This Day in Diplomatic History (Alaska Border Dispute Settled, to TR’s Satisfaction)

October 20, 1903—Undoubtedly crying “Bully!” when he received the news, President Theodore Roosevelt saw his “big stick” diplomacy rewarded when the Alaska Boundary Tribunal ruled in favor of the U.S. on virtually all counts.

For years, the Alaska border between the U.S. and Canada was unsettled, but nobody paid it too much mind. The territory, after all, was known as “Seward’s Icebox” when the American Secretary of State negotiated its purchase from Russia to generally widespread derision.

Then practically overnight, the discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896 made this deal the most lopsided transaction until the California Angels swiped fireballer (and future Hall of Famer) Nolan Ryan from the Mets in exchange for on-the-way-out shortstop Jim Fregosi. Nobody cared that much about fisheries or lumber, but serious money—well, this was something different.

In short order, a joint high commission was formed to deal with the issue, but the matter dragged on without resolution. Pushing for one was not exactly high on the agenda of President William McKinley.

When it came to being filled with the milk of human kindness, the Republican President would probably rank among the top five who ever filled this position. Along with his warm disposition, McKinley thought he could be excused for having a lot of other things on his mind:

* His wife Ida, to whom he was utterly devoted, was an invalid who suffered from epilepsy and needed to be kept near his side at state dinners, where he managed to discreetly cover her face whenever he sensed an impending seizure.
* He had the Spanish-American War to fight.
* The treaty concluding that war put in America’s hands a number of former colonies whose fate needed to be decided.
* McKinley’s eventual decision on this—to embark on a policy of imperialism—excited criticism from, among others, Mark Twain, William James, Andrew Carnegie, and the once-and-future Democratic nominee for President, William Jennings Bryan.
* That decision also led to another conflict, an insurgent war in the Philippines led by Emilio Aguinaldo, featuring atrocities by the military that McKinley had to beg the American press not to expose.

In other words, McKinley’s attitude was: One war at a time, fellas. Let’s keep our friends on our side—you never know when we’ll need them. All things considered, not a bad governing philosophy.

After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, everything changed under his successor, T.R.—and in few areas more than in the President’s relationship with the Secretary of State, John Hay.

One of two secretaries for Abraham Lincoln, Hay had been a Washington player for four decades. I’m afraid that John Huston’s performance as him in The Wind and the Lion gives, in some respects, a false impression of the man. I’m not talking here solely about their difference in height (like Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, the great director was considerably taller than his subject). More crucial was the distinction between their voices. Huston’s, of course, was whiskey-soaked and nicotine-tarred, while Hay’s vocal instrument, according to Roosevelt biographer Edmund Morris in Theodore Rex, was “like a well-resined viola.”

The change in bosses meant that Hay was jumping to the tune of a man two decades his junior in body—and, if we are to believe the word of British diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, six decades younger in temperament. “You must always remember,” the future British Ambassador to the United States once said, “that the President is about six.” (And he would know—he’d served as best man at the London wedding of Roosevelt to wife Edith.) Indeed, had he been born in a later time, T.R.’s youthful interest might have turned not to taxidermy but acting, so he might have appeared in those commercials that those of us of a certain age remember: “I want my Maypo!”

This totally hyperactive, hyperbolic man was setting a sharply different tone in U.S. diplomacy. He had tired of what he regarded as the Canadian-British delaying game, just as, at the same time, he was growing impatient with Colombia’s dickering over building a canal. T.R. didn’t mind stirring things up on two fronts.

Let’s stop here for a second for a different perspective on T.R. As a young New York state assemblyman and again as Police Commissioner of New York, Roosevelt had tangled with Irish-American politicians and cops over corruption. As he contemplated the Alaska boundary dispute, however, he might have been forgiven for thinking that the Irish might not have been entirely mistaken for several centuries in describing their colonial tormenters as “perfidious Albion.”

Come to think of it, the Irish members of New York’s finest might be onto something with their use of the good cop, bad cop routine. With his cultivated tastes, fashionable prejudices (anti-Semitism, along with anti-labor sentiments he vent in an anonymous novel, The Bread-Winners), and “sherry-now-or-after-the-Wordsworth-reading?” manner, Hay was practically central casting as the good cop. Roosevelt—arms flailing, voice rising, with all those teeth—was born to play the bad cop.

So T.R. made his move. He not only sent troops to the Alaskan border but slipped to Associate Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. a note that could be “secretly” shared with members of His Majesty’s government. It bristled at the objections of Canadians that the three men he had appointed to the tribunal—Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and former senator George Turner—might not be impartial.

Moreover, Roosevelt threatened that if there continued to be a disagreement, the next time he sent a message to Congress, “I shall take a position which will prevent any possibility of arbitration hereafter; a position … which will render it necessary for Congress to give me the authority to run the line as we claim it, by our own people, without any further regard to the attitude of England and Canada.”

It worked. The two Canadian representatives on the tribunal, Sir A.L. Jette and A.B. Aylesworth, continued to object, but the British representative, Richard Webster, 1st Viscount Alverstone, Lord Chief Justice, sided with the Americans. The commission acceded to the U.S. claim for a boundary behind the heads of inlets, while equally distributing four islands at the mouth of the Portland Canal. The Canadian commissioners, sore at the outcome, refused to sign and went home, and the blow-up led the Canadian government to create its own Department of External Affairs to look after its own interests better.

But the settlement turned out to be a marker in the transition from tension between Britain and America (including a near set-to in the Civil War over use of British ports in building Confederate ships) to the celebrated “special relationship” of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill (whose mom, be it noted, was the New York beauty Jennie Jerome).