Peace

Ethel Roosevelt Derby and her children will be leaving Sagamore Hill in a few days, and Theodore Roosevelt enjoyed spending time with them. Everyone enjoys receiving Richard Derby’s letters as they are the most consistent source of overseas information. Roosevelt is proud of the work of the 1st and 2nd divisions and is glad they have crossed the Rhine River. He hopes that everyone will be brought home as soon as peace is assured.

Collection

Harvard College Library

Creation Date

1918-12-30

The Roman god Mars, eating a battleship, is seated a table with Uncle Sam and Marianne (symbol of France) and the rulers of European and Asian countries at the “Dreadnought Club,” each awaiting their meals of munitions and armaments being brought to the table by a heavily burdened waitress labeled “Peace.” Caption: Peace — “Waiting on a crowd like this is no job for a woman.”

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1911-05-31

Draft manuscript of speech delivered in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December 1906 but postponed his address to the Nobel Prize Committee until after the end of his Presidency.

Collection

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site

Creation Date

1910

Whitelaw Reid writes to President Roosevelt to discuss Roosevelt’s correspondence with the Japanese, Russian, and British governments during the peace negotiations. Reid commends Roosevelt and asks permission to share the correspondence with Lord Lansdowne and King Edward.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-09-18

W. T. Stead relays the history of Russian Emperor Nicholas II’s reign up to this point, and asserts that his unpopularity with his people and inability to act rests on the bureaucracy built up by his ministers. Stead believes that Nicholas will be “emancipated” from the limits of autocracy and bureaucracy by the upcoming election of the Duma. When the Tsar and Duma meet, Stead predicts that they will be able to work well together.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-10-12

Herbert H. D. Peirce writes to William Loeb about a rumor that President Roosevelt wanted the chairs used by the peace plenipotentiaries. Peirce encloses a clipping from the Boston Globe in which he denies the rumor.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-09-13

The writer believes that the adoption of Article 27 of the Arbitration Project ensures the success of the Hague Conference and of efforts for peace. The Article recognizes the duty of each nation to seek arbitration in the Permanent Court of the Hague of any dispute that threatens to lead to war. Had the Article been adopted earlier, the Spanish-American War could have been avoided.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-09-09

Herbert H. D. Peirce forwards a message from Baron Komura to President Roosevelt. Komura states that Japan has removed all demands for reimbursement, Russia and Japan have agreed on a division of Sakhalin, and diplomats are now discussing details of the arrangement.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-08-29

Ambassador Meyer reports that Emperor Nicholas II has received President Roosevelt’s message but will not alter Russia’s stance on peace conditions.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-08-27

Ambassador Meyer met with Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, who refuses to pay war indemnities to Japan. The Emperor would prefer to lose part of Sakhalin rather than pay any money to Japan. William II, German Emperor, is encouraging the Emperor to make peace.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-08-24

Peace talks continue, but the peace envoys deny speaking with representatives of President Roosevelt.

Collection

Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Creation Date

1905-08-23

A female figure labeled “Peace” stands in a barber shop, holding a large pair of shears labeled “Disarmament.” Sitting in the shop are the heads of state from “Spain, U.S. [Uncle Sam], Austria, Japan, Italy, France, England, Germany, [and] Russia,” each with bayonets and artillery as hair. A sign on the wall states “No hair tonic used here.”

Comments and Context

Disarmament. Yes, the word existed in pre-nuclear times. Theodore Roosevelt, as president and before, sought to increase America’s arms, and especially its naval defenses, yet knew that the world was in jeopardy of hurtling toward a major war, probably on the European continent. His diplomatic interventions in the Russo-Japanese War and in Venezuela, but especially in the German-French tension that led to his Algeciras Conference were in the belief that a European land war could be delayed or averted.

In this context, Puck‘s cartoonist J. S. Pughe drew a brilliant portrayal of the arms-conscious world in 1906. Armaments sprouted like wild hair on the world’s powers, all of whom accepted invitations to international peace congresses at the Hague, Netherlands, in 1899, and proposed for 1907.

A large group of representatives from several nations, many carrying weapons and making threatening gestures to others, arrive outside the “Palace of Peace” for the peace conference to end the Russo-Japanese War. Andrew Carnegie is posting a notice on the side of the building offering “Best Armor Plate for sale by Andy U.S.A.”

Comments and Context

Carl Hassmann’s cartoon cleverly depicts the actual situation behind the surface rhetoric and posturing between world powers. A second World Peace Congress was organized and funded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1905, and held in 1907; and the nations of the world flocked to attend at the Hague. But few of them were committed to disarmament or peace, and the Great War (to commence in 1914) was a universal assumption.

The Second Conference was actually called for by United States Secretary of State John Hay, and President Roosevelt believed that a conference could ameliorate international tensions. He had just negotiated an end to the Russo-Japanese War and would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1906; he had even floated the idea of a League to Enforce Peace.

A tattered, but happy, Russian army returns home after the end of the war with Japan. In the background, the rising sun of Japan is visible on the horizon.

Comments and Context

Carl Hassmann’s double-page cartoon in Puck at the end of hostilities in the Far East — where the bold symbol of Japan, the sun, clearly rises; it is not setting, as history learned — is a very sardonic portrayal of the international situation. If anything, his depiction of the defeated Russian army as happy, though sotted, as retaining riches and even singing and occasionally smiling, was scarcely true, even in a cartoonist’s metaphor.

The Japanese had decimated the Russian fleet, and captured expanses of territories either Russian or under Czarist hegemony. Despite losses sustained by both empires, the Russians lost more — from international prestige to wealth.

Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia, sits on a throne, wearing a large skull topped with a cross as a crown. A Japanese man offers him papers labeled “Peace ‘with Honor’,” and a Jewish man, holding bags labeled “Jewish Loans,” stands in a palace doorway in the background. A basket overflowing with papers labeled “Jewish Petition [and] Protest against Kishineff Massacres” is on the floor. A paper on a desk states “Cost of War to Russia $1,042,500,000.”

Comments and Context

The bleak twin situations of the St. Petersburg court are laid bare in this stark double-page cartoon by Joseph Keppler, Junior. Even before its disastrous war with Japan in the Far East, Czar Nicholas’s Russia was crumbling in virtually all ways possible. It was nearly bankrupt, losing control of its client states and border peoples, beset by protests from serfs and the bourgeoisie, facing assassination attempts and intrigues among underground Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist groups, and worldwide condemnation over Czarist suppression of religious and Jewish minorities.

Vignette cartoon with a central image showing President Roosevelt sitting with Russian, Japanese, and possibly Chinese figures at his summer retreat at Oyster Bay; his personal secretary, William Loeb, is serving drinks. The vignette scenes suggest that the Russo-Japanese war, and the control of Manchuria and Vladivostok, be decided by competitions between the Russian leaders and those of Japan and China, such as a swimming race, a wood-chopping contest, a tennis match, and a contest of telling the tallest fish story.

Comments and Context

Puck cartoonists L. M. Glackens and S. D. Ehrhart joined forces to draw the magazine’s semi-regular centerspread genre cartoon commenting on current events, this page on the upcoming negotiations to end the Russo-Japanese War. There was one month to go before commencement of talks. Approximately two months after this cartoon’s publication, a Treaty of Peace was signed.

The cartoonists had innocent fun, suggesting feats of strength and skill to settle the conflict, dismissing the bloody and exhaustive carnage in the Far East, and ignoring what was at stake with the United States — President Roosevelt’s personal prestige, and America’s potential role as a world power.

A flotilla of ships sails with Theodore Roosevelt’s face on the lead ship. The figure of Peace, wearing armor and carrying a sword in one hand and an olive branch fashioned out of bayonets in the other, is sitting atop this ship. Two doves flying by her side are wearing armor and are armed as well.

Comments and Context

This cartoon has had a long life since its original publication in 1905 in Puck magazine. In textbooks and dissertations, magazine articles and books, it has been reprinted as a representation of President Roosevelt’s brand of Pax Americana; and often as a commemoration of the Great White Fleet, America’s two squadrons of 16 battleships and escort ships that circumnavigated the globe. Painted a glowing white, the ships were ambassadors of peace, and assertions of America’s new naval prowess.

In truth, however, the Great White Fleet only set sail two and a half years later, in December of 1907. Roosevelt made only his perfunctory request for increased naval strength, coupled with a major articulation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, in his Annual Message. But that justification and references were made in December of 1904 — three and a half months before this cartoon, and therefore outside Puck‘s current-events focus.

Meiji, Emperor of Japan, and Nicholas II of Russia, kneel before the female figure of “Peace.” Caption: When, your Majesties?

Comments and Context

Given the exigencies of magazine production — writing and drawing, editing, printing and distribution — we cannot be certain whether the events of Russia’s “Bloody Sunday,” the suppression of protesters on January 9, little more than a week of this cartoon’s cover date, prompted Nankivell’s cartoon. A crowd of petitioners, led by an Orthodox monk, were brutally massacred. The world, and much of Russia, reacted with revulsion, and the Revolution of 1905 began. It was ultimately unsuccessful, but formed a direct line to the Bolshevik Revolution a dozen years later.

Puck‘s cover cartoon would have been appropriate during any week of the grinding, bloody war between a rotting Old-World empire (Russia) and a rising force of the 20th century (Japan). The immediate flash-point had been the insistence of the Russian Czar, Nicholas II, to have geographical and security guarantees in Manchuria and warm-water Chinese ports (never mind the prerogatives of the old, weak, overextended Chinese themselves). The Japanese Emperor Meji and his aggressive military leaders sought similar hegemonic understandings for itself in Korea and maritime lanes and islands.

Mars, the Roman god of war, sits on a throne with his arms folded across his chest and a sword resting on his lap. He is illuminated by a ray of light beaming from above. At center a broken olive branch lies on the ground, and on the right a female figure labeled “Peace,” cradling a dove, flees storm clouds, representing Russia and Japan, about to clash, between her and Mars.

Comments and Context

The first Hague Tribunal, an international conference on war, peace, negotiations, and armaments, was held in the Dutch city in 1899. In what subsequent history perhaps viewed as ironic, it was suggested by Czar Nicholas II of Russia. Many nations participated, and many agreements were reached — on weapons, settlement of international disputes, protection of hospital units on battlefields, etc.

These and occasional other Hague tribunals were similar to Geneva Conventions. A second conference was called for 1904, but it was cancelled, as Keppler’s cartoon illustrates, because of the intractable conflicts then raging between Japan and, ironically, Russia. (Japan’s bloodless domination of Korea was conveniently ignored by the international community, as another result.)

The Russian Bear eyes a house of cards. Each card is labeled a different country, “England, France, Germany, Japan, U.S., Austria, China, Italy, [and] Turkey”, and the king on each card bears some facial characteristics of the ruler of the country, including Uncle Sam. A dove of “Peace” has landed on top of the cards. The bear’s right paw and claws are touching the “Japan” card.

Comments and Context

In this cartoon, remarkable for its cleverness and caricatural details, Joseph Keppler illustrates the threats to peace in daily news, and the larger situation in international relations. The “house of cards” is dispositive in two ways: the cartoonist has pictured the major nations of the world, and their leaders, when challenges to the world order arose; and the meaning of the phrase — a precarious situation — is perfectly portrayed.

The propriety of picturing the Russian bear at the center of this scenario is proper. There were strong and stable empires among the “cards,” but some, including Austria, China, Turkey and Russia itself were unstable, barely solvent, and beset by internal divisions.