All the Great Prizes by John Taliaferro

Author:John Taliaferro
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 15

Spheres of Influence

As much as Hay had complained about the clammy climate and diplomatic frustration of Washington, he fretted obsessively about the business yet unfinished. “I am plagued by the foul fiend fibbertijibbish,” he wrote Alvey Adee, who was minding the store in his absence. “I cannot give myself up to rest and be thankful.” After only three weeks at Lake Sunapee, he went to Lake Champlain, where President McKinley was vacationing, “to bore him for a few hours about Alaska, and Samoa and China, and Nicaragua and the other outlying nurseries of woe and worry.” From there he proceeded to Washington to face “the purgatory I have left,” he told Adams.

Prospects of a resolution of the Alaskan boundary dispute had brightened considerably since Joseph Choate’s appointment. As Hay had hoped, he and his new ambassador made an effective team: Hay working through British minister Julian Paunceforte in Washington and Choate with Lord Salisbury in London. In early August 1899, Great Britain and the United States at last succeeded in coaxing Canada to accept a provisional boundary, pending final settlement. If nothing else, this modus vivendi now cleared the way for unencumbered discussion of the Clayton-Bulwer canal treaty.

Next he sold Britain on another map. For the past decade the Pacific islands of Samoa had been controlled jointly and rather unsatisfactorily by the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. After a brief civil war earlier in 1899, in which the Americans and the British backed one side and the Germans the other, the three powers concluded that it was in their mutual interest that the islands be divided. The timing made sense, for Britain was already arming for war with the Boers in South Africa and very much needed the sympathy of the United States and, just as crucially, the neutrality of the kaiser, who had made a show of congratulating the Boers for their early resistance.

Hay met with a German envoy on August 31 to draw up a plan of partition and then had Choate present it to the British. The final details took several more months, but in the end the United States gained what it wanted: the superb harbor of Pago Pago, the island of Tutuila, and several smaller islands. Germany got the rest. For its gentlemanly deference, Britain was given rights to islands in the Tonga and Solomon groups, plus sundry concessions in Africa. Hay’s style of unruffled, round-robin diplomacy worked just as he had wished, and it would soon reap even greater rewards as he directed his foreign policy even farther afield, to China.

FOREIGN INCURSION IN CHINA had begun in the 1840s with the establishment of the first sanctioned trading port at Canton. After the First Opium War (1839–42), China gave up five more coastal cities, most notably Hong Kong and Shanghai; in 1858, a dozen more “treaty ports” opened, and for the first time foreigners gained access to the Yangtze River. Looking down the barrels of European guns, China had little choice but to allow low tariffs on foreign goods.

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