Two

The Clever Kaiser and the Yellow Peril

LATE IN THE YEAR 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm had a revelation. He decided to commit it to paper in the form of a drawing, and when he had finished he was delighted with his artistry; the ominous Oriental figure dominating the picture was truly admirable. Suddenly it inspired in his fertile mind a title in one succinct and striking phrase: Die gelbe Gefahr!—the Yellow Peril.

Europe had been shocked earlier in that year by the quick, cut-and-slash victory of Japan over the ancient colossus of China. He alone, the Kaiser believed, grasped the significance of that event. Germany, France, and Russia had joined to force Japan to disgorge the larger part of her territorial gains and, as their price for thus coming to China’s aid, had taken most of these gains for themselves. Tsingtao and a naval base on Kiaochow Bay had fallen to the Kaiser’s share, but Wilhelm, who dealt in world dynamics, had been brooding over the rise of a new power in Asia. Vividly he saw its yellow hordes overwhelming Europe. “Under the glitter of the Christmas-tree candles,” as he described it to his cousin Nicky, the Czar of Russia, he drew his vision on paper and ordered the court painter, Hermann Knackfuss, to immortalize the sketch in a painting.

The picture showed a Buddha riding upon a dragon through a thunderous sky, leaving smoking cities in ruins beneath him as he advances upon Europe. Apprehensively watching this apparition are seven long-haired ladies in helmets and breastplates, representing the nations of Europe, of whom the foremost, Germania, with streaming blond locks beneath an eagle headdress, has drawn her sword and leans forward aggressively. Upon a height an archangel exhorts the ladies, “Peoples of Europe, guard your most precious possessions!”

Seized by the brilliance of his conception, the Kaiser caused copies to be engraved and presented to all the embassies in Berlin and to royal relatives of the various reigning houses and other distinguished persons. Wilhelm’s forays into personal diplomacy often dismayed the European chanceries, in some of which he was known as William the Sudden. Because he swung wildly between feelings of persecution and a rosy optimism, no one ever knew what to expect of the German Emperor. Bismarck said of him that “he wanted it always to be Sunday.” Wilhelm’s Byzantine court assisted him in this illusion by providing him with his own morning paper, in a special imperial edition of one, made up of carefully excerpted items from the world press, printed in gold.

Wilhelm was interested in gold-plated news only and disliked above all else those tiresome visits from ministers with their reports of inconvenient facts that did not fit in with his schemes. To avoid listening to them, the Kaiser would walk up and down, do all the talking himself, and dismiss the minister in twenty minutes. It was his task, he believed, to preserve the balance of Europe. Indeed, who but he in Europe was equal to it? Government officials from the Chancellor down were nothing but a pack of clerks. Europe needed a master mind if it was not to fall apart under the fumbling of these petty bureaucrats. Dynastic rulers were the only persons fit to manage international affairs, but really it was not fair the whole burden should fall upon him. Immediately the Kaiser, a man of volatile moods, felt deeply sorry for himself. Alone he shouldered this terrible burden, and no one realized how it weighed upon him. But he must bravely carry on, misunderstood, unappreciated though his efforts were. His fat uncle, King Edward of England, hated him as Wilhelm’s own mother, Edward’s sister, had hated him. Emperor Franz Josef belonged to a past generation, an ancient recluse who understood nothing of modern times. France had no ruler worth talking to. Anyway they were all conspiring behind his back, trying to encircle him. Only Nicky, the Czar, was his friend, neither clever nor strong like himself, but at least malleable. He had to hold on tightly to Nicky, wheedle him, flatter him, frighten him judiciously from time to time, for the Czar too they were trying to draw into this terrible encirclement.

He formed the habit of writing Nicky confidential letters, gossiping, advising, warning, admonishing, and signing himself “Yours Affectionately, Willy.” The letters, written in English (accounting for their occasional curiosities of spelling and grammar), were found in the Russian archives by the Bolsheviks after the war. The Czar’s replies are not extant, but the Kaiser evidently derived considerable pleasure from the correspondence. It charmed his ego to mold the Czar of all the Russias to suit his schemes.

Proud of his new naval base on the Pacific, Wilhelm now embarked on a program to make Germany a first-class naval power. Bismarck, content for Germany to dominate the land mass of Europe, had warned against collision with England on the seas, but the Kaiser wanted empire and took the fatal path. It occurred to him that Germany ought to have a foothold in the Americas, and the direct method he favored, as did the Count of Monte Cristo, was to buy one. In 1901 his roving eye alighted on the Santa Margarita Islands off the coast of Venezuela, but when Secretary of State John Hay learned that German warships were surveying the islands, he dropped a démarche in Berlin, and the enterprise was heard of no more.

If Colonel Hay thought his protest had stopped the German Emperor, he was wrong. The Kaiser had thought of something better than Venezuela: why not a piece of Mexico? On the desolate coast of Lower California, the thousand-mile-long peninsula which hangs down from California along the Pacific coast of Mexico, there was another Santa Margarita island, enclosing the superb natural harbor of Magdalena Bay. In 1902 an American lawyer practicing in London called upon Ambassador Joseph H. Choate with a startling piece of news which the Ambassador promptly reported to Secretary Hay. The lawyer told him, Choate wrote, that he had been approached by a German gentleman doing business in the City, “to draw options giving him the right to purchase the principal part of the peninsula of Lower California.” He did not disclose for whom he was acting, but after some weeks of transactions the American lawyer, who found he would be required to go to Mexico to obtain the concessions, insisted on knowing where the money was coming from for so extraordinary an adventure in real estate.

The real purchaser, he was told, was “the Emperor of Germany in his personal and individual capacity,” and it was he who would furnish the money. Amazed, the American lawyer asked what the German Emperor could possibly want with such a property. His German client pointed to two harbors on the map, Magdalena Bay and Whale Bay farther north, remarking that they were excellent harbors “for naval purposes.” At this stage of the business the American lawyer, disinclined to assist the German Emperor’s proposed penetration of the American continent, withdrew his services.

“We have a decidedly exposed flank there,” concluded Ambassador Choate’s letter to Hay, “and it seems pretty clear the property is for sale and the Germans are after it.” He added, perhaps unnecessarily, “We are concerned that it should not fall into the hands of any foreign power under any disguise whatever.”

Whether the options lapsed after the American lawyer’s withdrawal, or whether Hay took some action of which he left no record, is not known, but Magdalena Bay was not sold to the Kaiser. His happy thought of acquiring a naval base in the American hemisphere was balked again.

In the same year the Kaiser’s pride suffered a more serious setback. The perfidious English, ignoring the warning of his picture, had gone behind his back and made an alliance with Japan—had actually joined hands with the Yellow Peril! And some months later, when he generously tried to help them out over the affair of the Venezuelan debts and sent his warships to blockade Venezuela, he stirred up a crisis. President Theodore Roosevelt shook the big stick at him and threatened to send Admiral Dewey and the fleet in the name of the Monroe Doctrine. The Kaiser was disgusted. The Americans were always calling upon the Monroe Doctrine as if it were some sort of covenant established by God, giving them rights over the rest of the hemisphere. Wilhelm believed that if God were going to play favorites He would choose Germany. (It is recorded that one Sunday when the Kaiser went to church the Court Circular reported, “This morning the All-Highest paid his respects to the Highest.”)

Even his gold-tinted morning newspaper could not cheer from the Kaiser’s mind the suspicion that everyone was against him. Once, when he suspected France of calling a European Congress without Germany, his anger, echoing across the Atlantic, prompted Roosevelt to remark, “The Kaiser has had another fit. What a jumpy creature he is anyhow!”

His feelings of persecution centered upon the English, whom he loudly hated and secretly admired. In the midst of a long tirade against England addressed to Roosevelt he suddenly blurted out, “I ADORE the English!” but he never could quite suppress the suspicion that his mother’s countrymen thought him vulgar. Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan, he was haunted by doubt that he was not quite “good form.” And like Captain Hook, who was feared by all, but himself quivered at the approach of the ticking crocodile, Wilhelm quivered at the approach of encirclement. The form of it he most dreaded was an alliance of Russia at his back with France and England at his front.

In an effort to turn Russia’s energies eastward, away from Europe, he determined to urge Nicky into war with Japan. It is “the great task of the future for Russia to defend Europe from the inroads of the great Yellow Race,” he wrote the Czar and assured him he would keep Europe quiet, guard his rear, and “help you as best I can.” Unfortunately the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 turned out disastrously for Nicky, but that, as Willy never tired of reminding him, was not Willy’s fault. In fact, after the Japanese had won all the battles, the Kaiser could not make up his mind whether they were now more of a Yellow Peril than ever or, on the other hand, the Prussians of the East who might very well be his natural allies.

At this juncture, in 1906, the United States acquired the ground for the Panama Canal. Across the Pacific, Japan was swelling out of her narrow islands like a jinni out of a bottle; all Europe considered a clash between her and the United States inevitable. The Kaiser waited hopefully. And one day in 1907 his gratification was immense when he personally uncovered a Japanese plot to seize the Panama Canal with a hidden army of ten thousand men already stationed in Mexico! A private informant just back from the coffee plantations of southern Mexico had reported to him having seen the ten thousand Japanese, “all in military jackets and brass buttons,” secretly drilling after sundown under the command of sergeants and officers “disguised as simple laborers.” The Kaiser wrote Nicky all about it. His informant had himself counted the ten thousand Japanese. “They are reservists who have hidden arms with them and intended as army corps to seize the Panama Canal and cut off communications with America.” As a thousand miles of Central American jungle separates Mexico from Panama, it is hard to say just where the Kaiser thought the canal was, but a king with vast problems on his mind may be forgiven if his geography is slightly askew. “This is my secret information for you PERSONALLY,” he continued. “It is sure information and good as you well know by now that I never gave you a wrong one.”

He went on to instruct Nicky in the world implications of this startling news. “London,” he pronounced, “is afraid of an encounter between Japan and America because they must take sides with one of them, as it will be a question of Race, not of Politiks, only Yellow vs. White.” Now, he ended triumphantly, the English have “for the first time used the term ‘Yellow Peril’ from my picture, which is coming true!”

The Kaiser’s mind leaped ahead to a vision of the Japanese pouncing upon the half-dug ditch of which President Roosevelt was so proud. The prospect of a war acted on Wilhelm as does the ringing of the bell on the laboratory dog. It made his saliva run. “Whenever war occurs in any part of the world,” he once said to Arthur Balfour, “we in Germany sit down and we make a plan.” Now the Kaiser had found in Mexico a new pressure point, and already he was forming a plan. The news set off in the mind of that “autocratic zigzag,” as Roosevelt called him, a train of ideas that was to bewitch German policy through the next ten years and culminate in the Zimmermann telegram.

The Kaiser savored the effect his discovery of the Japanese in Mexico would have on the American President, who was even now flinging thousands of men and more money into the digging in Panama. Mr. Roosevelt would have to admit the reality of the Yellow Peril about which the Kaiser had so earnestly warned the Western World. Wilhelm’s vigorous imagination envisaged the United States and Japan locked in conflict on a battlefield in Mexico. He saw the most fortunate results for Germany. The moment the United States invaded Mexico the smoldering anti-Yankeeism south of the border would burst into flames throughout Latin America. Yankee domination of the continent would end. Germany, ambitious to expand her commerce and influence, would at last have the free field she deserved and had long sought.

Properly exploited, the Japanese menace would surely provoke the Americans to invade Mexico. Another pleasing consequence occurred to the Kaiser. In a war between the United States and Japan, England would have to support America, and that would cost her her Japanese ally. The Kaiser’s whirring mind, endlessly scheming, had now found a new candidate to defend the white race against the yellow—America! And Mexico would be the battleground. How simple, how natural! One had but to convince the heedless Americans of their mission.

The Kaiser felt sure America’s virile president would appreciate the glory offered to him. Mr. Roosevelt, Chancellor Prince von Bülow had told him, “is a great admirer of Your Majesty and would like to rule the world hand in hand with Your Majesty, regarding himself as something in the nature of an American counterpart to Your Majesty.” Clearly Mr. Roosevelt was just the man to fight the Yellow Peril. In January 1908 the Kaiser summoned the American Ambassador, Charlemagne Tower, and told him about the ten thousand Japanese in brass buttons, whom he now described as distributing themselves “throughout” Mexico. Inform the President, he told Tower, that there is no doubt they are soldiers who will certainly move against the Panama Canal the moment there is war in Europe.

Mr. Roosevelt, informed of this threat to the canal by his Ambassador, was not disposed to take up the challenge offered him. The Kaiser, however, had convinced himself it was his clear duty as well as an act of friendship to awaken Mr. Roosevelt to his opportunity. He determined to prod him, as he had prodded Nicky into war with the Japanese, by promising him Germany’s assistance. The extraordinary idea suggested itself of proposing an alliance among Germany, the United States, and China.

At this moment fate, like an obedient courtier, laid an opportunity at Wilhelm’s feet. An American journalist named William Bayard Hale, representing the New York Times, arrived in Berlin especially to secure an interview with the Kaiser. This is the first appearance of a man who will reveal a curious affinity for turning up at crucial junctures in the coming entanglements. In August 1908, Hale, not yet a German agent, was granted an interview by the Kaiser of such startling indiscretion that the Times felt obliged to consult the President personally before publishing it.

What the Kaiser told Mr. Hale was that “within a year or two the Americans would certainly have to fight the Japanese” and therefore he was arranging an alliance among China, Germany, and the United States that would very shortly be announced. He inveighed bitterly against England as a traitor to the white race because of her alliance with Japan. Germany would soon have to go to war against England, and the time had nearly come. With one of his characteristic leaps over consistency, the Kaiser said he was arming the Mohammedans as a bulwark against the Yellow Peril. He said Russia had been fighting for the whole white race against Japan, but of course, if Germany had been doing the fighting, Japan would have been beaten. He continued to harangue Mr. Hale along these lines for two hours.

The Germanophile Mr. Hale had an uncomfortable feeling that the Emperor might not be serving Germany’s best interests by these remarks, and took the precaution of showing them to the German Foreign Office, which “had a spasm,” and to the American Ambassador, who was horrified, before he cabled the interview to the Times. The Times took it to Roosevelt, who in his “strongest manner” advised against publication. Sacrificing a front-page sensation, the Times complied. “I really like, and in a way, admire him,” Roosevelt wrote some months later, “but I wish he would not have brain storms.”

The Kaiser was not to be foiled of his heroics by the mean tactic of silence. He gave another interview, similar in spirit although different in substance, to the London Daily Telegraph, which published it on October 28, 1908, causing an explosion that rocked Europe and almost rocked Wilhelm off his throne. Hurt, astonished, and bewildered, he escaped Berlin, where his sanity was even being questioned by the press, and fled to Pless, where a royal hunt was loyally got up to soothe the All-Highest spirit, though without much success. “Oh, I am most unhappy, I am always misunderstood,” he told the beautiful English Daisy, Princess of Pless, at dinner and, as he spoke, “a tear fell on his cigar.”

Meanwhile what of the Japanese? The fact is the Kaiser’s information was not entirely groundless. Something was going on between Japan and Mexico, no one knew exactly what. In 1908, some months before the Kaiser’s famous interview, the American Minister in Guatemala advised Washington of a rumor that Japan, by secret treaty, had acquired lease of a naval base at Magdalena Bay, the largest and most secure base on Mexico’s Pacific coast, the same place the Kaiser had once coveted. Washington’s worried queries were met by official denials, but the reports persisted over the next years, usually accompanied by the story of disguised Japanese soldiers (reminiscent of the Kaiser’s ten thousand) ready to swarm across the Rio Grande or, alternatively, seize the Panama Canal.

There may have been a secret treaty; the archives do not say. But certainly Japan was making common cause with the Mexicans, who had not forgiven the loss of Texas. Japan had a fresher cause of resentment in the American restrictions on the entry of Japanese labor. They began to talk about the Mexicans as their racial brothers, descended from Japanese fishermen who had long ago been blown across the Pacific on a raft. Japanese training ships visited Mexican waters. In 1911 came Admiral Yashiro, Grand Admiral of the Japanese fleet, on a state visit. Entertained by the Mexican Minister of War at a splendid banquet at Chapultepec, the Admiral rose, rather unsteadily after seven courses and seven wines, to toast this “fraternal feast” of the Mexican and Japanese Army and Navy and to make a speech teeming with portents of common action against a certain common enemy. He stressed the similarities of the Mexican and Japanese people: “The same blood” flows in their veins (clamorous applause); both have terrible and untameable volcanoes which, though now quiescent, can erupt and make the world tremble in their fury (cries of approval); both are building up their Armies and Navies to resist insults to their national honor (Viva Japon! Abajo los gringos!). No doubt was left of the identity of the common enemy.

If America did not or would not understand these portents, Berlin determined to bring them forcibly to her notice. In February 1911 a German spy named, almost too Teutonically, Horst von der Goltz, arrived in Paris under orders to steal the draft of a secret treaty which the Mexican Finance Minister, José Yves Limantour, was believed to be negotiating with Japanese agents in France. Limantour, regarded as the cleverest man in Mexico and the probable successor of President Porfirio Díaz, was in Paris raising a loan while waiting out the results of an insurrection that was threatening to oust old Díaz at last. Von der Goltz, according to an embellished confession he later made, attached himself to Limantour and, with the aid of a Rolls-Royce, several Apaches from the Paris underworld, a wild party, and a drugged bottle, succeeded in rendering the Mexican minister unconscious and extracting from him the vital document in the most approved cloak-and-dagger manner. Immediately two silent, black-coated couriers from Berlin appeared and relieved him of his loot, and in a few weeks a photographed copy of the secret treaty was laid under the startled eyes of the American Ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson.

Ambassador Wilson was to deny this ever happened, and courtesy suggests more credence in the word of an American ambassador than in that of a German spy. Yet early in March, Ambassador Wilson did scurry up to Washington to consult President Taft, Roosevelt’s successor, and the Cabinet in person. The morning after his arrival, March 6, the country was astounded by the news that the President had mobilized twenty thousand troops, two-thirds of the regular Army, on the Mexican border, and had sent the fleet steaming to the Gulf. Mr. Taft said it was maneuvers, but everyone else said it meant war with Japan. Correspondents converged upon El Paso, mobilization headquarters, to send home stories of bugles, campfires, baked beans, and martial confusion. Among the crowd in El Paso a stranger in uniform attracted particular notice. He was discovered to be Major Herwarth von Bittenfeld, German military attaché in Washington. What is this gentleman doing in Texas? Keep your eye on the major, for he has not come down just to watch the maneuvers.

Texas and the border states were in a ferment. At Fort Sam Houston men assured each other that the Japanese fleet had appeared off the Pacific Coast; at San Antonio people were saying the Army would be in Mexico City by Easter. Every Japanese ship arriving at Seattle and San Francisco was said to be disembarking colonists who were being speedily transshipped to Mexico. Alert patriots spotted suspicious Orientals on the Mexican side of the border who wore civilian clothes but walked with a “military carriage” and did not seek employment. A cache of fifty thousand rifles was reported located at strategic spots along Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Foreign capitals buzzed with “authoritative” stories (of remarkable unanimity) about the secret treaty. Japan was credited with having obtained not only a fleet-coaling base at Magdalena Bay but also rights to the trans-Mexican Tehuantepec Railway linking the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Despite anguished denials by Japanese ambassadors in all the capitals, and by Mexican officials, the report persisted, reverberating with most relish and embellishments from Germany. The German press, in an access of wishful thinking, firmly predicted that the Americans would cross the border within three days, overthrow Díaz, and annex Mexico to protect the Panama Canal.

So fast flew the rumors that President Taft felt obliged to deny publicly that the mobilization was concerned in any way with Japan. He was telling the truth, but nobody believed him, the less so because Germany took a certain step to make sure nobody would. On April 9 a sensational story headlined SECRET TREATY PHOTOGRAPH! appeared on the front page of the respectable New York Evening Sun. It told much the same story von der Goltz was later to tell in his published confessions, though without mentioning his share. The secret treaty with Japan indeed existed, the Sun informed the world, and had been ratified by the Díaz government. Ambassador Wilson had obtained the original, had kept it only long enough to have it photographed, after which it was returned to the innermost archives of the Mexican Foreign Office. The Ambassador, the Sun continued, immediately entrained for Washington, wiring ahead that he was coming, and upon arrival laid the incriminating document before a startled President and Cabinet. Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood, lunching at his club, received a White House summons and, throwing down his napkin, hurried there for consultation. Mobilization orders were issued the same day. Ambassador Wilson went on to New York to meet Limantour, who was arriving that very moment from Paris, and told him, declared the Sun, that he must take an oral message to President Díaz demanding abrogation of the secret treaty within six days or the United States would take positive action.

This inside story, circumstantial, dramatic, and supported by the Sun’s prestige, convinced the public that Mexico was to be Japan’s invasion base. The Yellow Peril became as popular as the turkey trot, creating in the American mind a special sensitivity to alarums from over the border that was to last for some years.

What did Ambassador Wilson, the only man who could have scotched the story, have to say? Publicly, nothing. Privately he told the State Department that no secret treaty had ever been placed in his hands. He told them something else. Mr. Ritchie, the Sun’s special correspondent, had admitted to him having written the famous article entirely from information supplied by (as the clever reader will instantly have guessed) Major Herwarth von Bittenfeld.

It was, of course, a German invention. The fact is that President Taft mobilized the American Army to foil not a Japanese threat to American territory but an internal Mexican threat to American business from the increasingly menacing insurrection. Ambassador Wilson’s hurried trip north and Taft’s response were made in the hope of overawing the rebels and of bolstering the Díaz regime, not overthrowing it. They had no intention of invading Mexico and, though it was unfeeling of them to disappoint the Kaiser, did not cross the border.

Whether there ever was a secret Japanese treaty with Mexico, or von der Goltz ever stole it, is unresolved but irrelevant. For the purposes of history, what actually happened is less determining of later events than what people think happened. Germany had succeeded not only in making Americans believe in the possibility of joint Japanese-Mexican action against the United States but in making herself believe in it. So the pit was dug for Zimmermann.

Meanwhile the Kaiser still itched for Latin American adventure and was soon to try again. The insurrection in Mexico, already lapping at Díaz’s boots, gave him his next opportunity.