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Herman Bernstein congratulates and thanks Theodore Roosevelt for his recent editorial in the Outlook, which he believes will help “America’s case against Russia.”
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-10-14
J. O. Johnston harshly condemns the Russian government and the living conditions of Russian citizens. He expounds on Russian actions that he believes Theodore Roosevelt and the United States must take a stance against.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1911-09-16
Herman Bernstein writes to Theodore Roosevelt after having read Roosevelt’s article “Peace of Righteousness.” Bernstein recalls having an agreeable meeting with Roosevelt, during which Roosevelt informed Bernstein he cannot, as a former President, write publicly on foreign matters. Bernstein urges him to reconsider.
Bernstein states that he understands foreign nations have no international legal standing to interfere with “Jewish massacres”, and that foreign nations cannot criticize the lack of reforms that had been codified in the Manifesto of October 17, 1905. However, Bernstein claims that Russia violated the Russo-America treaty of 1832 due to their treatment of Jewish Americans and states that by allowing in to continue, “Uncle Sam… should permit his ‘face to be slapped’ ” – quoting Roosevelt’s own words.
Thomas Henry Barry describes his recent introduction to Czar Nicholas II in a letter to President Roosevelt. At this time, Barry was serving as an observer of the Russo-Japanese War. He mentions the Czar’s kindness to Barry’s companions, Colonel Hoff and Captain Cloman. Barry also points out how helpful the American ambassador, George von Lengerke Meyer, has been.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-06-21
Henry White writes to John Hay regarding Morocco’s demands for an international conference and the ensuing responses from ambassadors of other interested nations. While Hay’s efforts toward peace are appreciated by the Italian government, White does not anticipate any results in the near future.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-06-07
The Office of Naval Intelligence reports that there has been no change in position along the Sha River since last week. The first reported military operation on the west side of the Liao River was a Russian raid by Cossacks accompanied by mounted infantry and eight guns. It is not clear whether the troops passed though neutral Chinese territory.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-01-20
Ambassador Meyer writes President Roosevelt about the Russo-Japanese War. Meyer describes Stanley Washburn’s report of dwindling American sympathies with the Japanese. Washburn does not believe the Japanese army will ever beat the Russian army in Manchuria. Meyer mentions his interactions with Camille Barrère, the French Ambassador, and his indication that French and German banks are beginning to side with Russia. Meyer also relates an interaction he had with the Japanese minister, in which the minister stated he was interested in Roosevelt’s thoughts on Manchuria and Japan’s control of Port Arthur.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-01-20
Copy of a telegram, stating that Russia’s refusal to pay indemnities is supported by the people, and may weaken Japan’s position.
Library of Congress Manuscript Division
1905-08-28
A bearded, hairy man appears as a young child labeled “Russia,” learning to walk with a walker labeled “The Douma” while playing with toy figures of royalty.
The Douma, or Duma — Russian for consultative assembly, similar to a Parliament or House of Representatives but never with powers those bodies possessed — existed, on and off in Russia under czars as far back as the 18th century.
A crown in the shape of a human skull appears against a background of blood dripping into the title area at the bottom.
Cartoonist Carl Hassmann, in his apocalyptic mode, again chose the dissolution of the corrupt and doomed Romanov dynasty, as it seemed in 1905. Czar Nicholas was indeed beset by intractable problems — crises inside his family and court, inside and outside his country, his military, his subjects, his economy, his once-servile satellite states, his standing in the world. Yet it would be a dozen years before his reign crashed around him in the 1917 Socialist, then Bolshevik, revolutions. The bloody 1905 revolution was merely a precursor.
People cling to a large rock in a stormy sea. Some are royalty and some are terrorists. In a flash of lightning in the background appears the word “Revolt.”
Cartoonist Carl Hassmann’s evident specialty, the depiction of apocalyptic threats and figures in crisis situations, is what he needed to delineated the situation of Imperial Russia at the end of 1905.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
A Russian man stands on a rowboat, using an axe labeled “Nat’l Assembly” to battle an octopus labeled “Bureaucracy.” The octopus wears a crown and royal robe, and its tentacles are labeled “Graft, Exile, Oppressive Taxation, Despotism, Religious Intolerance, Cossackism, Incompetence, [and] Greed.”
In cartoonist J. S. Pughe’s centerspread Puck cartoon, the embattled man is beset by many identified dangers, all parts of the same autocratic monster. The caption calls him a Slav, where it might have called him a Russian just as easily; and the crown and “Cossack” reference suggest that Russia, and not the Slavic lands and peoples, were the object of attention.
Czar Nicholas II of Russia clutches against his chest a doll that is wearing a crown labeled “Autocracy” as he races through the woods in a troika pursued by a pack of angry, ravenous wolves.
Keppler’s cartoon is a simple depiction of a simple situation, or, in the eyes of the Czar and his dwindling number of supporters, a complicated situation.
A drunken Russian man holds a jug of vodka and wildly swings a bloody sword at a wasp representing Japan. John Bull and Uncle Sam sit in the background.
The context of this cartoon is the Russo-Japanese War, a conflict whose logic, or lack of same as with many wars, is represented by the flailing Cossack and the tiny insect. But the relative strengths of the opposing powers is not depicted accurately by cartoonist Keppler.
The Russian Bear, as a soldier with rifle, has been turned into a scarecrow. A crow labeled “Japan” bites its nose. Another crow labeled “England” is perched on its cap. A crow labeled “Germany” is flying around its head. A crow labeled “Turkey” is on the ground at its feet. A crow labeled “China” is perched on the rifle butt. All these crows, and several others on a fence nearby, are cawing with laughter at the scarecrow.
The term “Sick Man of Europe” has been applied through centuries of international diplomacy to several countries — the Ottoman Empire and Turkey during periods of decline, and Great Britain when parts of its empire fell away. In the years prior to World War I, Russia surely wore the mantle.
A man representing Russia holds a cat-o’-nine tails labeled “Russia” with the lashes labeled “Absolutism, Persecution, [and] Tyranny.” Next to him, on the left, are several dead or wounded people with the word “Kish[i]neff” written on the ground, and in the background, clouds labeled “Finland” and “Poland” are hovering above large groups of people being persecuted by the Russians. The man is shielding his eyes against a burst of sunlight on the right in which is a Japanese woman labeled “Modern Japan” surrounded by the words “Justice, Progressiveness, Humaneness, Enlightenment, Tolerance [and] Religious Liberty.” The figure of a Japanese man labeled “Medievalism” lies on the ground, crushed by the light of “Modern Japan.”
With the commencement of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904 in the month before this cartoon’s publication, Puck clearly chose sides, as seen in this cartoon by Keppler. The world learned that the failure of often harsh diplomatic exchanges was quickly followed by Japan’s overwhelming victory over the Russian fleet in Port Arthur (occupied Manchuria).