

partners earned

*Lcttcr to George

A

and

many

At certain other Wall Street firms more money.) Now Henry Stimson be-

diversions.

times

Wharton Pepper, August

2, 1923,

quoted

in

Morison, Turmoil and Tradition.

eoncise version of the Coal Commission's five-volume report

Commission Found, Baltimore,

1925.

Lawlessness, contains a fair-minded

Paul

M. Angle,

is

contained in

Bloody Williamson:

A

What

the Coal

Chapter in American

account of the Herrin disturbances and their causes.

THE COLONEL

96 came

for the

time, in his

first

own

estimation, a rich man. This was

the result not only of his success at the bar, but of the benevolent

operation of the laws of capital and

compound

interest. In the 1890s a

wealthy patient of Dr. Stimson 's, instead of paying his the equivalent

amount of money

doctor, treating

it

as capital

and therefore untouchable,

and Stimson's other

until he died in 1917. It,

Stimson's cousin, Alfred L. Loomis,

become

One

a partner in a firm

fee,

had paid

into a bank account in his name.

capital,

who had

left

left it intact

was managed by the law firm to

of stockbrokers, Bonbright and Companv.

reminded of the description given by Winston Churchill,

is

end of My Early

of

Life,

The

how

at the

he handed over £10,000 he had earned

by an American lecture tour to Sir Ernest Cassel with a telegram reading, " 'Feed my flock.' He fed the sheep with great prudence. They did not multiply

but they fattened

fast,

and none of them good shepherd.

steadily,

ever died." Alfred L. Loomis, too, was a

fifties. He rode regularly, and own ground at Highhold and in South Carolina, where he was a member of the Yeaman's Hall Club at St. Stephen's. On a brief vacation there in 1931 he wrote in his diary, "Not

In the 1920s Stimson was in his

both over

hunted

birds,

a thing

had changed

his

in the five years since

was here

I

last.

The same

old Negro servants were there ready to comfort you and make you

comfortable."*

a rather

new

make himself comfortable, not Mabel and he moved from cramped apartment on Lexington Avenue to a brownstone on

Stimson used in the pursuit

of

his

affluence to

stylish social ostentation.

East Thirty-sixth Street. Both there and at Highhold, decor and diet

were comfortable rather than elegant. The drawing room

was decorated with family with bound

sets

of the

portraits in paint

classics,

opened,

it

and

in

at

Highhold

photographs, and

was suspected, more often

by Mabel than by her husband. "At dinner there were things like clear soup, roasts of beef and lamb, jellies and, often enough, ice cream and chocolate cake. At tea there were cinnamon toast and cakes.

been

The people who cooked and in the

cratic, host,

house for

years,

little

frosted

served these meals had, ordinarily,

"t Stimson was

a hospitable,

but auto-

capable of shaming even Felix Frankfurter onto a horse.

was the annual Highhold Games, when the neighbors came over to celebrate Thanksgiving. Squire Stimson would inaugurate

One of his *

Diary,

joys

December

30, 1931.

tMorison, Turmoil and Tradition,

p. 195-

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

97

A

the proceedings by firing off his double-barreled shotgun.

newspaper reported

how

Brooklyn

the festival went in 1910; the formula did not

change until the second war: There was

a barrel

of new sweet cider on tap; there were any

much too good to use for campaign purposes, and any quantity of soda water, ginger pop, etc., for the ladies and little ones. There were sandwiches and cream cake, with cream from the Stimson dairy, and other kinds of cake and fruit quantity of cigars

abundance.

in

The

sports began at

ing, riding across

11

a.m. and consisted of clay pigeon shoot-

country

after the anise bag, foot races,

jumping

contests and other sports, with suitable prizes to the winners.

The

straight-a-way race, in which the rider after going over the

course had to dismount, put on a night shirt and open an umbrella, was the laugh producer of the day.

One of

.

.

.

the most interested of the spectators was Col. Theo-

dore Roosevelt,

who came on

foot from Oyster Bay,

.

.

.

wear-

ing a broad-brimmed hat, leggings and walking clothes which

showed much

usage.

.

.

.

This annual fete at the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Stimson has

endeared them greatly in the hearts of their neighbors. They look forward to

this

event just as eagerly

as

do children

to their

Christmas tree.*

Much

as

they entertained, and enjoyed entertaining, Mabel and

Henry Stimson were probably happiest together pottering around

their

property, looking at the trees, the flower garden or the poultry, riding

out together, or reading aloud to each other.

and she made sure that he in their

but often he was alone with her,

said that

In 1896 Stimson had done

member of

the Alpine Club of

and Mabel occasionally 1930s,

all

was "an open

some adventurous rock-climbing

Switzerland which led to him being made, orary

hated to be alone,

what they wanted most of study with both doors locked."

and one friend fire

rarely was;

He

visited their

many

years later, an

London; and

until the

in

hon-

war he

beloved West. In the 1920s and

with the Stimsons' advancing age, their vacations became more

Sometimes they would go south to the Carolinas, sometimes north to the Maritime Provinces of Canada, in which case, if they

stately.

*Brooklvn Times,

November

25, 1910.

THE COLONEL

98

would follow on land. More often they young relatives in staterooms on carerullv

traveled by sea, the Cadillac

went

taking several

east,

chosen

and renting shooting lodges

liners

from the

in the

Highlands of Scotland

of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie or the Duke of Sutherland

likes

only after meticulously checking the floor plans and the heating rangements. But by that time Henry Stimson,

ar-

lawyer with offices

trial

New

York City, had been transformed into Colonel Stimson, statesman and public servant. The transformation began in

in Liberty Street,

one of the

dustiest corners of the planet.

L

he story of the Tacna-Arica dispute sounds

of Voltaire's Candide, 1879 the republics fight

a parable

of

human

something out

stubbornness and

of Chile and Peru were

what was rather grandiosely known

like

as the

folly.

misguided

sufficiently

War of the

In

as to

Pacific

over

the dusty towns and provinces of Tacna and Arica, between the Andes

and the ocean country.

The

in the far

north of the one, the

treaty that

ended the

south of the other

far

conflict provided that

Tacna and

Arica should be governed by Chile for ten years and that their future a plebiscite. The trouble was that the two on the terms in which the plebiscite should of the two provinces. Negotiations broke down

should then be decided by countries could not agree

be put to the voters five

times in the twenty-one years between 1893 an d

weary a

parties

I

9 I 3- In 1922 the

turned to President Harding an an arbitrator, and

commission under General Pershing

sive Secretaries

of

actually visited the area. Succes-

Evans Hughes and Frank Kellogg,

State, Charles

took up the tangled thread, and President Hoover ever glory was to be

won from

in 1925

this ancient quarrel

finally

won

what-

when Tacna went

to Peru and Arica, not to Chile, but to Bolivia. In 1926, Stimson was

asked to undertake an advisory brief for the State Department on the

mediation process.*

Tacna-Arica was important

was that the work he did on as

he put

plebiscites

it is

bluntly

not

much

a fruitful

it

in

left

Stimson's

him with

one

in

Active Service, p. no.

two

reasons.

One

conviction that—

most Latin American countries '

outside agency, meaning the United States,

tO«

for

later— "the notion of honest elections and

unless those plebiscites and elections are

*Scc Foreign Relations of the United

life

a lifelong

States,

1926, vol.

i,

'impartially t

And

pp. 260-530.

1 '

11

guided by an

the second was that

'

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa dusty and

this

suc-

forward to retirement, virtually

and absolutely

his first responsibility in international affairs

as a

when many

dispute offered him, at an age

futile

cessful corporation lawyers are looking

opportunity

99

his first

diplomat. Within two years, he was to be Secretary

of State.

The second break was not long Stimson had

just returned to his office in

trip to Philadelphia

when he

On March

coming.

in

New

York from

received a telephone

31,

1927,

a business

from Colonel

call

Robert E. Olds, Assistant Secretary of State in charge of Latin American Affairs, asking whether he would undertake "a

important and emergent nature involving a

Stimson asked Olds whether

No,

it

is

Nicaragua.

He

was

it

saw Olds and Secretary Kellogg

me

"I assume you want

down

told, in effect,

to Washington,

morning, and lunched with

in the

to be your eyes and ears," Stimson said

"I want you to go somewhat further.

said Coolidge.

find a chance to straighten the matter out,

The next day Stimson in a

He

and was

train

end of the meal.

"No," you

mission of an

White House.*

President Coolidge at the

at the

political

took the night

new

of about one month.'

trip

He

week.

spent

told the

I

White House he was

lawyerlike, in furiously reading

it,

free to leave

up the

devoured the State Department's papers on Nicaragua.

to anyone

who

could be found

is,

the substantial

He

brief.

talked

with special knowledge,

at short notice

"mahogany American-owned lumber interests on

from Elihu Root to Douglas Allen, the lobbyist people," that

If

want you to do so."

for the

the Atlantic coast of the country. Root suggested, as a "snap shot

suggestion," inviting Mexico to supervise the next Nicaraguan election jointly with the U.S.

Out of the

question, said Kellogg the next

morning.

On

April 9, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson

Brooklyn on board the

S.S.

left for

Aconcagvm. The

Central America from

first

two days out were

"cold and raw," but the weather improved and so did morale when

on

April

15,

after

lunching with a party of American

officials in

Canal Zone, the Stimsons transferred to a 7,500-ton navy light the Trenton, for the run

up the

Pacific coast

the

cruiser,

of Central America. Their

quarters were "comfortable," and the table "delicious," he noted; *Stimon's

first

very

full

and

of this lunch with Coolidge,

account

in

American

lively is

account of

contained

Policy in Nicaragua,

his

month

in

in Diaries, vol. vii.

New

York,

1927.

Nicaragua, starting with his account

He

subsequently published another

THE COLONEL

IOO

the voyage smooth and the moonlight memorable. Colonel Stimson was never unhappy to be back inside the certainties of naval and military order.

On

April

17

made Corinto,

Trenton

the chief Pacific coast

port of Nicaragua, and the Stimsons went bv special train to the capital,

Managua. They traveled with

guard of Marines, and U.S. blue-

a

jackets could be seen at intervals guarding the track, with posts at

bridges and the principal stations. These were not merely the honors due to an American proconsul. Nicaragua was in the grip of civil war.

I

.f

Mexico sometimes seems, even to Mexicans,

a

comic-opera

country, Nicaragua at the beginning of the twentieth century was even

harder to take seriously— for anyone

About

who was

not Nicaraguan, that

the same size as Michigan, Wisconsin or Georgia,

than 650,000 people in the 1920s, more than half of

and fewer than 100,000 of

erate

Spanish) descent.

edge on the

The

4

of the

is

cities

conquistodores

'Mosquito," coast

were

were of European

illit-

(that its

is,

short

longer curve on the white sand beaches of the

Caribbean; the west coast

arrival

had fewer

it

whom

national territory spreads like a fan,

Pacific, the

of Spain with ancient

whom

is.*

.

more whose

fertile

and was

a

wealthy province

origins date back even before the

Columbus himself explored

as early as 1502.

isthmus were so bad that even

the eastern, or

But communications across the

in the early twentieth century the

Mos-

quito Coast, formerly under British protection, was a remote forest fringe, sparsely settled

descent,

by Mosquito Indians and blacks of West Indian

many of whom spoke

mainly occupied

in cutting

English until recently, and

who

timber and exporting timber and

were

fish

to

the United States. In the north, against the border with Honduras, the forested tain

hills

of the interior rose to form

a

rough

barrier

and jungle, long the refuge of bandits. In the western coastal plain and around the great

ragua and

Managua and below

of moun-

lakes

of Nica-

the mountain fringe around Matagalpa,

Spanish, American and British planters

Most Nicaraguans were of Indian

owned coffee farms, or fincas. owned no land, and worked

descent,

for the background to the Stimson mission and the subseof Nicaragua were: Rodolfo Cerdas, La Hoz y el Machete; Harold N. Denny, Dollars for Bullets; Richard Millett, The Guardians of the Dynasty; Dana G. Munro, The United States and the Caribbean Area; Gregorio Selser, Sandino; Bryce Wood, The Making of the

*Among quent

the sources

I

found useful

political history

Good Neighbor

Policy.

See also Foreign Relations of the United

States, 1927, vol.

iii.

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa for these foreign

owners or

In this microcosm,

i

boiled as in a test tube.

for the descendants of Spanish landlords.

It

might seem

infinitely

remote to most North

geography, Nicaragua could not be forgotten entirely,

had an

i

the political passions of the twentieth century

all

Americans, but well-informed Americans knew that because of

icans

o

interest in

communicating between

as

long

as

its

Amerand

their Atlantic

Pacific coasts.

One of Stimson's rare comments on Latin American affairs when War concerned the Panama Canal: The canal, he

he was Secretary of

pointed out, shortened the maritime distance between the east and

west coasts of the United States from 13,000 miles to 5,000 miles; the three

months saved

make

if a

foreign fleet had to

go round Cape Horn could

the difference between victory and disaster. "It

portance to this country not only that the canal fleet in case

of need, but that

it

shall

shall

is

of

im-

vital

be open to our

be closed to the

fleet

of our

enemy."*

Long

before the canal was built, North Americans had been mak-

ing similar calculations. In 1849, the year of the great California Gold

Rush, with would-be miners dying of even reduced to cannibalism nelius Vanderbilt

had

like the

his eye

thirst in the

Donner

on an isthmian

Party,

Nevada

desert or

Commodore

canal.

By

far

Cor-

the easiest

route lay across Nicaragua; Vanderbilt obtained a charter for the Accessory Transit

Company, which would

use stagecoaches, lake and river

steamers to cover the route. But the plan ran afoul of British interests established

on the Mosquito Coast, and

in 1850 the

Clayton-Bulwer

Treaty ordained that any future railway or canal across Nicaragua should

be under joint United States-British control. The Nicaraguan govern-

ment was not

consulted.

For decades

after the

United Provinces of Central America,

cluding Nicaragua, achieved their independence from Spain in

in-

1821,

"frank admiration" had been the predominant attitude of the Creole elites

toward the United

States. In Nicaragua, the elite

were

politically

divided between the Conservative and Liberal parties. While, as the

names

suggest, the Conservatives were the party of the

many

big landowners,

tuals

and the

Church and of

Liberals attracted anticlerical intellec-

and those sympathetic to nineteenth-century European

ideas, the party division also

*Denny,

Dollars for Bullets, p.

16.

had

a strong geographical logic.

liberal

Each had

THE COLONEL

102 its

base in one of the

two

chief Spanish towns of the provinces that

became Nicaragua: the Conservatives There

are those

who

in

Granada, the Liberals

say that the rivalry

back even before the Spanish conquest.

enough to cause the choice of the less nagua as a compromise capital in 1857. In

1855

between the two was

It

in

and

historic

Leon.

in

goes

cities

anv case strong

less attractive

who was

the Californian "filibuster" William Walker,

Ma-

allied

with both the Vanderbilt and Morgan interests, was invited to Nicaragua by the Liberals, routed the Conservatives, and became

first

the

Master, then formally president of the countrv, recognized as such bv

U.S. President Franklin Pierce. Walker's precise motives are obscure,

but

it

would seem

that he

dreamed of creating

the Caribbean allied to the American South. his

a great slave

It is

empire

probable that

in

among

some of the promoters and ideologues of nullifiand secession. However that may be, he was overthrown in 1857

supporters were

cation

and eventually executed

in i860.

Walker's association with the Liberal party discredited ragua for a generation. Until 1893 a

more or

less

Conservative presidents followed one another revolt

by

a dissident

it

in Nica-

orderly succession of

in office. In that year a

Conservative gave the Liberals their chance, and

the Liberal Jose Santos Zelaya became President.

Zelaya was a tough, ruthless dictator, and he built up the Nica-

raguan army to the point where he was not

likely to

be overthrown

unless with the help of the United States. In the beginning, his rela-

tionship with Washington was good. This soon changed, however,

with the U.S. decision to build the canal through Panama rather than Nicaragua, where the Nicaraguans had always assumed

would have

it

to be. Zelaya canceled several American concessions and turned from

Wall Street to

When

a

London

revolution against his regime

openly supported the leaders, fields,

syndicate for his next loan.

rebels.

The

real

came

United States

in 1909, the

organizers were the Conservative

but the nominal chief was General Estrada, governor of Blue-

on the Mosquito Coast. Estrada was defeated by

local

ment forces and had to take protection under Marine guns

When

govern-

at Blueficlds.

Zelaya sent troops against him, Estrada hired two American

one Frenchman) to blow up the troopships on the San Zelaya imprisoned the Frenchman but executed the two

citizens (and

Juan River. Americans.

That gave the Taft administration the opportunity

it

wanted. In

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

i

highly undiplomatic terms Secretary of State Philander Chase

came out

"The government of

against Zelaya.

Knox

the United States

convinced, " his note to the Nicaraguan government

o3

is

"that the

said,

revolution represents the ideals and the will of a majority of the Nic-

araguan people more faithfully than does the Government of Presi-

dent Zelaya." President Tart and Secretary Knox, Times" s

special

correspondent Harold Denny

later

as

put

The New York cc

it,

set

about

generally to run the country."

By the beginning of 1912, the moderate Conservative Adolfo Diaz, whom Washington supported, was President; negotiations were pro-

new loan from the New York bankers Brown Brothers and W. Seligman*; and the United States was pressing for first

ceeding for a

and

J.

the police, and then the army, to be put under American officers. Liberal risings outside the capital were successful. President Diaz

was compelled to

call for

American help, and

in

August

1912 the

U.S.

at Corinto. The American force soon built up to 2,700 men, commanded by Marine Colonel Joseph Pendleton. At the Battle of Coyotepe, near Managua, the Marines easily routed the Liberal

Marines landed

troops, and the Liberal

commander, General Zeledon, was

killed.

Gradually the Marines withdrew, leaving only a hundred-man

c

'lega-

tion guard" behind them, symbolic affirmation of American military

power

Nicaragua and American willingness to use

in

kept the minority Conservative party in power until

moval

in that year

not surprisingly acted

as

it.

presence

Its

1925,

and

its re-

an invitation to the Liberals

to bid for power.

Between

1912

and

1925

American

Nicaragua's vulnerable economy.

were almost

dustries

all

in the

interests tightened their grip

The main

on

cash crops and export in-

hands of American,

British or

German

entrepreneurs, with the former out in front in terms of numbers and size

of investments. The legendary United Fruit Company, "the Oc-

topus," had few investments in Nicaragua. But another American firm, Standard Fruit, together with

its

wholly owned subsidiary the Brag-

man's Bluff Lumber Company, was worth $8 million

Cuyamel Fruit in Bluefields was American-owned, and so was the La Luz y Los Angeles gold mine. With the exception of the loan Zelaya had nego*Both banks transferred by the

fall

in

their interests to the Mercantile

collapsed, and Guaranty Trust took the place

Seligman

in

Bank of the Americas. In

many of its of Brown Brothers

sugar prices, which acted as security for

financing the Nicaraguan government.

in 1929.

1924,

caught

loans, the Mercantile as partners

with

J.

Bank

and W.

THE COLONEL

104 tiated in

London, Nicaragua's public finance was wholly in American York bankers had first charge on the customs revenue and

New

hands.

half of the government's income,

and an American

was Collec-

The National Bank of Nicaragua was incorporated

tor of Customs.

Connecticut, and

its

in

manager, L. G. Rosenthal, was an American and

an ex-employee of Guaranty Trust. The

owned by

citizen

the National Bank, was

Pacific Railroad

managed by the

of Nicaragua,

Com-

G. White

J.

pany of New York City.

how American imperialism worked in the early twentiAs President Tart explained with superb candor, it was a aimed at "substituting dollars for bullets." Unfortunatelv,

That was eth century.

system that it

did not altogether eliminate bullets.

Adolfo Diaz, the Conservative leader

in the

coup of

was

1912,

a

mild-mannered gentleman whose benevolence beamed out from under his straw

skimmer and from behind

his

so pro-American that he not only did

wire-rimmed

Woodrow

dent

Wilson

"The

present government with which

as a

should be extended to Nica-

Even Elihu Root thought that was

ragua.

was

actually cabled Presi-

money and proposing

in 1914 asking for

Amendment

He

he could to push for a new

all

American loan to refund the London one, but quid pro quo that the Piatt

glasses.

we

He

steep. are

making

pointed out that this treaty

was

[it

end defeated in the U.S. Senate] is virtually maintained in office by the presence of U.S. Marines."* For Root, dollar diplomacy might

in the

be acceptable; the conflict of interest involved

in

Diaz asking to be

paid to invite U.S. domination of the country of which he was Presi-

dent was too much.

Behind Adolfo Diaz

in the Conservative ranks there

stood the

of Emiliano Chamorro. In 1924 Chamorro lost the election to the Liberals, led by Juan Bautista Sacasa, head of one of Nicaragua's oldest grandee families. Chamorro claimed he had been

more

military figure

cheated.

Still,

in

August

1925 the

Marines

finally

placed by a "constabulary" trained by U.S.

withdrew, to be

officers. In their

re-

absence

peace in Nicaragua lasted just twenty-five days, ending in the finest opera buffa

manner.

A

Conservative editor, waving two large

pistols,

gatecrashed a champagne reception at Managua's International Club.

While timid members of Managua's tables,

Conservative

elite

gunmen frog-marched

cowered under the

Liberals to the door.

scene in contemporary descriptions has a certain •

Harold N. Denny, Dollars for

to Nicaragua at the time.

Bullets, p. 130.

billiard

Denny was The New

Marx Brothers

The qual-

York Times\ correspondent

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa ity— one can imagine the a

gunmen

rebuke from Margaret

enough

at the time.

i

o5

slinking away, utterly discomfited by

Dumont— but

must have been frightening

it

Emiliano Chamorro was behind

this

comic-opera

scene too. As a result of it, he became Commander-in-Chief, virtually

power to be would not get.

dictator. But, in order for his

And

recognition.

that he

secure, he

needed American

The American minister, Charles Eberhardt, left Managua for Washington to avoid the hottest months of the summer of 1926. He left

the legation in the hands of a charge

who was

described by Harold

than a year

He

York.

servative

later

as a

d'affaires,

J.

sinister political views;

American Mercury and Fascism,

not

and W. Seligman

conspiracy to

commit

book

in 1936 published a

as a

warning but

sedition.)

At

11

(Less

in

New

he wrote for the ultracon-

as a

Dennis was to be indicted with other American

ers for

Lawrence Dennis,

"hard, youngish man.

he was to go to work for

had rather

Coming American still,

Denny

called

The

welcome. Later

fascist

sympathiz-

that point, Dennis

seemed

no more than a brusquely dedicated supporter of constitutionalism. He would regularly call up General Chamorro and say, "Good morn-

now how

ing, General,

about that resignation of yours?" After the

explosion at the other end of the line subsided he would say, "But

you know In

do it eventually. Better do it now!"* new civil war broke out. This time it was the Liberals Bluefields; two American adventurers and one German

you'll have to

May

a

who

landed

were

killed fighting for the Conservatives.

lots,

working

at

Two

month, bombed the

Liberal positions in

freelance

American

pi-

wage of $500 a Managua. So little do things

for the Conservative cause

and

for a

change in Nicaragua! In October 1926, in the continued absence of Minister Eberhardt,

Dennis called

a conference

on board

the U.S. cruiser Denver at Corinto

and proceeded to make Adolfo Diaz President of Nicaragua.

On No-

vember 14 he was inaugurated. (One of his first acts was to send Emiliano Chamorro off as ambassador to Britain, France, Spain and Italy all at once!) So now Nicaragua had two Presidents: the Liberal, Juan Bautista Sacasa, duly elected and then pushed aside by Chamorro; and Adolfo Diaz, imposed in place of Chamorro by the U.S. legation. Worse, the Conservative incumbent was backed by the United States, the Liberal by Mexico. Sacasa, in a long career in Nicaraguan politics never notable for

* Denny, op. cit., p.

222.

THE COLONEL

106

personal courage, established himself at Puerto Cabezas,

sand straw-hatted soldiers

as his military protection, their

ammunition coming from Mexico. And formally recognized Sacasa

Diaz

as President.

mixed up

The

when

tangled

in the conflict

on the Mos-

Moncada and an army of some

quito Coast, with General

end of the

at the

three thou-

weapons and Mexico

year,

the United States recognized Adolfo

of Nicaragua were

affairs

between the United

now

getting

and the Mexican

States

revolution.

World War II, justly or unjustly It had no such reputation in the 1920s, least of all where Latin America was concerned. It treated Mexico, in particular, under Presidents Obregon (1920-24) and Plutarco JLhe State Department,

after

acquired a reputation for liberalism.

Elias Calles (1924-28)

in the

Mexican nation

all oil

cause of this was

Mexican Constitution of 1917 vested

and mineral

be interpreted retroactively, then oil

One major

with deep suspicion.

Article 27 of the revolutionary

oil.

all

was to

rights. If Article 27

foreign investments in Mexican

and mining, including copper, would be confiscated. The prudent

Obregon tation,

refused to

commit himself on

of interpre-

this crucial point

and the Harding administration therefore withheld recognition

of his government, demanding that Obregon affirm that United States interests

would not

ican sovereignty,

This Obregon regarded

was not

retroactive,

He

more

liked to be seen as the "heir

Mexican Congress, also in

radical

Hearst,

and

less

of Zapata."

cautious

He

December

at his instigation, declared that the oil

favored 1925 the

companies

to exchange their holdings for fifty-year concessions.

proposed agrarian

Mexico,

who

legislation that

re-

a crisis.

the retroactive interpretation of Article 27, and in

would have

an insult to Mex-

in 1923 fortunately held that

and so averted

President Calles, however, was both

than Obregon.

as

and he refused. After two years of deteriorating

Mexican Supreme Court

lationships, the

Article 27

suffer.

He

alarmed American landowners

included the newspaper magnate William Randolph

owner of some 300,000

acres in

Chihuahua. Calles

also

found

himself in a tense confrontation with the Church. Each of these com-

ponents of

his policy

meant trouble

in the

United

meetings and

money

for Calles's opponents.

papers denounced him and printed

American

Columbus held protest The Hearst newsdocuments purporting to show

Catholic organizations such as the Knights of raised

States.

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

i

o7

Mexican President had bribed American supporters, including

that the

The

industry was the most influential of

all. The Mexico (competing with the Mexican Eagle company owned by the Englishman Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray) were Sinclair and Doheny, the same two companies

four senators.

American

principal

compromised

that were

when

Teapot

in the

Dome

bribery scandal of 1924,

was shown that they had bribed Secretary of the Interior

it

Albert

oil

oil interests in

B.

Fall,

who

them

gave

government-owned

valuable

oil

properties.

The

Department was extremely responsive to all these So too was the embassy in Mexico City. Ambassador James Sheffield was a stern upholder of American interState

American and

ests,

interest groups.

times he sounded contemptuous, almost

at

marks about Mexicans. In

racist, in his re-

William H. Taft, for

a letter to his friend

example, he said that they "understand and respect only force." As for

him, he

said,

"I have

tried to

be a red-blooded American south of

the Rio Grande," and in that he certainly succeeded.*

In 1925 Secretary of State Kellogg protested the lack of protection

He

accorded to American interests in Mexico. that he

had read

added on the record

of another revolutionary movement com-

in the press

ing forward in Mexico, and that he

hoped

this

was not

of comment was of course blatant interference affairs,

and

it

was

criticized in

skeptical

in confrontation

even resort to military force,

all

mining and land companies and

kind

Mexican

most American newspapers. Indeed,

American public opinion was increasingly United States should engage

true. This

in internal

of the idea that the

with Mexico and perhaps

to protect a handful of American a

few of the wealthiest

men

in

oil,

Amer-

The Supreme Court, upholding the conviction of Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair in the winter of 1926-27 and the subsequent conica.

viction

and imprisonment of Albert B.

Fall,

reinforced this

new mood.

In August 1927, recognizing the unpopularity of the hard line on

Mexico, President Coolidge changed

Ambassador a classmate

Sheffield with

tack.

He

replaced the red-blooded

Dwight W. Morrow,

of the President's

at

a

Morgan

Amherst, t Morrow saw

partner and his task as

heading the United States and Mexico off from a dangerous confron*James

R

Kellogg,"

Sheffield, letter to in

The American

TMorrow was

W. H.

the father of the poet

famous kidnapping

(1932).

Taft,

Secretaries

March

27, 1927,

quoted

in

Robert H.

of State and Their Diplomacy, vol.

xi,

pp.

Fcrrell,

"Frank

B.

31, 32-

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, mother of the baby

taken

in

the

THE COLONEL

108 tation.

His

of greater

skillful

diplomacy marked the beginning of

sensitivity in relations

between the United

new

a

period

and

States

its

neighbors to the south and an approach which Franklin D. Roosevelt

Good Neighbor Policy. As a Wall Street banker, Morrow was known to Stimson, and they were friendly. Later, Morrow was to work with Stimson when the latter was Secretary of State. The Morrow mission was still in the future when Henry and Malater called the

bel

Stimson rode the

train

from Corinto to Managua

in the spring

of

but the ideas that led to Coolidge's change of policy toward

1927,

Mexico was very much

background to Stimson's mission

part of the

The Nicaraguan

to Nicaragua.

crisis

cannot be understood except

in the

context of American responses to the revolution in Mexico. Before American policy softened, scious that defending Sinclair

it

hardened for

a while.

Con-

and Doheny was unpopular with Amer-

ican voters, President Coolidge

and

Department had

his State

denouncing the Mexican government

started

exporter of Marxist rev-

as the

olution to Central America, a charge which, they believed, would be a

more

acceptable criticism of the neighbor to the south than that

was opposed to U.S. business

interests.

On November

17,

it

1926, Assis-

tant Secretary of State Olds briefed the Associated Press to this effect;

he told the wire-service reporter, the Mexican government

specifically,

was "seeking to a 'hostile

establish a Bolshevik authority in Nicaragua to drive

wedge' between the U.S. and the Panama Canal.'

1

*

In making this claim, Olds committed a major blunder. Senator

George Norris of Nebraska moved for an investigation into his statement and was defeated only by five votes to eight in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Others charged that Olds was trying to justify

war with Mexico over

oil.

Senator William E. Borah charged the "oil

interests" with trying to get the United States into a "shameless, ardly

little

Yet Olds was not discouraged. confidential

memo

raguan

was

crisis

whether we

American

now

On

January

shall

affairs

United

States.

Denny,

1927,

.

.

.

We

he wrote a

must decide

tolerate the interference of [Mexico]

or

insist

upon our dominant

in Central

position.

.

.

.

Un-

Central America has always understood that govern-

ments which we recognize and support *

2,

arguing that the Mexican involvement in the Nica-

a direct challenge to the

til

cow-

war with Mexico."

op. cit., p. 243.

stay in

power, while

.

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

we do not

those which

become

a test case. It

recognize and support

is

difficult to see

i

fail.

how we

o9

Nicaragua has

can afford to be

defeated.

That was blunt enough. Coolidge

which was

line,

also that

intended to follow

this

figures in the State

De-

at first

of other powerful

partment—Secretary of State Kellogg and Under Secretary Joseph Grew (later

ambassador to Japan)

On

January 10 he sent a message to Congress stating that

conditions in Nicaragua "seriously threaten American

lives

crisis

and prop-

erty" and in general interpreting developments there as a mere episode in a larger crisis vis-a-vis

to the Nicaraguan

Mexico. Noting that arms had been shipped

"revolutionists," as he called the Liberals, he

pointed out that Sacasa had used Mexico at

as a base to raise his standard

Puerto Cabezas, and that he had been promptly recognized by Mex-

ico.

"It has always been and remains the policy of the United States,"

the message concluded ominously, "to take the steps that necessary. ... In this respect

I

may be

propose to follow the path of my pre-

decessors."*

For

a

couple of weeks, Coolidge's message

set off a scare that the

administration was indeed planning war with Mexico.

The

reaction

from Congress, the churches, the newspapers, and European and Latin

American opinion was

all

but unanimous: the Republicans must put

away Teddy Roosevelt's Big

Stick,

which seemed to be wielded only

on behalf of such greedy and unappealing figures as Sinclair, Doheny and Hearst. The President and his conservative allies were taken aback by the breadth and indignation of the opposition, and decided time to back

One of

it

was

off.

more powerful opposition

the

voices

was again that of

Senator Borah, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In February he suggested that the entire committee should

aragua to see for

been it

a

itself

how

matters stood.

The

nightmare to Coolidge. Preposterous

may have been

visit

Nic-

very thought must have

as

Borah's suggestion was,

the seed of the President's decision to send the sa-

gacious and reliable Colonel Stimson.

v^o

far as

ignorance could free

ments," Stimson *Denny,

op. cit.,

said later,

pp. 250

ff.

it

"my mind

from prejudices and commit-

was

a clean slate." In other

HO

THE COLONEL

Nicaragua or indeed in Central America. Spanish.

When

way of a

toast,

(My

He

had never been in Spanish

he wrote the words out in phonetic spelling on survives: Aminos, brindo por

friends, I toast a

how

imagination boggles at

prompt,

just

this actually

bv

a scrap

una paz pronta, husta y heand generous peace.) The

came out, because we know

mispronounced the name of the country

that Stimson stubbornly

in

word of

did not speak a

he did try to say two or three sentences

of paper which nerosa.*

He

were impressive.

respects, his disqualifications

as

"Nic-a-rag-yew-a," in place of the liquid native pronunciation.

What handed

is

racist

more, Stimson was not to be

relied on to avoid heavyhumor, which must have made him sound like the most

pompous of sahibs

lecturing the natives. In a talk with the Nicaraguan

foreign minister, Dr.

Cuadro

Pasos, for example, he "said jokingly

Nicaraguans ought to play more football, baseball ctc."t Dr. Cuadro Pasos "referred to the role of the umpire," and Colonel Stimson "re-

marked jokingly that the Again

a

couple of days

manship" to

Colonel Stimson brought to Nicaragua three than those he seemed to

him

the umpire."

analogy'

of base-

[*«:]."*

This was not conventional diplomacy or even

abled

kill

he "urged the necessity of better sports-

from Granada, "giving the

a delegation

and cockfights

ball

players at times tried to

later

common

qualities

more

lack: a lawyer's trained intellect,

tact.

But

valuable

which en-

to grasp the realities and the possibilities of the situation

with remarkable speed; a

what the various

man of the

world's shrewd understanding of

parties might be prepared to

settle for;

and unmis-

takably disinterested integrity within the limits of his patriotic Ameri-

canism.

At visit,

breakfast with the minister, Eberhardt,

he suggested there were

on the

third day of his

strategically three alternatives.

The

first

was "an indefinite succession of sanguinary revolutions." That was to at all costs. The second was "what I would term barren or naked American intervention." That, too, was undesirable and to be

be avoided

avoided

if

possible.

The

desirable third alternative

was "constructive

American intervention which would endeavor to lead the country nearer to self-government." That meant many things. Certainly, as Stimson planned his campaign, it meant that the United States must * I

.

c

.

,

justa y generosa.

tHLS., Diary, April tlbid., April 19, 1927-

17, 1927.

1

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

1

supervise the Nicaraguan elections in 1928 and perhaps for

1

some time

after that.

There were to be three stages to the negotiations which Stimson

now ing

conducted.

them

Diaz.

that

First,

he had to deal with the Conservatives, reassur-

Washington would stand by

meant making them

It also

on the Americans to take their

its

recognition of Adolfo

see that they could not simply

count

but must make compromises.

side,

Second, he must see whether Sacasa and the various factions of Liberal politicians

Diaz

could be brought to accept an agreement that would leave

as President.

armies in the

field

Third, he had to agree on terms with the Liberal

and with

their chief leader, General

Getting the Conservatives on board was the Stimson,

when he met them on

their

Moncada. Even

easiest part.

ground, was surprised

how

will-

ing they were to put everything in American hands. After an expedi-

on the lake to Granada, which he found a "much higher class city than Managua," he jotted in his diary: "All Conservatives, wealthy, dreadfully frightened of Liberal success. Fairly turned on me for US intervention"— he means, demanded it— "wanted us not only to give tion

military protection but to run their finances in absolute

Were

trol.

US

con-

very frank in admitting Nicaraguan incompetence and

corruption."* In short, the Nicaraguans of 1927 anticipated

from the Philippines by way of Vietnam to parts of Latin America,

on the United life,

who

Iran,

during the next

power with

those other

elites,

not to mention other

fifty

States to protect their pleasant

rather than share their

all

years chose to count

and privileged way of

their fellow

countrymen.

After negotiating with Adolfo Diaz through the foreign minister,

Cuadro Pasos, Stimson was able to write by the fifth day, "got Diaz in writing on terms agreed with Cuadra [sic] Pasos": an immediate peace, with both sides surrendering their arms into American custody, followed by a general amnesty; Liberal participation in the Diaz Cabinet; the organization officers,

of

a

Nicaraguan constabulary under American

with in the meantime enough Marines staying in the country

and American supervision of the Nicaraguan elecand succeeding years. The same conditions were cabled Puerto Cabezas. "Then," Stimson wrote that night, "I

to keep the peace; tions in 1928

to Sacasa in felt

we had accomplished something."

*HLS,

Diary, April 23, 1927.

THE COLONEL

112

That was April

For the next few days, while he waited

22.

Sacasa's answer, Stimson,

could slack off a

little

who had been

and enjoy

Logan Feland, hero of the

who was commanding

a

battle

for

interviewing at a furious pace,

dove shoot with Marine General

of Belleau

Wood

in

World War

the Marine brigade in Nicaragua, and a

visit

I,

to

U.S. Admiral Latimer's "very attractive den in a beautiful garden on

edge of lake."

On

April 29 the delegation from Sacasa finally arrived. (Since, as

Stimson reported to the State Department, "the country

is

full

of

armed men rapidly approaching anarchy," the Liberals were sped round through the Panama Canal by the U.S. cruiser Tulsa.) Their .

.

.

temper was more amenable than Stimson expected. At ous and jovial" lunch, Stimson made

two

pleasant surprises:

one was to

a

"very

hilari-

a speech saying that there were

find that the Liberals exhibited

no

anti-American feeling, and the other was the unanimous agreement that "the root of Nicaragua's political evils lay in

government control

of elections." This was Stimson's pet theory. Since whoever was

power controlled the outcome of elections, he argued, the left:

losers

were

with no option but armed rebellion. Only outside intervention

could break the cycle of revolution and revenge. The theory was

enough observation on what had been happening

in Central

In the short term, American intervention might be the only

But Stimson that

in

for

once did not look

American intervention would

a

good

America.

way

out.

far

enough ahead. He did not grasp

in

time become part of the system.

Those who wanted reform and were denied it by the beneficiaries of American aid would sooner or later have to make the United States the target of their revolution.

A

couple of days after the pleasant lunch with the Sacasa delegates,

Colonel Stimson enjoyed likeable

young

liberal"

his first

whose

Somoza

English that,

it

a

"very frank, friendly,

attitude "impresses

than almost any other."* The Anastasio

meeting with

name of

me more

this rising Liberal

favorably

hope was

Garcia. Stimson was so impressed with his fluent

appears, he took

young Somoza with him

as his inter-

preter for a few days.

What

quickly became clear was that Sacasa's delegates wanted a

want to commit themselves to one until they knew what General Moncada had to say. Moncada was the key. It was plain,

deal but did not

"Diary, vol.

May

3,

1927.

vii, p.

99-102,

memorandum of conversation

with Anastasio Somoza, morning of

3

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

1

1

too, that he was not merely a general subordinate to the civilian authority of Dr. Sacasa, but an independent player in the political game,

and one with high ambitions of his own. Stimson, and they

met— as we

On May

3

he agreed to meet

have seen— the next day on the Tipitapa

between the Lake of Nicaragua and the Lake of Managua. Five hundred Marines lined the river, a summer trickle in its parched bed,

River,

when General Moncada a

arrived the next

morning and disappeared

dingy inn to be briefed on the preliminary negotiations.

emerged

after a quarter

into

When

he

of an hour, Sacasa's delegates faded into the

background.

Then General Moncada and Colonel Stimson sat down to talk, man to man and soldier to soldier, on the riverbank under the thorn In the background were the well-fed, spick-and-span Marines,

tree.

newly armed with the Thompson submachine gun. All around the wild soldiers of the Nicaraguan revolution sprawled in the shade: wiry,

undernourished

shown

men

in straw hats with ancient

rifles

who had

never-

They were on horseback, some backcountry Indian and mestizo rebels, some, to North American eyes at least, indistinguishable from bandit chiefs. The condition of Moncada's army can be judged from the fact that before the negotiations were over their general had successfully obtained for them theless

led

by

that they could fight with desperate courage.

mixed bag of "generals," some city-bred

a

pants, shirts, rice, flour, beans, coffee, sugar

Moncada was rines,

he

said. It

ready to allow his

men

was agreed that American

and

politicians

salt.

Mawould be interposed

to be disarmed by the forces

along the line of the Tipitapa and would collect arms from both

What Moncada could not President.

Men

had died

sides.

accept was the retention of Adolfo Diaz as for that,

Moncada

said; therefore

it

was an

of honor, and not negotiable.

issue

Stimson records laconically letter explaining the

in his diary that

he "gave Moncada a

point about Diaz so General

Moncada could

ex-

men." He makes it sound The truth was that Stimson understood that he had the ace of trumps in his hand. He also knew that because Moncada understood the point perfectly, he would not need to play it. Stimson had superior force: in pure numbers, Moncada had two or three thousand men, roughly the same strength as the Marines, but the Marines were so easy— a miracle of negoti-

to his

plain

it

ating

skill.

incomparably better armed, with heavy and lery

and even bomber

aircraft.

They were

light

machine guns,

also better trained

artil-

and better

THE COLONEL

114 led.

Moncada knew

that his

men would

pitched battle with such forces; he also his

men

knew

to accept Diaz as President and

American backers,

thev would

him

see

stand

no chance

at all in a

that if he simplv ordered

hand over

arms to

their

who was

as a traitor

selling

his

out

the revolution.

Nor would

thev have been entirelv wrong.

One of the

factors in

the situation, which Stimson did not have the background or perhaps the imaginative sympathy to understand, was that however conventional the Liberal leaders

and however scrappv the Liberal

change for the campesinos, the hungry and angry tually

generals, the

and Moncada's army were nonetheless the only hope of

Liberal party

excluded from

all

political

power bv the

who had

been

effec-

plav of partv politics in

Managua. Stimson was too discreet to mention it, but what he was offering Moncada was what that cynic wanted: his turn in the political square dance.

And

he eventually got

Moncada was inaugurated Moncada, could come

in

in,

it.

On

January

i,

1929, Jose

Maria

President of Nicaragua.

other words, needed to be threatened so that he

and he needed to

let his

know

followers

been threatened. That was the function of the

letter

that he had

which Stimson

dictated under the blackthorn tree. Tipitapa,

May

4, 1927

Dear General Moncada, Confirming our conversation of this morning, our to inform you that

I

am

I

have the hon-

authorized to say that the President

of the United States intends to accept the invitation of the Nicaraguan government to supervise the election of retention of President Diaz insisted

upon: that

a general

is

1928:

essential to that plan

that the

and

be

will

disarmament of the country

also

is

regarded as necessary for the proper and successful conduct of

such an election; and the forces of the United States

be

will

authorized to accept the custody of the arms of those willing to lav

them down, including the government, and who will not do so.

to disarm forc-

ibly those

Very

respectfully,

Henry

The "not

last

L. Stimson

sentence, Stimson subsequently explained, was added

as a threat to

Moncada's organized and

loyal troops

.

.

.

but

as

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa a

1

warning to the bandit

fringe.'

1

1

n

That was not, however, Admiral La-

timer's understanding, as he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations

Committee the following February. This tough old

officer,

known

in

the na\y as Rosie Poker Face, was asked bv Senator Swanson:

Did you understand, and did General Moncada understand from made by Mr. Stimson that if he did not acquiesce

the statement

continuance of Mr. Diaz until an election was held, force would be used to disarm him and compel him to acquiesce?

in the

Admiral Latimer: Yes. Senator Swanson: You understood Admiral Latimer: Yes.

A

week

meeting, Stimson

after their first

time with General

that

Moncada under

and so did he?

sat

down

for a

second

the thorn tree. Stimson transmitted

to the Liberal general the Diaz government's willingness to pav $10 for

weapon handed in. (The Nicaraguan treasury being empty, the money was to come from a loan of $1 million helpfully arranged by Seligman's and the Guaranty Trust.) That night Moncada and his

every

troops entered Managua, where they were treated as heroes, and so treated themselves,

Moncada and

though the wine shops were closed

his officers,

it

seems, neither handed in

as a precaution.

all

their personal

weapons nor denied themselves the warrior's traditional repose. "They set up in a hotel," one eyewitness reported, "as if they had conquered, while the Indian servant

On May

15

Stimson

in triumphal language.

ended,"

it

girls

giggled and whispered at their pistols."*

cabling the State Department

felt justified in

"The

war

civil

in Nicaragua

is

now

definitely

began. There also seemed "less danger of banditry and

guerrilla warfare

than

I

at first feared.

tents are the extremely small

.

.

.

Almost the only malcon-

group of personal

through their well-organized press bureaux

Guatemala and the United

associates in

of Sacasa

who

Mexico, Costa Rica,

States have sought to

convey an

entirely

impression of the situation, "t

false

Xt

certainly

seemed

a

remarkable feat of mediation and diplo-

macy. Stimson had been given

less

than ten days to brief himself about

*See Denny, Dollars for Bulkts, pp. 298-311.

tHLS, 1927.

Diary, vol.

vii, p.

1-9, text

ofletter sent by

HLS

to

Under

Secretary (R. E. Olds),

May

15,

THE COLONEL

116

He

Nicaragua.

then spent

less

than

a calendar

month

in the country.

Yet by masterly diplomacy, direct yet

tactful, all parties seemed to have been brought to accept American supervision of Nicaraguan democracy

for the foreseeable future.

Nor was

this

an isolated episode in American

foreign policy. Stimson's achievement, anticipating that of his friend

Dwight Morrow

in

Mexico, was to make possible

American

ican relations with the Latin

republics.

new era in AmerThe Peace of Tipi-

a

tapa, as the historian of President Franklin Roosevelt's

Policy toward Latin America put

of

start

arms

in Latin

Yet skill

America

it,

was

for

States refrained

from using

whatever reason.

look surely compels

a closer

was the

a turning point.* It

which the United

thirty years in

Good Neighbor

a

more

critical

judgment. The

with which Stimson handled the negotiations was impressive, yet

his success

American

depended to

military force

resort to use

was not

It

it.

on the presence of

a great extent

and the administration's willingness

ragua was over, only that

civil

war

in Nica-

a different

and

in

even true that the

really

it

was moving into

superior

in the last

ways more ominous phase. The very day that he sent

his victory cable

to the State Department, Stimson recorded in his diary the "sad

of

a

"bandit" attack

for 14

La Paz Centro

in

their

news"

which "our men accounted

of the bandits." The next day, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson

on

into

at

some

left

voyage home. (Stimson played with the idea of

Cor-

visiting

Sacasa at Puerto Cabezas but was apparently rather easily talked out of it

by Admiral Latimer.) That same day Captain Richard B. Buchanan

and Private Marvin A. Jackson of the United

States

Marine Corps were

when guerrillas attacked a Marine post near Leon. More important, Stimson seriously underestimated

killed

of Moncada's generals

who had

not accepted the

Calderon Sandino.t Immediately

most

resolute of the guerrilla

letter to

Moncada

is

cease-fire:

Augusto

of Tipitapa, even

commanders seems

the idea of giving in, and in what

genuine

after the peace

the only one

to have flirted with

thought to be, but may not be,

men— only

sixty

of whom were said to

have rifles— into the wild mountains of the department of

Nueva

Honduran

garrison of Marines

Wood, The Making

tGregorio Selser,

Se-

border, and on July 16 attacked a mixed and the new Nicaraguan constabulary, the Guardia Ocotal, capital of Nueva Segovia. He was driven off with

govia, near the

*

a

he said he would disarm his forces. But

instead, he rode north with his

Nacional, at

this

in

of the Good Neighbor Policy.

Sandino, gives his middle

name

as

"Calder6n"; others give "Cesar."

7

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa heavy

losses,

1 1

thanks largely to the Marine aviation forces. Sandino

learned his lesson, and for the next six years, by adopting classic guer-

made himself

tactics,

rilla

thorn in the

a

flesh

to the Marines, the

Guardia, and the Nicaraguan government. In 1934 he was betrayed and

murdered on the orders of Stimson's "frank, friend Anastasio

young

Somoza.

suited the Marines to

It

friendly, likeable"

Sandino

call

a

"bandit,

1

'

and Stimson

accepted their classification. General Feland showed him a memoran-

dum

written by an American engineer, John Willey, who owned a mine near Matagalpa, the chief town in Sandino's operating territory. Willey had seen Sandino and his force, and Stimson records reading his

account with "great interest."

So why did Stimson make the mistake of thinking that it didn't if Sandino were left out of the deal with Moncada? It is hard

matter

to avoid the impression that there was an element of class conscious-

Moncada was an officer regrettable taste for "good wine

ness in Stimson's evaluation. For him, General

and

a gentleman, even

if

one with

and bad women."* Sandino was nothing better than

a

a

man of the

people, and therefore

a bandit.

After his death, Sandino became a hero to radicals, nationalists

and

2J\XA-gringo intellectuals

In his

own

from the Rio Grande to Tierra

del Fuego.

country he came to symbolize the struggle not only against

the United States but against dictatorship and corruption of the kind

came equally to be

that

associated with

sons. Sandino, the "hairy is

"Tacho" Somoza and

warrior" with his "crazy

little

little

seen as a hero, a martyr and a revolutionary pioneer.

ruling party of his country

there are those

who

revere

is

his

two

army,"t

Today the

called after him. All over Latin America,

him

as a cross

between George Washington

and Robin Hood.

The

reality

was

different,

but on the other hand, to dismiss San-

as a bandit, with the implication that he was interested only in making money by robbery or blackmail, is totally to misunderstand how dangerous he was because of what he stood for. Sandino was not only interested in loot. The son of an Indian woman and a small coffee farmer, he went to work abroad, first in Honduras, then for United

dino

Fruit in Guatemala,

Doheny-owned, *SeIser, Sandino,

tThe

title

in

and

later at the

Huasteca Petroleum Company,

Tampico, Mexico.

He

is

said to have

quoting "a journalist," probably Denny.

of an admiring study by Gregorio

Selser: "el pequeno ejercito loco.

"

been

anti-

"

THE COLONEL

118

American

boy he saw the body of the rebel commander Coyotepe in the rising of 1912. However that may be,

since as a

Zeledon, shot

at

Sandino was certainly exposed to

leftist

ideas in the

Mexico of Plutarco

Being half-Indian, he was excited by the way the Mexican Revolution was reviving the Indian roots of Mexico's history, giving

Elias Calles.

the long-despised Indian peoples an honored place in Mexican society.

Sandino joined

a labor

1926 he took his savings

Moncada

And

union; he became a Freemason.

and offered

his services to

in

General Moncada.

did not accept them. Sandinista legend relates what

may be

an apocryphal exchange:

Moncada: And who made you Sandino:

My comrades

in

arms,

a general? sefior. I

owe my rank

neither

to traitors nor to invaders."*

Caramba! Sandino himself wrote

mind whether alized with

dled.

.

.

the pacifier,

time of the Peace of Tip-

to join

Moncada

in surrendering his arms.

bitterness that the Nicaraguan

Finally

.

By May

later that at the

"wretched, depressed days" trying to make up

itapa he spent three

I

'

...

'I

re-

people had been swin-

broke the chain of reasoning and decided to

21, five

his

fight.

days after Henry Stimson sailed from Corinto as

Moncada marched out

against Sandino. First, though, the

old cynic sent Sandino's father this message: "In this world, saviors

end up on

crosses,

Sandino, in

and the people

fact,

are never grateful."

was no sophisticated revolutionary,

let

alone a

He was, rather, an excellent example of what the British hisEric Hobsbawm has called "primitive rebels," like the guerrillas

Marxist. torian

of Spain or southern

Italy in the

nineteenth century, and

like

so

many

other brave and desperate people throughout history. Such rebels have

worked out revolutionary program. They have their pride By courageous, determined action they express the anger of the landless, impoverished masses and give them the courage

no

carefully

and

their anger.

to help themselves. In Sandino's case he had been exposed to revolutionary nationalist ideas in Mexico, in particular to the teaching of

APRA,

a

came the

group of revolutionary

intellectuals

which subsequently be-

ruling party in Peru. Alive, he was Public

*Selser, Sandino, p. 72.

Enemy Number

9

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

One

1 1

to the settlement Stimson negotiated. Dead, he

beeame the

na-

tional hero.

When

Sandino was

a guerrilla fighting the

Niearaguan govern-

ment, the State Department aceused him of adopting "the stealthy

and

which characterized the savages

ruthless tactics

American

our country

settlers in

a

monopoly of stealthy or

if

that had been the case, he

But the charge does

reveal

150 years

would not have met

how

of Latin American

chosen the path of rebellion

for

little,

all its

his

wars;

civil

death as he did.

expertise,

Washington

dynamics and the emo-

historical

politics.

upon

fell

ago." Sandino did not have

ruthless tactics in the Niearaguan

understood about the underlying tional climate

who

For the mestizo Sandino had

in part precisely because

he identified, not

with European conquerors, but with the "savages." Almost every-

where from

Brazil north to the

United

smaller proportion of the population

whole or

in part,

is

States border, a greater or

proud to be descended,

in

not from European "settlers" but from the "sav-

ages" they dispossessed and kept in peonage.

By any count, dino in

as

was

it

Stimson did,

a disastrous mistake to underestimate San-

just as

it

was

a catastrophic mistake to be taken

by Somoza. Stimson had read the personalities and

gentlemen lessly

politicians

of Managua. The only two

wrong were the two who would

men

politics

of the

he got hope-

define the political future of the

country.

in

1929, the year

when

General

Moncada succeeded

to the pres-

idency of Nicaragua, Colonel Stimson became Secretary of State. The

Niearaguan presidential election had been held successfully, without serious interference

from the Sandinistas, but only because of the

pres-

ence of 5,000 heavily armed U.S. Marines, not to mention 2,000 of

Somoza's national guards. In July Sandino went into exile in Mexico, but before long he was back. By 1931 he had plunged the country into chaos again.

He and

American and

his soldiers sacked

British

Bragman's Bluff and massacred

employees of the lumber company there. The

U.S. legation in Managua asked the navy to send a Special Service

and this was done. But Stimson the ship and landed armed sailors sent had complained that the navy without consulting him. The Secretary of State made it plain that he

Squadron

cruiser to Puerto Cabezas,

would approve such landings

in the future

"only when

it

was abso-

THE COLONEL

120 lutely necessary" to save the lives

of American and foreign people ex-

cluding property.

At

a press conference

"This administration

on April

15,

1931,

Stimson reflected aloud,

long before becoming involved in

will hesitate

any general campaign of protecting with our forces American property

throughout Nicaragua." The contrast with President Coolidge's message of January 1927, promising to follow the path of his predecessors

by protecting both American

life

and American property, could not

have been more plain. Guerrilla activity reached a peak in the

Marine rillas;

air

there was

no question of suppressing them. In June

Matthews and other Americans officers

summer of 1931. Even with

support, the Guardia were hard-pressed to contain the guer-

in

should continue to serve with the Guardia

raguan and American presidents were inaugurated

of 1933. Stimson would have none of it. the Marine presence States

and

in Latin

He

felt

Marine

fifty

after the

new

Nica-

months

in the early

strongly that to prolong

would convince many people both

America that the United

General

1932,

Nicaragua argued that

States

in the

United

was trying to hang

power over Nicaragua at any cost.* His attitude made it possible for the incoming administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to enter upon its Good Neighbor Policy with one embarrassment the less. But Stimson's change of heart had a more immediate, less happy effect. It removed the last remaining obstacle between Anastasio Somoza Garcia and the totalitarian power he and

on

to

his family It

were to exercise for the next

would be unjust

forty-five years.

to reproach Stimson with any significant frac-

tion of responsibility for this outcome.

He

had gone to Nicaragua and

decided that American military force might, by guaranteeing fair elections,

free

help the Nicaraguans to govern themselves. Later,

and re-

sponsive to the rising opposition in Congress and the country to the use of American forces to prop

he had changed his mind. The

up favored regimes first

in the

Caribbean,

course was honorable, the second

prudent.

There was, though, something arrogant, even frivolous about *An

additional motive

Stimson's appointment

denounced him

as

may have contributed as Secretary

to Stimson's change of attitude.

of State broke, newspapers

all

When news

of

over Latin America had

Coolidge's representative in Nicaragua. Given the dangerous situation in his personal unpopularity south of the Rjo Grande.

Mexico, he may have wanted to minimize

See Pearson, Washington Merry-Go- Round, p. 104, for

shrewd account.

a characteristically

highly colored but

1

The Latin Experience: The Thorn Tree at Tipitapa

1

Stimson's efforts to save the Nicaraguans from themselves. Those forts

doomed— it

were

is

easy for us to see

now— by

2

ef-

his failure to rec-

ognize that the inevitable consequence of American involvement was that the conflict in Nicaragua

would become not als,

must sooner or later be transformed. It between Conservatives and Liber-

a confrontation

but a conflict between

kind of fascism, established by the

a certain

young man Stimson found so likeable, and a revolutionary movement whose leader Stimson found too insignificant to include in his settlement. As a consequence, the United States became the guarantor of one

side in that conflict for the future

implacable

enemy of the

of Nicaragua, and therefore the

other.

In the Nicaraguan experience, in certain amateurism,

and of that

lack

fact,

of imagination that can sometimes

be more dangerous than any miscalculation.

gua

illustrated the limitations

ward the

instincts

and

More

important, Nicara-

of Stimson's foreign policy: carrying

when he

profitable, that

is,

did not will the means.

for the

relied

on

a "liberal" imperialism,

local auxiliaries to

maintain

its

was

Teddy Roosevelt would

have accepted the consequences and sent the Marines,

wanted

It

United States to play the

imperial role in Central America. But where

sive disciple

for-

of Teddy Roosevelt into the age of Franklin

Roosevelt, he willed the ends gratifying

there was evidence of a

his less aggres-

where the United

States

supremacy. The apparently

inconsequential episode that ended under the thorn tree at Tipitapa

long shadow over the future of American foreign policy, just as Henry Stimson, in his very first venture in foreign affairs, can be seen

cast a

as a link

between the unselfconscious expansionism of

reluctant, self-doubting imperialism of the 1950s

and

1898

1960s.

and the

IV The

Oriental

Experience

The

Philippines Take up the White Man's burdenSend forth the best ye breed-

Go

bind your sons to

To To

exile

serve your captives' need;

wait in heavy harness

On

fluttered folk

Your new-caught,

and wild—

sullen peoples,

Half devil and half

child.

Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden,

The poem States

I

n the summer of 1926 Henry and Mabel Stimson

called

"the Orient."

It

trip. It

land train journey by Canadian Pacific from

by

subtitled

and the Philippine

visited

1899

"The United Islands'

what they

was, according to the fashion of those days of

steamers and steamer trunks, a leisurely

with

is

began with the over-

New

a stop for a little golf at Banff, in the Rockies,

ship, with "rather interesting

York to Vancouver, and then continued

company ... an assortment of Yanks,

Chinks and Japs,"* to Yokohama and Kobe before they sailed Manila. In the Philippine Islands, as guests of the Governor Gen-

British,

for

eral,

the Stimsons

made

leisurely expeditions. Sailing to

government yacht, Stimson's host found time to catch HLS,

Diary.

Cebu

in the

a large

pom-

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines

1

2

3

pano and Stimson a small barracuda. They visited the villages of the Moros, the Filipino Muslims, and put in at the exquisite bay of Zamboanga, nearest point of American territory to the island world of Joseph Conrad. In the villages of

Apa and

Iloilo there

were native dancers to be

admired, though in contrast the Stimsons found the dancing of the

"American

Manila Hotel " disagreeable.'

mestizo girls" at the

relief to escape from the steamy, multiracial world of the

cool, Anglo-Indian-style

hill

where the Colonel played even more

leisurely,

'

more

a little

The

golf.

Hong Kong

at

a

capital to the

station at Baguio, in northern

with stops

was

It

Luzon,

return journey was

and Shanghai before

a

home may be that

day's sightseeing at Kyoto, a city rich in centuries of art and the

of many emperors. In the strange workings of history,

it

Henry Stimson was the most important visitor Kyoto ever had. The Stimsons' luxurious progress around the westernized fringes of "the Orient" was wealthy

New York

a holiday

of

kind that

a

is

not possible, even for

corporation lawyers, in a world of jumbo

tourism and national sovereignty. Theirs was a

Madame

jets,

Butterfly

mass

world

of hot nights and cool drinks, of submissive native houseboys and

men

confident, red-faced white

den

in stiffly starched

bearing their distinctly agreeable bur-

white ducks.*

Sightseeing, however, was not the purpose of Stimson 's journey

to the Philippines.

none other than

He went

his old friend

shrewd observations on that he

made

empire was

General Leonard

his visit to the Islands,

Wood. Stimson 's

and the report of them

White House,

led

appointed Governor General in succession to

years later,

ver's Secretary

of the Governor General,

to President Coolidge at lunch in the

directly to his being

Wood two

at the invitation

and

indirectly to his

of State in early

a job that

1929.

To

becoming President Hoo-

be viceroy of America's oriental

made everything

possible.

Wood

went

there

from being a presidential candidate, and Taft went from there to the White House.

X^rom

1898 until the

Aquino to power

in 1986,

'Stimson's account of his 1926

"snap revolution "t that brought Corazon it

was axiomatic with most Americans

visit is in

HLS,

Diary, vol. vi(a).

Philippine situation in an article in Foreign Affairs, February 1927.

tjames Fenton, The Snap Revolution, Cambridge, England,

1986.

He

also gave his views

that, on the

THE COLONEL

124

whatever the United States was doing in the Philippines,

mere

there as a

imperialist power. This, however,

so apparent to the Filipinos. Certainly class greatly

admired the United

had done for the

icans

States.

many

Many

Yet they also

Islands.

was not

Filipinos

it

was not

necessarily

of the

political

Amerresented American domappreciated what

inance and the behavior of many Americans. Similar mixed sentiments

common among assimiles in French Africa or among the "brown who prospered under the Raj. Colonel Stimson's future

were

Englishmen"

and intimate, Harvey Bundy,*

Assistant Secretary of State Islands

on

a

much more

War

world tour before World

II,

visited the

and remarked on how

easygoing the atmosphere was there than in British India,

from which he had a little ditty that

come. But

just

in the

same breath Bundy quoted

was popular among the Americans

in

Manila

at the

time:

Damn, damn, damn the Filipino He may be a friend of William H. But he

The

like

1933

*Young Bundy, unhappy

the Filipino leaders the one

States, said that

he would prefer "a

by Filipinos to one run

hell

as a

schoolmaster

at St.

of $3,000 to escort around the world

a

Mark's School,

in

heaven by

up to

Massachusetts, had accepted

well-heeled but imprudent

at sixteen

But according to Stanley Karnow,

in In

Damn damn damn

young Bostonian who

and then been divorced by nineteen. Of

he was able to save $2,000. H. H. Bundy, Columbia Oral History

tlbid.

like

to grant independence in ten years' time can be

had married an unsuitable young person fee

all

history of the United States presence in the Philippines

the decision in

a fee

a Kraglt

Quezon, of

most admiring of the United government run Americans."

Taft

friend of mine;

him with

Civilize

No wonder Manuel

no

ain't

Our

Project, pp. 27

Image, there were

two

this

ff.

separate ditties:

the Filipinos!

Cut-throat khakiac ladrones!

Underneath the

And The other

starry flag,

them with

Civilize

a Krag,

return us to our beloved home.

was:

They But

say I've got

still I

He may But he

The Krag-Jorgensen field, in 1893.

rifle

brown brothers

draw the

be

a

ain't

here,

line.

brother of Big

Bill

Taft,

no brother of mine.

was introduced into the U.S. Army, replacing the single-shot Spring-

Michael, Lord Carver, Twentieth Century Warriors,

p. 266.

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines divided into four periods. In the

1

the second, from

5

the Islands were Americanized,

first,

by force of arms and then by wise and generous

initially

2

policies. In

they were re-Filipinized. Then, from

1913 until 1921,

under Republican administrations, an attempt was made to stabilize American sovereignty more or less permanently. Only with the onset of the Depression, after 1929, and the intensified pressures to 1921 to 1929,

eliminate both American expenditure

on the Islands and any comfrom Filipino products within the American tariff wall,

petition

did a Democratic Congress get around to promising eventual in-

dependence.*

The

legislative history

of the Jones Act of 1916 displays the Amer-

ican ambivalence about the idea of Philippine independence.

When

in

Congressman William Atkinson Jones introduced a bill calling for complete independence by 1921, it failed to reach the floor of the 1912

When

House.

he reintroduced the

bill

with no

set date for

indepen-

dence, but with a simple preamble to the effect that independence

would be granted lished, the

as

soon

as a

Republicans killed

it

" stable" government could be in the Senate. In 1916, Senator

amendment promising

Clarke's

full

and four years passed the Senate by killed

and

it

House. Even

in the

independence

James

F.

between two

but the Democrats

a single vote,

so, the Jones bill did

in

estab-

become law

in 1916,

preamble did promise to withdraw American sovereignty and

its

to recognize the independence of the Philippines "as soon as a stable

government can be established therein."

Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, Democrat of New York, Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Wilson

was appointed Governor General by was committed ippines.

He

in theory to

"deprive" the United States of the Phil-

sent his close colleague and friend

Princeton to assess the Filipinos' capacity to

Henry Ford Jones of

govern themselves, and

Jones reported favorably. Wilson then proposed that "step by step

we

should extend and perfect the system of self-government in the

is-

lands."

The question of how

fast

*For the background to Stimson's time

in the Philippines, see

Guerrero, History of the Filipino People; Renato Constantino, ito

move

the Philippines should

to inde-

Teodoro Agoncillo and Milagros C.

A

History of the Philippines;

Rom-

V. Cruz, America's Colonial Desk in the Philippines; Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires;

Hermann Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, vol. ii; Philip Jessup, Elihu Root, Karnow, In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines; Peter W. Philippines 1790-1946," in Ernest R. May and James C. Thomson, Relations:

A

Survey.

I

have been helped

in

my

vol.

i,

pp. 304-71; Stanley

Stanley, Jr.,

"The Forgotten

American-East Asian

study of Philippine history by Dr. Peter Carey, of

Trinity College, Oxford; any mistakes are, of course,

my own.

THE COLONEL

126 pendence was not

a simple party question; there rarely have

been simUnited States Congress. Many southern Democrats had doubts about granting early independence, and some ple party questions in the

northern Democrats

who were

bishops into taking a similar

Catholics had been influenced by their

line. Still, it

was

a

Republican administra-

tion that had taken the islands; the Republican President Tart had

governed them, and the expansion of American power

in the world was the policy of both the Tart and Roosevelt wings of the Republican

Party.

And now Harrison arrived President who was committed

Manila

in

agent of a Democratic

to anticolonialism in principle and to

independence for the Philippines

early

as the

in particular.

He

shared Wil-

commitment, and he set to work with a will to do what he had He announced in his initial message on Wilson's behalf that the United States hoped to move toward Philippine inde-

son's

been sent to do.

pendence "as rapidly

as

the safety and the permanent interests of the

islands will permit."

made

on the Commission, number of Filipinos in the civil service and reduced the number of Americans, so that by 1919 he had transformed a government of Americans "assisted by Filipinos to a government of Filipinos aided by Americans." By the same date he had reduced the Governor General's control over Harrison swiftly

them

giving

full

Filipinos the majority

control over the legislature.

He

increased the

the Cabinet to "matters of general policy," and the Cabinet had be-

come

He

in effect responsible to the legislature

on the parliamentary model.

created a Council of State which "brought about a centralized

Filipino leadership responsible to the electorate through the majority

Osmena, Speaker of the House, became vice chairman of the Council (the Governor General was Chairman ex officio) and so party." Sergio

officially

the second-highest

The

politicos

who were

Filipinization used their

official in

new power to

institutions: a Philippine National

and

several

important sugar

the government.

the primary beneficiaries of this political

centrales

create Filipino-owned

Bank, the Manila

economic

railroad, a hotel,

and development companies. Both

the Filipinization of the government and these economic ventures infuriated the bilized to

American business community

denounce Harrison and

in the Islands,

his policies.

successful because while real progress

The

was made

in

which mo-

attack was the

many

respects

more under

Harrison (for example in transport, irrigation and education), misman-

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines

1

27

agement and corruption were real too. By 1921, with Warren Gamaliel Harding in the White House, the Philippine treasury had been seriously depleted by graft, the Philippine National Bank was bankrupt,

and the Philippine government was "on the brink of and

total

economic

financial collapse."*

The problems were not in truth wholly the fault of Harrison's Commodity prices, inflated by the World War, had broken sharply in mid-1920. The price of sugar, in particular, which

administration.

had it

risen to astronomical heights

was

than 2

during the

'

'dance of millions,'

from 45 cents per pound cents by the end of the year, t

called in

Since

Cuba,

fell

many of the

most prudent managers

hardly have averted trouble in these circumstances. business

community any

'

as

less

National Bank's loans were ultimately secured

against the sugar crop, the

istration that

mid-1920 to

in

in the Still,

world could

the American

Manila was so hostile to the Harrison admin-

in

was good enough to beat

stick

Secretary of War, John

W. Weeks,

it

with. Harding's

appointed a commission to

visit

members were both prominent Republicans who knew the Islands: a former Governor General, Cameron Forbes, and General Leonard Wood, once governor of Moros province and commander of the Philippine division. The commission's report was the Philippines in 1921.

partisan,

Its

but devastating.

The Harrison administration was uncompromisingly criticized. Under Harrison's "incompetent direction," the report said, the quality

of public service had deteriorated. Withdrawal from the Philippines

would be "a

betrayal of the Philippine people." It

recommended

for-

mally that "the present general status of the Philippine Islands continue until the people have had time to absorb and thoroughly master

the powers already in their hands." That came close to asserting that the Filipinos were unready, not merely for independence, but for the limited participation in

government they had already achieved. that the Governor Gen-

The second formal recommendation was eral

should have "authority commensurate with the responsibilities of

his position." If the Philippine legislature refused to act,

United States Congress should

nullify

any Philippine

then the

legislation that

"diminished, limited or divided" the authority conferred on the Governor General by the Jones Act. *Agoncillo and Guerrero, History of the Filipino People. tl am indebted to Dr. Laurence Whitehead of Nuffield College, Oxford, for

this information.

THE COLONEL

128 Filipino historians have generally

Wood

report was a true

bill as far as

acknowledged that the Forbesconditions under the Harrison

administration were concerned, though Harrison continued to be held in high regard for his

commitment

and

to equality, Filipinization

in-

dependence. "That there were mistakes committed under the Harrison regime," wrote will

Maximo Kalaw

in 1929,

"the writer,

a Filipino,

not deny. That there was more democracy in the Islands during

no

that period than during any of the subsequent periods,

impartial

observer can deny."*

What

Filipinos objected to

about the report was not

descrip-

its

tion of conditions, but the strong implication that those conditions

demonstrated that they were not ready for self-government. That, however, was precisely the conclusion that was drawn

in the

Washing-

ton of "normalcy" and nationalism. President Harding appointed

Wood

General

Xn Leonard

1886,

Governor General.

as

when he was

serving as an Indian fighter in Arizona,

Wood gave it as opinion

and most

elusive

of the Apache

"the right kind of white

Wood's formidable

man"

that even

chiefs,

Geronimo, the most

could be hunted

could be found for the

down

task.

feared if

only

Much

of

energies was devoted to proving himself the right

kind of white man.

Trained

at

the Harvard Medical School,

Wood

Boston City Hospital, where he was an intern, carried

out minor

to do.

He

involved

first

in

in 1885

surgical operations that an intern

joined the

Army

had to leave the because he had

was not supposed

Medical Corps, but soon found himself

combat and then

in

command

in Indian wars.

His

courage and energy were both legendary. During the Geronimo campaign he carried on, riding dozens of miles in a day, after being severely bitten by a tarantula, t

In 1898 he was one of the remarkably motley band of adventurers

who

volunteered for service in Cuba; they ranged from Harvard-

educated polo players to wranglers, roustabouts and roughnecks of all kinds, as well as regular

Army

officers.

In

fact,

Wood

was the colonel

United States Volunteer Cavalry, universally known as the Rough Riders, and as such the nominal superior of Theodore Roose-

of the

First

*Maximo Kalaw, "Governor Stimson

in

the

Philippines," Foreign Affairs,

372-8?.

tjack C. Lane,

Armed

Progressive:

General Leonard Wood, p.

10.

April

1929,

pp.

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines

1

velt,

whose protege he became and whose philosophy of

itics

he uncritically adopted.

Rough

Riders

first

It

came under

was

fire in

of

typical

Wood

to take cover and stood up, exposing himself to heavy

him to

at

of Courage,

and

links,

there,

this occasion.

Wood

arm so badly was

man

a

after

Teddy

later in

Party. In spite

J.

Hill

also a

bills

hurt the

officers to brigadier

of the Foraker

Amendment of 1899, which in

Cuba

forbade the

to grant economic concessions,

from American entrepreneurs

like

and Thomas Fortune Ryan to develop Cuban railways. convinced annexationist where Cuba was concerned.

Wood

was

in the Philippines,

new

It

James

He

member of the group who

a leading

that he should be sent to the wildest

Moros province

gen-

he was in the conservative wing of the Republican

tried to bring in capital

In short,

and

knowledge to cope with an outbreak

Teddy Roosevelt's dream of an American empire.

Wood

Wood

for a while. Virile,

his political talents.

his medical

American military government

Wood

padding and towels

with the help of energetic lobbying from Elihu

fever;

Politically,

until

officers

Roosevelt's heart, though he lacked

Root, he was soon promoted over 509 senior eral.

fire,

brother

great energy as a military governor in Santiago

Havana, using

of yellow

in

singlesticks, until

that he couldn't sign

both the President's culture and

Wood showed

enemy

and Teddy Roosevelt, when the

and thwack each other with heavy hearty, he

his

was favorably impressed with Wood's per-

was President, used to wrap themselves

President's

his

take cover. Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge

who was

formance on latter

when

the Santiago campaign, he refused

an enemy bullet shattered his cuff

screamed

and pol-

life

that

2q

was

shared

was natural enough

frontier

of that empire,

where he became governor

in 1903.

mounting sanguinary punitive expeditions from Zamboanga, at the southwestern tip of Mindanao; "the only way to deal with these people," he said, "is to specialized in

his headquarters at beautiful

be absolutely firm." In the execution of

he destroyed several hundred

Moro

cottas,

his

conception of firmness,

or fortified

In 1906

villages.

there was something of a scandal in the United States about one of these expeditions, dignified as the "Battle of

one Moro

who had

run

amok

Wood

in

Mount Dajo."

Chasing

Borneo and was wanted by the

British

ended up storming a Moro stronghold in a volcano crater and killing six hundred men, women and children, for the loss of eighteen American dead. TR sent a cable congratulating him on what he called this "brilliant feat of arms." The uproar over the Mount Dajo incident did not harm Wood's authorities there,

1

3

THE COLONEL

O

now accelerating

slow-starting but

tively

seen,

new

office

Wood

of chief of

staff

commander

career. After a period as

of the Philippine division, he was appointed

compara-

in 1910 to the

of the U.S. Army. There, asvwe have

found himself allied with President TafVs young Secretary

of War: Henrv L. Stimson. Roosevelt and their friends, of whom Stimson was

Wood, Teddy

one, were, Samuel Huntington has written,

American sciously

social

group whose

political

"the

borrowed and incorporated elements of the

tary ethic.'

The

'

Huntington

political beliefs

them "a

called

a liberal journalist

like

Adams,

Mahan

What brought them

States' destiny as a

con-

less

professional mili-

liberal-conservative

active Progressivism

on

New

social issues

of

Republic to the

or the brothers Brooks and Henrv

American

self-conscious heirs of an

aristocracy.

amalgam of

Herbert Croly of The

conservatism of Admiral

important

of the group were not uniform;

peculiar

They ranged from the

values."

first

philosophy more or

and

political

intellectual

together was their belief in the United

world power, and the need for the United States

to accept that destiny and to learn to wield military force in pursuit of it.

These

men

which both as

both

called themselves "expansionists,"

Wood

and

militarist

but the school to

and Stimson belonged may be more nationalist; in the

closely resembled the liberal imperialism

precisely seen

European experience

it

most

of Joseph Chamberlain and

his friends. It is

worth pointing out that most members of

unmistakably

racist in their cast

this school

of thought, though

individuals varied, to be sure. Stimson

were

in this respect

was accustomed to

refer to

himself as "an old abolitionist," and he certainly saw himself as enlightened in

racial

matters, although the evidence suggests he was

less

Wood, on

the

enlightened in his instincts than he thought he was.

other hand, sometimes spoke in terms that would not have provoked

disagreement from Houston Stewart Chamberlain,

temporary

who was one

his

American con-

of the fathers of pseudoscientific

racial

theory

and the grandfather of Hitlerism. In 1926, for example, Stimson talk

with

Wood

(without

made

this record in his diary

dissent):

The Governor-General

thinks pure Malays (Filipinos) superior

to pure Mexican Indians (Chihuahua and Sonora) in self-governing 'Huntington, The

Soldier

and

the State, p. 270.

of

a

1

The Oriental Experience: The capabilities,

but probably

owing to white blood

Philippines

inferior to

After Stimson

left

[sic] and Cubans them far superior to the Philippines] owing

Porto Ricans

[in

Taft's Cabinet in 1913,

The top command

in France,

Wood's

career

was

dis-

which he coveted, went to

former junior in the expeditions against the Moros, John

his zealous

Pershing. In 1920,

Wood

3

in the latter; thinks

Negro and probably far simpler here to lack of Negro blood.*

appointing.

1

went into the Republican convention

J.

as the

heavily financed front runner for the party's presidential nomination,

but, in part because of his

own

ineptness, he lost the prize to the

imposing but shallow Senator Warren Harding of Ohio. Once in the White House, Harding gave him as a consolation the Governor Genof the Philippines.

eralship

As might be expected of

this

whiskered buffalo of a man,

did not stoop to diplomacy in his determination to

he saw

it,

that

the harm, as

had been done by Governor Harrison. Roaring

old bull, he put his head Filipino

undo

down and

charged.

He

to reverse Filipinization both in the

graft.

an

like

swiftly replaced the

head of the National Bank with an American.

budget and campaigned successfully against

Wood

But he

economy and

He also

cut the

moved

in the political

system.

The tone of Wood's revealing.

official

biographer,

Hermann Hagedorn,

is

According to Hagedorn, the two most prominent Philip-

pine leaders— Manuel Quezon, Speaker of the House, and Sergio Osmefia, President of the Senate— were "the crux of the

Wood. They had "organized a railroad, a hotel

pany and

American been

a

and countless sugar

cement company ...

capital.

for

purchased

centrals, organized a coal

com-

in order to forestall the intrusion

of

Rape, adultery, seduction, unlawful marriage had

left practically

unpunished during the

regime." And then he sums up what can Wood's own view of the two nationalist

"Astute and

problem"

a Philippine national bank,

brilliant as

later years

of the Harrison

surely be taken to have been leaders he

had to deal with.

they were," says Hagedorn, "they were

like

children."!

Wood plowed ahead. have

legislators ever

Alleging graft (perhaps truthfully, but

skimped on

*HLS, t

Diary, August 22, 1926. Hagedorn, Leonard Wood, pp.

382,

409.

when

their travel expenses?), he did his best

.

THE COLONEL

132

money from

to cut off the

to finance delegations to

the Independence Fund, which was used

Washington to lobby

He

for independence.

abolished the Council of State, and insisted that Philippine xgovern-

ment must follow

the American, not the British model; that

the Cabinet must not consist of

members of

that

is,

the legislature. Finally,

he interfered in a case involving the alleged bribery by Chinese gambling-house operators of an American detective with the Manila vice

The

squad, Ray Conley.*

were obscure, but

rights

Wood made

and wrongs of the

his attitude

original case

too plain. "Mr. Secre-

all

tary," he told the Philippine Secretary of Justice, "this question

between Americans and

Filipinos.

Naturally

is

one

have to be with the

I

Americans."

Not long

afterward, the entire Cabinet resigned in a body, and

the Philippine legislature passed a formal resolution calling for

No

recall.

Republican administration

in

Washington, however, was

going to abandon the leader of so significant

Old

Party.

The

attitude to the

a fraction

of the Grand

general response was not very different from

Conley

case.

Wood's

At the height of the

Wood's

furor, Calvin Coolidge

became President upon Harding's death. Through the Secretary of War, Coolidge backed

new Speaker of

Wood

and snubbed

the Philippine House,

by the

a delegation led

Manuel Roxas. The U.S. At-

torney General found that the Board of Control was contrary to the

Jones Act, and the Supreme Courts of the Philippines and the U.S. agreed

The economic ers

situation

was chaotic, and the tone of Filipino

lead-

sharpened dangerously. This was the time when Quezon made

remark about preferring "a government run

one run cause

like

like hell

by Filipinos to

heaven by Americans," though he added

no matter how bad

be improved." Later

government might

a Filipino

Quezon went

the Governor General to go to hell

his

hastily,

be,

it

"be-

can

on one occasion and on another calling him further,

still

telling a

"ty-

rant" and a "usurper."

was

It

at this juncture, in the

summer of 1927,

that Leonard

Wood

surgery in the United States, where he died on the operating Honorable and brave, but incapable of criticizing either himself assumptions, and therefore doomed to be misunderstood and

left for

table.

or his to

become

obsolete,

Wood

•See Carlos Quirino, Quezon: pp. 428-29.

was

a tragic figure, as

Paladin of Philippine Freedom,

men

p.

157

are always tragic ff.;

Hagedom, Wood,

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines

whose

have outlasted their

lives

beliefs

1

and whose

3 3

tasks are too great

for their abilities.

now

jL hose tasks credentials

and

Henry Stimson.* With

to

fell

his Progressive

Stimson might have been ex-

his nationalist instincts,

pected to follow a middle course between Harrison's Democratic anticolonialism and

He

however.

Wood's

had already

He

Post, t

shared

not what he did,

is

Wood's

visited the Islands as

summer of 1926, and had defended him The Saturday Evening

That

bluff imperialism.

guest in the

and

in articles in Foreign Affairs

Wood's

basic philosophy, the

creed of strenuousness, imperial responsibility and dedication to national destiny.

had

iticians in

the

He

Wood's contempt

also shared

for the

mess Harrison

behind. Since he held no exaggerated opinion of elected pol-

left

the United States,

politicos

it

can be guessed that he privately despised

And

he opposed

in-

that Stimson 's views

on

of the semifeudal Philippine system.

dependence. There

is,

in fact,

no evidence

independence had changed substantially since "Until our work in the archipelago are prepared

is

when he

1912,

wrote:

completed, until the Filipinos

it, abandonment of would be ... an abandonment

not only to preserve but to continue

the Philippines under whatever guise,

of our responsibility to the Filipino people and of the moral obligations which we have voluntarily assumed before the world. "J

On

his 1926 visit,

believed

ally

it

he told Sergio

Osmena

"frankly that

I

person-

to be for the interests of both the United States and

the Philippine Islands that there should be permanent association."

And

he was even more frank Quezon:

The

"false issue

is

On

the contrary, said

an interesting account of Stimson

impossible to

in

Lewis E. Gleeck,

Jr.,

The

in the Philippines: Proconsuls, Nation-Builders

Politicians.

tHe wrote

in his

became disorganized with

vice

Stimson

a racist,

itself felt

resulting epidemics of smallpox."

No

yet Stimson chose to incorporate Active Service, p. 120.

it

doubt

this

Harrison period "the Malay

with disastrous consequences. The sanitary

but he shared the weakness of

tainable racial generalizations.

tOn

article that in the

February 1927 Foreign Affairs

tendency to backslide promptly made

call

it

Quezon, he was more

Governor General

as

American Governors-General and High Commissioners

and

of a three-hour lunch with

of independence" had made

perfect the system. *There

in the course

his

It is

perhaps going too

Anglo-Saxon contemporaries

for unsus-

Wood's

table-talk,

perception followed General

in a serious

ser-

far to

academic

article.

THE COLONEL

134

sure that there must be independence than he had been in The U.S. must stop talking about the "unfitness" of the

1913.

Fili-

pinos to govern themselves, and [he said] that he was in favour

of a Filipino

Stimson was no

as

Governor-General.*

less direct

on the taboo on the

He

subject of race.

that Americans were prejudiced

subject,

and he

admitted

said

he was

aware of the danger of provocation by "thoughtless Americans."

Given these

Wood

ness to

unbending views, t and given Stimson's closeand the way he insisted on identifying himself with his fairly

ham-handed predecessor, it might have been expected would arouse equal, perhaps even greater hostility. That, however,

From

is

not what happened.

the start, Stimson deployed great tact and charm. In his

"he gained our

inaugural speech, as one Filipino wrote, called us

fellow-countrymen."*

wore Philippine national

dress

It

General's efforts

It

was

alone,

a witness in the

floor,

Malacanan, and

at

though equally valued

Wood

relations

in particular

a Filipino

Filipino leaders

of trust with most of them. With

he developed a close personal friendship

of their

lasted for the rest

for the

less successful.)

never met

room, Stimson habitually met

and soon established

He

with grace. (The Governor

noted with approval that where

Manuel Quezon which

rigodon,

which they were undertaken, were apparently

also

without

on the dance

souls.

was appreciated that Mrs. Stimson

on formal occasions

danced the national dance, the

spirit in

that Stimson

lives.

Quezon remarked

in his auto-

biography that "there was never any mental reservation" when Stimson talked to him, and that from the days of his Governor Generalship

"he gave me

his entire confidence exactly as

...

if I

had been an

American."

Most of Stimson's velopment. "I ress," he said.

inaugural speech was devoted to economic de-

lay particular stress

upon

industrial

And by economic development

and economic prog-

Stimson the Wall Street

lawyer, devoted believer in the benefits of American corporate capital*HLS,

Diary,

August

10, 1926.

tElihu Root held even stronger views.

independence movement,

a

He

called General Aguinaldo, the leader of the Philippine

"Chinese half-breed," and

said in a political speech:

"Government

does not depend on consent. The immutable laws of justice and humanity require that people shall

have government, that the weak shall be protected, that cruelty and

whether there be consent or not. Elihu Root, vol.

*M orison,

i,

.

.

.

There

p. 329.

Turmoil and Tradition,

p. 285.

is

lust shall

no Philippine people." Quoted

be restrained,

in Philip Jcssup,

The Oriental Experience: The ism, emphatically did not

Many

public enterprises.

was

to the Islands.

11

1

mean government-owned,

3 5

Filipino-operated

years later in his autobiography he wrote, "It

of economic growth

a necessary condition

large quantities

Philippines

in the Philippines that

of foreign— presumably American— capital be attracted *

American investment meant revision of the Philippine corporation

on

laws

foreign investment, and of nothing in his term as

Governor

General, Stimson wrote, was he prouder than of winning Filipino ap-

more

proval for

"liberal" treatment of American capital. His inaugu-

in fact, accurately foretold his strategy.

ral,

He

intended to divert

attention from the divisive and dangerous issue of independence and to direct

instead to practical objects, such as the

it

economy,

health,

education.

In political terms, Stimson's policy was to oppose independence flatly

but

same time to improve the workings of responsible

at the

government under the Jones Act. He disposed of the bad blood over Wood's "cavalry Cabinet' 't by securing passage of the Belo bill, which gave the Governor General a fixed annual appropriation to pay tants

and

He

advisers.

accepted that

members of

be chosen only from the Nacionalista party and its

He amended

leaders.

members could

assis-

the Cabinet should

after consultation

with

the rules of the legislature so that Cabinet

And

address both houses from the floor.

of State was revived, not, however,

as the

the Council

powerful body of Harrison's

time, but as a forum for friendly consultation between the American

Governor General and the Stimson's tenure

at

Filipino legislative leaders.

Malacanan was

brief,

but

his

involvement with

the Islands did not end with his removal to Washington. As Secretary

of State,

his

was

a

powerful voice in the discussions on the Timberlake

Resolution, which threatened an American

Stimson three times went to Capitol Hill to

on Philippine goods. testify on matters affecting

tariff

the Philippines. In April 1929 he gave evidence against the Timberlake

Resolution, and in October of the same year he opposed a measure to

extend American coastal shipping regulations to Philippine waters. But

by August

1930, the interests affected

came out *On

by Philippine exports— cordage,

sugar— had shifted

their policy; cynically, they

for independence, because an

independent Philippine Re-

copra, but above

all

Active Service, p. 140.

tTwo

of Wood's

and George

S.

officers, as

Patton.

we have

seen, were intimate friends of Stimson's: Frank. R.

McCoy

THE COLONEL

136 public

would have no

case for

demanding

that

products should be

its

admitted to the United States duty-free. Ever since annexation, Philippine products had enjoyed, not free, but preferential treatment in

the United States, while the United States had enjoyed protected access to the Philippine market.

especially sugar,

As

a

consequence, Philippine industries,

had become heavily dependent on the U.S. market

and would do nothing that might deprive them of it. The combination of residual Wilsonian idealists with the representatives of the sugar interests

was enough to guarantee independence within

years— and

five

decades of enhanced suspicion and resentment of the United States

among manv

On

Filipinos.

both emancipative idealism and manipulative commercial cyn-

Henry Stimson characteristically turned his back. His policy, fact, epitomized the Theodore Roosevelt tradition. Let us unpick several threads and see what held it together. icism,

One element was let

alone Wood's, but

less

rambunctious than were the

essential principles

its

same. TR's view was accurately expounded

in

an ''intimate biography"

bv Roosevelt's friend William Roscoe Thayer before time and fashion had softened the outlines of that

Roosevelt embraced imperialism tantly.

To him

its

pure American nationalism and a strong sense

of imperial mission. Stimson 's imperialism was Roosevelt's,

in

.

.

.

virile

political

creed:

boldly, not to say exul-

imperialism meant national strength, the ac-

knowledgment by the American people that the United States are a World Power and that they should not shrink from taking

up any burden which

that distinction involved.

reached national maturity ical

and normal

ideal for

we must

man

for

.

.

plainly.

banging drums and sounding trumpets. ("Darn

Roosevelt used to

tell

Having

our matured nation.*

Stimson would not have put the thought so a

.

accept Expansion as the log-

him, "a campaign speech

is

He

was not

it,

Harry,"

a poster,

not an

etching!") But essentially his convictions were the same.

The

justification,

though, was not

in the satisfactions

of victory

and glory alone. Both Roosevelt and Stimson believed that the United had been given power in the world to protect the powerless. "Having destroyed Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines," Roosevelt

States

"Thayer, Theodore

Roosevelt, p. 172.

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines believed, according to Thayer,

1

"we must

see to

Islands were protected." Stimson used the

it

This

same language, speaking of

the pure milk of "liberal imperialism.

is

lines in Virgil's

7

that the people of the

the American duty to protect the Philippines as a "moral obligation.

of the great

3

11

Aeneid in which the

It is

11

the language

spirit

of Anchises

Rome, with a double duty. Even in Roman times it was assumed that Virgil meant them to be an exhortation to Octavian, who as "Augustus" was to become the charges his son Aeneas, the founder of

founder of the

Roman

empire. This climactic passage in Virgil's great

national epic was learned by heart by Roosevelt's and Stimson 's contemporaries in late Victorian schools

and taken

out loud

Andover,

have to

recite

feelings

about America's destiny

ses

it

at

or carve marble

softly,

tu regere imperio populos,

even

comes

motto and if

his

justifi-

Stimson did not

close to expressing his

in the world. Let others, says

contemptuously— for he means

bronzes more

it

as the

And

cation of their conception of imperialism.

Anchi-

enemies the Greeks— beat out

faces.

Rome's destiny was

different:

Romane, memento morem,

(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere

parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.

[Roman, do not

forget to rule the peoples in your sway;

those will be your

arts,

to impose the habit of peace;

to spare the subject, and beat

down

the proud.]

Influenced by contemporary British experience in Australia and

Canada

as

much

minion status" ism, the

as in India,

Stimson was attracted to the idea of "do-

for the Philippines. In this liberal variant

of imperial-

mother country would grant self-government but would

continue to enjoy the strategic advantages and psychic comforts of

dominion.* But Stimson was not able to

sell

dominion

to Filipinos or, with a few exceptions, to Americans.

status either

(One of the

ex-

ceptions was Elihu Root.) In part this was because, in the Depression,

Americans did not want to be burdened with the cost of a continuing connection with the Philippines.

More

important,

it

was hard to

rec-

oncile a continuing relationship with the growing protectionism of the

sugar and other lobbies in Congress. *The

British Parliament granted

Australia in 1901, to

Free State in

1921,

1945. Ireland left

New

dominion

Zealand

fact

remains that Stimson 's

Canada in 1867, to the Commonwealth of Union of South Africa in 1910, to the Irish and to India, Pakistan, Ceylon and Burma after

status to

in 1907, to the

to Southern Rhodesia in 1923,

the British

The

Commonwealth

in 1949,

South Africa

in 1961

and Pakistan

in 1972.

THE COLONEL

138

was an imperial one, though one Westminster model of the time.

ideal for Filipino-American relations

updated on the

latest

There were other elements to

was the

this

American creed of empire. One

economic development would come from investment by American business, and that it was therefore right that American businessmen should be given inducements to bring the benison of their enriching presence to developing societies like the Philippines. belief that

Another was the easy assumption of cultural,

We

have seen

how

in a

man

assumption did not express patible

both with the

as wise

as

not

racial, superioritv.

courteous

as

form genuine friendships

zon) on a basis of something

Stimson, this

bullying or arrogance and was

itself as

ability to

and

if

like

(as

com-

with Que-

genuine equality, and with

a

theoretical recognition, at the level of philosophical or religious belief,

of human equality. in, still less to

for

all

To men

like

Stimson, there was no reason to glory

deny, what seemed clear to them:

were

practical purposes, Filipinos

inferior.

it

was obvious that

They needed

protec-

and example from Americans, and therefore they

tion, instruction

should count themselves lucky to be allowed to purchase those advantages with the surrender of their independence.

Sometimes

Filipinos shared, or affected to share, this assumption

needed American protection. Quezon,

that they

in particular,

was con-

cerned about the danger his country faced from Japan. Time was to

prove him right about that: only

dozen

years after Stimson

and oth-

ers

were arguing that the Filipinos should defer independence

in return

for

American protection, General Douglas Mac Arthur was

a

and unsuccessfully, struggling to put the Islands

No

doubt, too, Americans often believed

was more widespread among Filipinos than icant that virtually every

it

in a state

this

feverishly,

of defense.

compliant attitude

actually was. It

is

American discussion of the American

signif-

role in

the Philippines makes a point of the superiority of American imperialism to

all

other brands. Yet few Filipinos seem to think the point

worth making illustrates feels

as

most Americans

did.

A

comparison of two historians

the point rather neatly. Even the liberal Theodore Friend

the need to begin his study of the Philippines by asserting that

"the question of independence, elsewhere

on

principle,

was

for the

a

matter of grievous dispute

United States and the Philippines only

a

question of 'when.' "* Whereas

a Filipino historian stresses, not the

'Theodore Friend, Between Two Empires,

The point

p.

i.

is,

in

any case, debatable. Britain was

unmistakably committed to granting responsible self-government to India by the Montagu-

The Oriental Experience: The Philippines

1

3

9

differences

between American and other forms of imperialism, but the

similarity:

"American imperialism

in the Philippines

as

is

genuine

a

imperialism of other western powers at the turn of the

fact as the

nineteenth century in Asia, Africa or the Middle East."*

Xt

time to draw the threads together and to see

is

why Henry

Stimson's year in the Malacanan palace was so significant for the evo-

and of American

lution both of Philippine politics

policy.

In terms of the former, Stimson's achievement was that he ce-

mented the good

relations

between the Filipino

elite

States. Later in life, giving his advice to President

how

about

to deal with Stalin, he

man

only way to make a itself

made

his

and the United

Harry

may have been borrowed from

who

Truman

famous remark that the

trustworthy was to trust him.

ernor General, Dwight Davis,

S.

The

phrase

his successor as Philippines

said

Gov-

of Quezon that he was "ab-

solutely trustworthy as long as he feels that he himself is being trusted,"

but the perception was probably Stimson's. Certainly by the urbane

and generous way he behaved toward individual members of the pino

elite,

he administered tannic

Wood. On

his

way out

son had written in

jelly

to the raw burns

his diary that the

job would require "the patience

a serpent."

In

might have poured into open

March

Wood's was building up

Stimson had both.

successor had been less diplomatic, the animosity that

Wood

Fili-

by Leonard

to Manila in the S.S. President McKinley, Stim-

of Job and the wisdom of

under

left

1929 Stimson returned to the

If

rebellion.

United States from Manila

to be sworn in as President Herbert Hoover's Secretary of State.

had been streets

a

popular Governor General, and the Filipinos thronged the

and packed the

pier to see

him and

Quezon and Manuel Roxas brought

A

as parting gifts.

his wife off.

Both Manuel

made by

Filipino ladies

silk flags

crowd Stimson estimated "conservatively"

thousand people came to see him depart, and "the entire

He

pier,

at ten

boat pulled out

both upper and lower, was lined the entire length

with friendly brown

Chelmsford Report of

as the

1918,

faces,

"t

When

Stimson reached home, with

twenty-nine years before independence. (See

P.

Moon, The

this

British

Conquest and Dominion of India, pp. 944-56, pp. 972-85.) The future in which Stimson contemplated granting independence to the Philippines may have been at least as distant.

*Romeo V. Cruz, tHLS,

Diary,

America's Colonial Desk and the Philippines, 1898-1934.

March

7, 1929.

THE COLONEL

140 comforting testimony to

New

his popularity

ringing in his ears, The

still

York Times added an even more gratifying tribute. His compara-

tively brief tenure as editorial,

Governor General

had been "brilliant."* The

in the Philippines,

adjective

is

it

said in an

too fulsome from any

point of view. Stimson's few months in the Malacanan palace were in

an interlude, both in

effect

and

his life

in the political historv

of the

Philippines' progress towards independence.

Stimson did not succeed in delaying Filipino independence. Nor did he succeed in protecting the Philippines either from being excluded

from the American market or from being invaded by the Japanese. can be claimed is that he was one of the first American statesmen

What

to think of American foreign policy in global terms. In this he was a true disciple of Theodore Roosevelt.

General of the Philippines, he was

Even before he became Governor more aware of Japan than most

far

of his American contemporaries. (That was presumably because he had

both China and Japan,

visited it

was

as well as the Philippines in 1926.)

his interest in the Philippines that led

exploratory journeys, and

it

was

him to make those

his experience

But

brief,

of the Philippines that

gave him a wider perspective on Asia than any other American leader

of his generation enjoyed. That understanding was about to be brutally reinforced by the experience of dealing with the Japanese in the

churian

crisis

of

Stimson, in

fact,

forged the link between the global thinking of

the expansionists of 1898 and the

more than

Man-

1931-33.

a difference

new "globalism" of 1945. There was

of individual

style

between the raw,

assertive

nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root's generation, and

Stimson's world view. Stimson shared his mentors' conviction that

America was destined

for leadership, but he polished

acceptable to a generation of Americans

it

and made

it

more and more of whom were

own or anyone else's. Stimson is a by which the "new nationalism" of the first

offended by colonial empires, their

key figure in the process

decade of the twentieth century made the traverse between two Roose-

and emerged transformed into what might be

velts

internationalism" of World

More than

that:

War

called the

"new

II.

Stimson's experience of the Philippines con-

firmed him in the doctrine that the United States was justified in using its

military

"Cited

in

and economic strength to protect those who might want

Morison, Turmoil and Tradition,

p. 298.

1

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice to go to hell in their

The

own way

Philippines, after

all,

1

but ought not to be allowed to do

were not the only smithy

so.

which the

in

4

as-

sumptions of American world leadership were forged. But they were

one such

forge,

and Henry Stimson labored mightily

there.

Spears of Straw

and Swords of Ice

The road has run

to

its

Mukden

World War

terrible course

now

II is

clearly visible;

it

from the railway tracks near

to the operations of

two bombers over Hi-

roshima and Nagasaki.

On

Active

and War,

p. 221

Stimson and Bundy, Service in Peace

E

arly in

June

1931 a

Japanese army

Captain Nakamura

officer,

Shintaro,* obtained a permit from the Chinese authorities in Harbin, in

Manchuria, to

travel in

Inner Mongolia.

stated that the object of his trip

When

He

gave a

was to carry out an

false

name and

agricultural survey.

the permission was given, he set out with one Japanese assistant

and Russian and Mongolian Railway.

On

interpreters along the Chinese Eastern

June 27 the party arrived

inn on the road near

at a lonely

Solun, in the Hinganling Mountains. There they were stopped and

questioned by Chinese soldiers, survey instruments,

who soon found

six revolvers,

and

a supply

a Japanese

army map,

of narcotics, presum-

Nakamura and his men were arthe Chinese army post and there, after a few days,

ably intended for bribery. Captain rested, escorted to

taken out to the

hill

The Nakamura

behind the barracks and shot.t incident was the latest in a series that had in-

flamed, in the Japanese army and in *I have followed the Japanese practice

many of their

civilian supporters,

of putting surnames— e.g., Ishiwara, Tatekawa— first.

tDavid Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, p. 412; Edwin Takehiko Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at Mukden, chapter 6.

P.

Hoyt, Japan's War,

p.

81.

THE COLONEL

142 what was figures

called

"the Manchuria fever."' For years Japanese military

had dreamed of invading the provinces north of the Great Wall

of China. Indeed the great division

who

between those Manchuria.

It

in Japanese military circles

favored and those

was between the

wanted to take Manchuria

as a

so-called "Strike

was not

an invasion of

North"

faction,

who

prelude to an invasion of Siberia, and

who

the "Strike South" advocates,

who opposed

accepted the need for a Manchuria

operation but only to free Japan's elbows for a march on the rich

Dutch East

resources of Indochina and the

were to be found 20,000

men

at this

in the small elite

time— known

as the

The

Indies.

hottest heads

force— it numbered fewer than

Kwantung Army.

Since Japan's

victory over Russia in 1905, Japan had kept troops not only in Korea

but also

in

southern Manchuria and in the peninsula jutting into the

Yellow Sea which the Chinese

call

Liao-tung and the Japanese Kwan-

tung.* For months there were hints and rumors that the Kwantung

Army

or perhaps some of its junior officers, unknown to their senior commanders, were planning some incident or provocation that would enable them to start a major offensive against the Chinese and eventually take over

Much

Manchuria.

historical controversy has swirled

about the part the Em-

peror Hirohito played in the decision to invade Manchuria.

of thought portrays him

as

doing

One

his best to restrain the officers,

school

though

he was necessarily obliged by the strength of Japanese militarism to use the greatest subtletv. This interpretation was reinforced after

War

II

when

World

the United States, committed to maintaining the

Em-

component in the postwar democratization of Japan, needed to dissociate him from his generals and admirals. The veneration in which the Emperor was held by Japanese, his own modesty, and the growing power and reputation of his country in the world, inclined Western public opinion and even many scholars to give him peror as a key

the benefit of the doubt.

There Hirohito

is,

as

however, another view.

encouraging

his

Some

army and navy

scholarst bluntly portray officers to plan

conquest, while cloaking himself in the mystery of

*Not is

his quasi-divine of-

to be confused with the province that used to be given the same

now known

as

Gwangchou,

in the

wars of

name by

westerners, and

south of China, around Canton.

t Notably and, for me, persuasively, Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy especially pp. 32260 and pp. 411-31. The critical view of the Emperor has also been robustly adopted by Edward Behr in The Last Emperor.

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice fice

own

to hide the tracks of his

school, the

Emperor

involvement. According to this

actually ordered a secret operational plan for the

invasion of Manchuria from a brilliant as far

back

as 1928.

Ostensibly

young

filing it as a

officer,

Ishiwara Kanji,

contingency plan, the

preparations to put the plan into operation.

a

telligence

and

plan into

effect.

The

state

The murder of Captain

was one successful consequence of

this interpretation,

campaign of provocation

Emmake

peror ordered his great-uncle, Field Marshal Prince Kanin, to

Nakamura, on

43

1

secretly

mounted by Japanese

military in-

secret police to provide a pretext for putting the Ishiwara

of tension

in

Manchuria was so

great, in

any

case, that

And on either Kwantung Army was ready

the Chinese scarcely needed specific acts of provocation. interpretation,

by mid- July

1931

the Japanese

Manof southern Man-

to strike. Field artillery was deployed the length of the South

churia Railroad, from Dairen to

And on

churia.

Mukden,

the capital

July 25 Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara finished the job

of giving himself

a secret

weapon

for the capture

of Mukden, where

Chinese troops, though admittedly of indifferent quality, outnum-

Army by

bered the 20,000-man Kwantung siege guns,

Arthur

abandoned by the Russians

cealed as a

9.5-inch

after their surrender at

of a century before, were

a quarter

Two

ten to one.

installed in a

swimming pool, one trained on on the airfield.

the main

gun

pit

Mukden

Port

con-

police

barracks, the other

The war

minister, General

Minami,

called a

meeting of senior

home. Was there any chance that the Kwantung Army might act without consulting Tokyo? he asked. One by one the officers— most of whom already had more or less precise knowledge of the Kwantung Army's conspiracy— said it was officers

of the Imperial General Staff at

his

impossible.

Then Major General Tatekawa Yoshitsugu, the general

staff,

known

chief of operations

on

to his friends from his sexual exploits as "the

Pimp,"* looked up from scraping out his pipe. "There is no need to worry," he said. "The Kwantung Army

Peerless

is

not that stupid."

Tatekawa strenuously denied that he had any *Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, p.

363.

Tatekawa was

a

protege of Prince Kanin and a

former head of European and American intelligence on the general an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate

Chang

inside information,

staff.

He

was responsible

for

Tso-lin, the warlord of Manchuria, in 1916, and

for another, successful attempt in 1928. See Yoshihashi, Conspiracy at

Mukden,

p. 156.

THE COLONEL

144

tone gave him away. There was something about the way he had spoken that made it plain he knew more than he admitted.

but

his

The subsequent maneuvers of even-one, from the Emperor down to the field commanders of the Kwantung Armv and the intelligence operatives on the ground in Mukden, make sense onlv if there was indeed a concerted plan to take advantage of recent provocations, themselves in

all

probability deliberate, and take over

Again, the Emperor's role eration in

Mukden.

hotly disputed. Because of the ven-

is

which he was held, Hirohito was obliged not to commit

himself publicly to any course. His

own

actions and

words can be made

compatible with either interpretation. Did he struggle quietlv, and unsuccessfullv. against the army's determination to invade

Manchuria?

Or did he merely pretend that the operation was against his wishes, when he had secretly encouraged it all along: Given the Emperor's power and position and given the histon of the next ten vears of Japanese aggression— given, above all, the complex nenvork of connections binding the known plotters and firebrands to the Emperor and the imperial family over the previous decade— it is hard to believe that the Emperor did not know and approve of, even if he did not order, the attack. At the same time he kept his balance by maintaining to Prince Saionji, the jicwv, or elder statesman; to Prime Minister Wak-

atsuki; to

Baron Shidehara, the foreign minister; and to other members

of the peace faction, that he wanted to

restrain the

impetuous Kwan-

tung Army.

Whatever the responsibility, the

ber

28.

staff,

tion

It

who

it

nuance of the Emperor's foreknowledge or

Manchunan

operation was

finally set for

Septem-

was General Tatekawa, chief of operations on the general devised

a

plan of characteristic cunning for

up and heading offa

in getting

that

precise

it

stopped.

was up to every

possibility that the peace party

He summoned

his

subordinates and explained

loyal Japanese to lighten the

He

moving the acwould succeed

Emperor's burden

down and drafted a cable to Lieutenant General Honjo Shigeru, commanding the Kwantung Armv; he announced his intention of visiting him, in Mukden of all now

that he had decided to act.

places, in three days' time. It

was

a

then

sat

broad enough hint that he expected

Honjo bv that time to have advanced the timetable for his coup .md taken Mukden. One of the nvo subordinates to the political "commissar" of the Kwantung Army, Colonel Itagaki Seishiro, who had been in on the

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice plot from the start (and

who was

1

45

to be hanged by the Allies as a war

criminal in 1945), also received a cable from the General Staff in Tokyo. It

treatment to prevent the incident.

repeated Tatekawa's schedule and added: hospitable

will be appreciated; his mission Another general

is

staff officer also sent a cable, to a friend

an aide of Colonel Ishiwara. plot exposed,

it

said,

who was

act before tate-

kawa's ARRIVAL. General Tatekawa proceeded slowly by train across Japan and Kodays for a journey that could be done in one.

rea, taking three

meaning of the two

plotters agonized over the

time, though, General

who was Honjo

Honjo had

young men

told his

received a visitor, an elderly officer

to go ahead with the operation they had

Mukden,

to

Kwantung

headquarters at Port Arthur.

Two water

The

mean-

an intimate of Prince Kanin. After talking to him, General

planned, and took another train away from

Armv

cables. In the

hours out of Mukden, General Tatekawa's train stopped for

at the village

Itagaki,

of Pen-hsi-hu, where

an aristocratic young

man

it

was boarded by Colonel

with a moustache

like a seal's.

After an hour and three quarters of cautious doubletalk, the col-

onel reassured the general that

him

take

the train

all

was

in readiness

and promised to

good inn; business could wait till the morning. When reached Mukden, it was met by a young major, who drove to a

two officers to the best teahouse in town, the Literary Chrysanthemum. After his bath, the Peerless Pimp settled down to enjoy himthe

with the sake and the geishas. Itagaki,

self

after a single toast,

excused

himself and hurried off to the concrete headquarters of the Special Service Organ, the Japanese army's Secret Service.

With

characteristic Japanese indirection, these courtly

had provided everyone with for the

for

Emperor, Tatekawa

maneuvers

Thus Prince Kanin covered Honjo for Tatekawa and Itagaki

a cover story.

for Kanin,

Honjo.* At 10:20 an operative of the Japanese

Special Service

Organ pushed

a plunger and exploded forty-two charges carefully placed to shower

with

dirt the railroad tracks

*In the main,

"The

have adopted Bergamini's interpretation, which

is

based on the Japanese sources.

would convince Western historians that junior officers had The reality, in which every man on the ladder conspired to deceive,

multiplicity of cover stories

on knowing

acted

I

north of Mukden. The phony attack was

their

own. what was .

.

.

exactly

afoot,

is

demonstrated by Lieutenant General Honjo's

diary.'" Ber-

gamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, p. 422. Other interpretations, such as that of Yoshihashi,

seem to me

less persuasive.

THE COLONEL

146 to be blamed

on the Chinese, and was the

pretext for a general assault

on the Chinese garrison. At about 9:00 Tatekawa had retired to bed with one of the geishas. At 10:30, when the big guns hidden in the "swimming-pool" opened up, she woke her companion up and said she was frightened. He went into the lobby, clad only in his sleeping kimono, to be told politely by armed guards that they had been ordered to prevent him going out as it was dangerous. The Peerless Pimp announced that he and

his girlfriend

was seen

in

were going back to bed, though

later that

night he

uniform, sword in hand, leading the assault on the Chinese

police barracks.

At three o'clock in the morning in Tokyo the war minister, GenMinami Jiro, was woken by a night duty officer who read him a telegram from army intelligence in Mukden. At 10:30 the previous eve-

eral

ning, the telegram said, a unit of the Northeastern Frontier Defense

Army of the

Republic of China had dynamited the tracks of the South Manchurian Railway and attacked the Japanese guards. The second

battalion of the nihilated the

Mukden

garrison had

come

to their support and an-

enemy.

Henry Stimson was awakened at Woodley and told that the Kwantung Army had moved out of its cantonments along the South Manchurian Railway and was proceeding to occupy southern Manchuria, sweeping before them like Still later, as

so

much

the rising sun circled the globe,

dust the large but ill-equipped Chinese armies that stood in

their way.

(These were

"Young Marshal," who

commanded by Chang

Hsueh-liang, the

ruled the province as a warlord in loose

alli-

ance with the Chiang Kai-shek government in Nanking.)

Colonel Stimson's idea of the military code was very different from

Honjo or Colonel Itagaki, just were even more foreign to his Puritan

that of General

pleasures

former Texas attorney general.*

Still, a

taught him something about the

human

though most of the Western embassies ican one,t *Cf. p.

lifetime

in

as

General Tatekawa's

soul than those of the

of practicing law had

capacity for duplicity. Al-

Tokyo, including the Amer-

had refused to believe reports that the Kwantung Army was

16.

Ambassador Cameron Forbes had arranged to return to Washington for consultations on the very day of the attack, something he would never have done if he had believed it was imminent. And Nelson T. Johnson, U.S. minister in Peking, sent a memo from an American adviser of t

Chiang Kai-shek, warning him of the Kwantung Army's plans only twenty-four hours before, minuted it as "incredible, fantastic, " and sent it to Washington by the slow pouch.

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice about to move, Stimson was

skeptical.

"The

situation

fused," he dictated for his diary later that day, "and

whether the army

own."

is

acting under a plan of the

147 is

it

is

very con-

not clear

government or on

Later, however, he observed that the dynamiting incident

the railroad tracks at their

justifying

Mukden, which was claimed by

strongly to suggest

its

provided their

own

as

nonexistence." Both the American and the Brit-

ish military attaches, in fact, rightly believed that the Japanese

way

on

the Japanese as

"diminished to such small proportions

attack,

its

pretext for war by themselves blowing

up the

had rail-

tracks.

Wh

hat neither Colonel Stimson nor any other responsible West-

ern statesman or diplomat could understand was that the Japanese

coup

against

Mukden was no

trivial

incident, but the opening of a

Japanese war of conquest that would test the collective security system established after the First

World War, destroy

it,

and

in the

end make

another world war inevitable.

From Washington, and perhaps even more from Europe, Korea and Manchuria seemed

as

obscure as they were remote. Until the 1890s,

Korea was a "hermit kingdom," Manchuria

a little-known province

of China beyond the Great Wall. Unnoticed by self-absorbed

and supercilious watchers

all

but a few of the

in Whitehall

and Washington,

however, four of the great events of the

late

nineteenth century had

From time become the

transformed the strategic situation of both Korea and Manchuria. the remote periphery they very center of the world

under the Meiji emperor ciety; the

moved

power

to

what would

in

The transformation of Japan from a medieval to a modern so-

struggle.

(1868-1912)

awakening of China; the eastward expansion of Tsarist Russia

across Siberia to the Pacific

and Vladivostok, "Lord of the East"; and

power with the acmeant that Korea and Manchuria were destined to be a cockpit where the influences of the four greatest powers of the late twentieth century would meet and conflict. In its early years, in the meantime, other significant powers, too, such as Germany, ensconced at Tsingtao and on the Shantung Peninsula on the southern shore of the Yellow Sea, and Britain, with concessions at Hong Kong, Shanghai and Weihaiwei, in the north, kept one eye on events around the Yellow Sea.

the emergence of the United States as an Asiatic

quisition of the Philippines in 1898: these four processes

THE COLONEL

148 Korea

felt

the

short, conclusive

of Japanese naval and military power

rise

war

Manchu empire and

During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, an army of 30,000 and would undoubtedly

have taken advantage of the situation to claim

at the very least a

of influence in northern China. The Western powers declined

men

though, and restricted the Japanese to 10,000

tung Peninsula. Practicing their traditional

had to watch, outwardly

self-restraint,

but inwardly seething,

civil

mies marched in and occupied Manchuria, with lands,

its

In a

seized Korea.

Japan offered to send in

offer,

first.

in 1894-95 the Japanese defeated the paralytic

timber and coal,

its

sphere

this

in the

kind

Kwan-

the Japanese

as the Tsar's ar-

its

valuable farm-

future industrial potential and strategic

importance. In 1904-5, Japan had her revenge. itself a

match

The Japanese army, proving

for the Russians in courage,

equipment and generalship,

besieged and captured the great Russian naval base at Port Arthur, the tip of the

Kwantung

Peninsula, then smashed the Russian armies

of

in the field at the battle later, in

on

Mukden

in

February

Three months

1905.

the Tsushima Strait, the Japanese attacked the Russian battle

which had been dispatched around the world to cut off the Japanese army in Manchuria. The Russians lost thirty-four of their thirtyfleet

seven ships, and 4,830 small boats and

men drowned;

no men

the Japanese losses were three

killed.

This decisive Japanese victory was an event of great significance in

world history. For the defeated, in a major tion.

first

time a major European power had been

engagement and

in fair fight,

by

a

nonwhite na-

In India and China, as well as in Japan, the lesson was duly

committed to memory. The

fall

of Port Arthur and the battle of

Western nations of their power in the Orithem of their mystique, and of the reputation they had earned over more than a century of one-sided

Tsushima did not

strip the

ent, but they did strip

of invincibility

encounters since the days

when

Clive and Dupleix

won

battles in India

over armies that outnumbered them by ten to one.

At the peace

talks

under American auspices

in

Portsmouth,

New

Hampshire, the Russians were pushed out of Manchuria, and the Japanese acquired rights in the Kwantung Peninsula and along the South

Manchurian Railway. While millions of Chinese migrated into prosperous Manchuria, a few hundred thousand Japanese established themselves as railway employees, shopkeepers and farmers.* 'According to Stimson, The Far Eastern Chinese.

Crisis, p. 17,

only 230,000 Japanese and nearly 30 million

Above:

Henry Stimson upon graduation

from Andover

in 1883. Below:

classmates at Yale. Stimson center. Bight:

Mabel White.

is

With at front,

The

lifelong

hunting

outdoorsman Stimson indulging

(above)

his love

and opening the annual games

at

of big-game

Highhold.

mg#m

Above: Stimson whistlestopping as Republican nominee for governor of

New

York

in 1910. Below:

In his

artillery officer's

uniform during World

War

I.

Stimson with

his friend the fierce

nationalist General

whom

Leonard Wood,

he succeeded

as

Governor

General of the Philippines

in 192-.

Henry and Mabel Stimson.

r>-A^

;*$Hfi;.

•>•

?

Vassal **fefc23

Secretary of State Stimson (right)

with President

Hoover ^

LS ?*

(left)

and

Italian

Foreign Minister Dino

Grandi. Below: Conferring

with Mussolini in

^-

v~*

1931.

Stimson (seated with

at center)

Department

his State

staff, 1933.

as

FDR's

Secretary of

War

with

Department

staffers

Left:

Stimson

McCloy Lovett

(center)

(right).

Eisenhower

John

and Robert

Above: With

in 1944-

Stimson with

in 1945, at the

Truman

(above)

end of

his

War Department

tenure,

and with General George Marshall.

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice

World War, Japan sided with up some of Germany's lost chips in

In the First able to pick

German

the

1

49

the Allies, and so was the Far East, including

concessions around Tsingtao in Shantung and the former

German-held

of the Marianas and the Caroline and Marshall

islands

archipelagos in the northern Pacific. In 1917, after the Russian Revolution, the British

government pressed the Japanese to secure the Trans-

Siberian Railway,

and

later

Washington asked the Japanese to help the

hard-pressed Czechoslovak "legion," strung out by the hazards of rev-

olution and war along the railroad. In the event, the aggressive

of the army triumphed over the civilians,

and by the time the

treaty, there

vacillations

Allies

met

in Paris to negotiate the peace

were more than 100,000 Japanese troops

held the Trans-Siberian Railway as

far

spirit

and reservations of the

west

as Irkutsk.

in Siberia.

And

They

Japan had

annexed the maritime province of the Russian empire and the

island

of Sakhalin. Before the end of 1914 the Japanese government had presented

China with

outrageous Twenty-one Demands. These were

its

listed in

groups. Group One claimed the German interests in Shantung. Group Two covered claims to concessions in Manchuria, and Group Three dealt with Mitsubishi iron and steel interests there. Group Four five

forbade China to grant any coastal concessions of the kind she had

And Group

given to Western powers.

demanded

Five, the

for Japan the right to propagate in

most insolent of

China the Shinto

all,

faith,

to appoint Japanese advisers to the Chinese government, to share control all

of the Chinese police, and to operate vast economic concessions

over China.

The combined

effect, in

the opinion of Paul Reinsch,

would have been "to

U.S. ambassador in Peking

at the time,

Chinese

of vassalage." Appropriately, he noted, the

state in a position

place the

paper on which the demands were presented bore the watermark of a

machine gun. Eventually, the

by

a

demands were watered down. But

growing segment of Japanese opinion

was the same with every

issue.

as a

Whenever

a

this

was seen

scandalous betrayal.

It

Japanese government

stepped back from the most extreme demands of the expansionists, the cry of treason

was

raised.

Japan had staked her claim to be considered one of the front rank

of naval powers in

1905.

At the Washington Conference of

Westerners thought this had been acknowledged

lowed to build warships and

five

in a ratio

1921-22,

when Japan was

of three Japanese to every

al-

five British

American. The rationale, for Westerners, was that the United

I

5

THECOLONEL

O

States

Navy had two oceans

to be concerned about, while Britain

had to cover her major European

rivals

and

more than an

interpreted the ratio as nothing in the Japanese

ct

navy between the

same time protect

at the

The

the far-flung lines of imperial communication.

Japanese, however,

A

insult.

split

who

treaty faction,"

developed

were willing

who

to accept limitation of warship building, and the "fleet faction,"

wanted unlimited building to United States.

create a navy capable of taking

on the

Japanese nationalism in the early twentieth century was rampant

but not confident;

it

was

sour and rancorous patriotism

a

and resentment. The Japanese resented

their exclusion

and

California,

and

their anger

of

fear

by the Western

powers. They read with bitterness of the way Japanese treated in Hawaii

full

settlers

were

was fanned to white

heat by the specific exclusion of Japanese immigrants from the United States in 1924.

Although under the leadership of the zaibatsu— huge economic empires

like

Mitsui, Mitsubishi or

a single family

many

Sumitomo,

originally controlled

by

or even an individual but spreading their interests into

different kinds

of business— the Japanese economy was expanding

and modernizing, the 1920s were

a

time of hardship. There was reces-

sion in the early postwar years, and the worldwide depression that

elsewhere followed the

Japan in

1927.

Even

if

New

York stock market crash of 1929 began in the economy had performed as well as anyone

dared to hope, millions of individual Japanese would

still

have suffered

the hardships and the social and psychological upheavals inseparable

from rapid transformation from

a rural to

an urban society.

background there was the fear of overpopulation

And

as a result

in the

of Japan's

limited area of arable land and rapid population increase.

In 1918

it

looked

as

though Japan had

successfully weathered the

passage from the paternalism of the Meiji period to something like

parliamentary democracy

when

the aristocratic elder statesmen

Prince Saionji, the

who

riod—handed over power to Hara because title,

it

was so unusual for

and to the

Seiyukai Party

first

a

real

known

as the

of the jjenro—

in the Meiji pe-

Great

Commoner

Japanese politician not to have a feudal

true Cabinet

government

held

Kei,

last

power

on the Western

pattern.

rapidly introduced universal

Hara's

manhood

suf-

Shantung

frage and withdrew from the former German possessions in and the former Russian maritime province of Siberia. In the 1920 elections it won some 60 percent of the vote, and in 1925 another govern-

1

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice

5

1

the standing army by four divisions. But in 1921 Hara

ment reduced

was assassinated— by a railway worker, not by an army officer, as would be the fate of so many Japanese politicians in the next fifteen years.

The

more and more under the influence of the Japanese political life became a grim wrestling match between

political parties fell

zaibatsu.

the politicians, liberal or conservative,

who wanted

to preserve at least

the forms of the newly imported parliamentary democracy, and the

grand coalition of those

who

industrialists, soldiers, sailors

and

nationalists

sought to build a greater and more glorious Japanese empire on

the ruins of Western-style democracy. Within a few years, to those

who

litical life,

it

was plain

could see beneath the decorous surface of Japanese po-

with

Diet and

its

Lord Keeper and

its

Cabinets,

its

and marquises,

princes

its

Prime Minister, that the forces of democracy were

its

in undisguised retreat.

In 1921 three

young majors* from the Japanese

military

academy

met in, of all places, a Turkish bath in Baden-Baden, in southwestern Germany, and formed the Double Leaf Society, one of a long and baleful series like

of secret nationalist

societies that sported

romantic names

the Black Dragon Society and even the Cherry Blossom Society, t

But there was nothing even were junior

officers

faintly effete

about them. Their members

burning with resentment over the humiliations they

saw heaped on the army and the nation. Their goal was,

home, then empire tion, assassination.

first,

power

in Asia. Their methods were conspiracy, provocaThey were capable of tearing out the tongue of a

senior Chinese civilian

hope of provoking

official, as

a reaction

happened

in

Shantung

in 1927, in the

from the Chinese which would give

Men who

pretext for further Japanese aggression.

Tokyo and north China,

that in the late 1920s

a

thought such cruelty

were unlikely to shrink from the string of assassinations,

justified

at

and

in

early 1930s elimi-

nated or intimidated moderates and helped to channel the streams of *Thc

three,

known

as the

Three Crows, were

from Berne, Obata Toshiro

in

all

military-intelligence agents, Nagata Tetsukan

Moscow, and Okamura

Yasuji at large. Dedicated to reducing

the aristocratic, samurai tradition in the army, which was identified with the allied

with the imperial house against the old aristocracy, they were

Prince Higashikuni.

They and

their associates,

who

all

Choshu

clan,

and

closely identified with

included the wartime Prime Minister Tojo

Hideki, also present in Baden-Baden, played a leading role in transforming the Japanese army into a

modern

pp. 322

fighting force.

Hoyt, Japan's War,

p. 57;

Bergamini, Japan's Imperial Conspiracy,

ff.

Black Dragon, because the Chinese characters for those

t

the it

Amur

River,

which the Japanese wanted to make

symbolized the short

life

of the military hero.

two words

their

are the

same

as

those for

boundary. Cherry Blossom, because

THE COLONEL

152 Japanese political ideas

were more

named Peace

toward the

life

At home

waterfall.

easily repressed after the passage

Laws of

Preservation

liberal

or left-wing

of the euphemistically

and

radical thought was whole generation of young workers and students by random police arrests and routine torture.

stamped out in

The

1928,

a

partisans

of kodo ha, the Imperial Way, were

careful to clothe

themselves in the language of loyalty to the Emperor and in the silken

They spoke

trappings of feudal daimyo and their samurai. bushido, the knightly

fervently of

code of the medieval Japanese warrior, and claimed

they wanted to restore Showa, the Emperor's goal of Enlightened Peace.

There can be room for argument about

was

in

all this,

how much

romanticism

icism. Certainly the officers

vision of peace

As one of the all

knew

who

claimed to be restoring the Emperor's

perfectly well that

greatest

how much self-deception there and how much conscious cynit

was war they were preparing.

of American students of Japan once put

mumbo-jumbo, 'Impe-

the curious Oriental detail, such as Shinto

rial will,'

and samurai

of the picture bear an of Western history

prestige have all

"after

it,

been removed, the stark outlines

too clear resemblance to the major outlines

in recent

decades."* Specifically, the

political his-

tory of Japan in the 1920s and 1930s bears a close resemblance to the

of fascism, especially

rise

in

Germany.

A

number of

striking

elements were present: the same psychological and sulting from rapid industrialization

between big business, seeking new markets and quests, was horrified at the loss of a stab in the

interested groups

class that

them and

alliance

fearing socialist

exulted in

all

similar

turmoil re-

and urbanization; the same

cism and labor unrest, and a military

on

social

its

criti-

past con-

too ready to blame

it

the same tendency for

self-

and psychotic individuals to wrap themselves

in a

back by the

liberals;

woven from loyalty to the throne, medieval warrior mysticism and nationalist hokum; the same ruthless use of violence and intimidation to shut the mouths of anyone who dared to laugh at the dangerous absurdities that were being codified as a new national religion. toga

Manchuria, geographically Soviet Union, and a tempting

hemmed

in

honey pot

by China, Japan and the of them, was the

for each

logical place for the Japanese militarists to pursue their strategy, which

was to commit the reluctant

civilian

governments

Tokyo to expanTokyo would not

in

sion by taking actions of their

own

dare to disavow. So in 1928 the

Kwantung Army blew up

*

Edwin O. Rcischaucr, The United

States

accord which

and Japan, pp. 202-3.

the train in

The Oriental Experience: Spears of Straw and Swords of Ice

who was

which Chang Tso-lin, the "Old Marshal" Manchuria, was finishing

game of mah-jong. They

a

blame on three wretched Manchurian dissidents orned to go

him

kill

and

in

(as in

finish the

the event

Old Marshal

did).

it

off

One of the

if

1

5 3

the warlord of

plotted to pin the

who

had been sub-

the explosive did not

three escaped to

the

tell

tale.*

In the spring of 1931 they tried again unsuccessfully to provoke the

Chinese into starting major sion

on the

railway near

hostilities.

And

so in September the explo-

Mukden was both one

episode in a long

home, and the long-heralded opening of a grand campaign of conquest on the Chinese mainland. There was one specific dimension to the ferment of nationalism campaign to

in

militarize Japanese society at

Japan that was not

fully

understood

United

in the

States:

it

was

increasingly anti- American. Reports of discrimination against Japanese in

the United States lost nothing in the telling in the nationalist Japanese press.

The

zaibatsu

saw the Open Door Policy, by which the U.S. since

1900 had proclaimed the Chinese market open to threat to their

more

mercantilist ambitions there.

all

exporters, as a

Many

Japanese con-

sidered the 1922 naval treaty not just a reverse for Japan's legitimate

ambitions, but a racially motivated denial of Japan's right to be treated as

an equal. The

in these terms,

last

straw, for those

was the London naval

wanted to increase the States

and

who

Britain

ratio

from

between

3:5:5,

that

regarded the United States

treaty

of

1930.

The Japanese

and those of the United

their fleet

from 60 percent of the

is

of the

size

U.S. and Royal navies, to 70 per cent. Overall, they almost got what they wanted. But within the set overall figure (69 per cent of the American

and

The

and an actual reduction

"fleet faction" in the navy,

faction in the army,

pressure

were constrained to accept

British levels) the Japanese

ratio for cruisers

on

by

a

low

this issue allied to the kodo

draft treaty to

on Prime Minister Hamaguchi. Hamaguchi stood

railroad station

a

number of submarines.

was furious and leaked the

by the Emperor. But on November

Tokyo

in the

14, 1930,

firm,

he was murdered

young member of

the

ha

put

backed at the

Love of Country

Association.

A

few days

after the

Mukden

Incident,

Henry Stimson confided

to his diary a brief statement of his policy, which was at once highly

*Bcrgamini, pp. 363-66; Hoyt, pp. 68-69.

I

5

+

H

T

C

E

shrewd within the terms of the conventional wisdom and

O

I.

at the

time quite innocent of the ferocity and ruthlessness of the

typhoon he was shortly going to have to he wrote, "is to

let

the same time do right side

it

the Japanese

know we

way which

in a

deal with. are

will help

and not play into the hands of

ON

"My

E L

same

human

problem/*

watching them and

who

Shidehara

is

at

on the

nationalist agitators/**

Baron Shidehara Kijuro. the foreign minister, and his Pnme Minister. Wakutsuki Rejiro whom Stimson had met during the London

which Wakutsuki was the chief Japanese

naval talks in qgo, at

were

,

among

United

lations with the

who

those in Japan

At

dele-

favored maintaining good

re-

they were both

less

than two months from being forced to resign bv the "nationalist

agi-

tators" against

whom

kutsukfs predecessor

States.

Stimson hoped to prop them up.

Pnme

as

Minister.

successor. Inukai Tsuyoshi. were is.

by

this juncture,

Both Wa-

Hamaguchi Osachi. and

gunned down bv

his

"agitators." that

with the secret nationalist societies backed by

assassins associated

the armv.

Even so sagacious

a

diplomat

Tokyo

a

few months

who

arrived in

soviet

as

as

the Boston Brahmin Joseph Grew, later to

begin ten vears of yeoman

U.S. ambassador there, started out bv thinking that the Jap-

anese army's "operations are really aimed at

some time

it

must

in the future.

Japan

is

arraid

drive Bolshevism out of Asia."

at

Russia— not

at present

of Bolshevism and

And

Stimson.

who

but

feels that

had taken

more than most American generation and had visited Japan more than once,

the trouble to think about the Far East

statesmen of his

utterlv underestimated the political

taking place there, and seize an

empire for themseh

The Manchunan that purpose, was the

from the

rest

and psychic convulsions that were

the ruthless determination of the Japanese to [

incident, bv first

no means the

that positively

illustration

first

demanded

a firm reaction

of the world. But Stimson held no cards

Formallv. as he analvzed

it

of

in his

hand.'

later, the situation was governed by certain

*HLS.

Duiri, September 2?. 19*1*For the following interpretation of Srimson's handling of the Manchuria crisis. I have into- aha. on Srimson's own three accounts, in the Dtar\\ vols, xix and xx; in The Far Eastern -$:. A Whitney Gnswold. The Far Eastern Policy of the Ok Armin Rappaport. Henry Snmson and Japan I9_v-i91> Joseph C Grew. Ten Tears u VII. Report of the ComJapan; and League of Nations Publications No. C