Theodore Roosevelt by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss [Auchincloss, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Biography
ISBN: 9781559277389
Amazon: B000S1KZTW
Barnesnoble: B000S1KZTW
Goodreads: 774482
Publisher: Times Books
Published: 2002-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Ten

France had bought off British and Italian interests in Morocco by promising them a free hand in Tripoli and Egypt, and the French Convention with Britain of April 1904 contemplated the ultimate division of Morocco between France and Spain. Germany and German interests were totally ignored, and the Kaiser’s indignant retaliatory visit to Tangier provoked a war-threatening crisis. The Kaiser then proposed an international conference to settle the disputes and invited the American president to second his proposition to the nations concerned. TR, although dubious of the extent of America’s involvement in the Mediterranean, agreed to do this on behalf of world peace, and the conference of thirteen nations duly assembled in the Andalusian port of Algeciras in Spain in 1906, with Henry White as the United States representative.

TR instructed White, whom he regarded as the ablest of American diplomats, “to keep friendly with all” but to do nothing to shake the recently concluded Franco-British entente, which he considered a force for peace in the troubled European scene. Basically TR was much more on the French than the German side. The prickliest issue facing the conference was the question of who should police Morocco, such policing being essential to the maintaining of the open-door agreement. The French, who had already been policing the territory for years and who had by far the greatest investment in Morocco, insisted on continuing their virtual control, willing only to share a bit of it with Spain, while the Germans wanted the policing confided to a group of smaller, neutral nations. Tempers flared, and the home capitals began to be heard from. The president of the Reichstag in Berlin made threatening speeches; the Paris press boiled. War loomed. White, believing that the Kaiser was not fully informed by his representative in the conference, now urged TR to go over the heads of the conference in a direct appeal to him.

TR agreed to do this, after inducing the French to make a final offer of minimum terms. They revised their position slightly by bringing the Sultan of Morocco into more direct relation with the French and Spanish police officers and associating Italy (a sop to Germany) in the police control. Germany continued to stand pat until TR, citing the Kaiser’s letter to him of the previous June in which the German emperor had flatly stated: “I will in every case be willing to back up the decision which you consider to be the most fair and most practicable,” insisting that the time had come for this promise to be fulfilled. The Kaiser gave in.

The Algeciras conference averted a war that would have come at a time when the French army was far less prepared for it than it would be in 1914. As Allan Nevins put it: “It allowed the powers a few more years in which to avert the great conflagration—years and opportunities which they threw away.”

TR was entirely frank with Lodge about the individual and vital role he had played in the conference. “I became the intermediary between Germany and France,” he wrote him.

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