Roosevelt to Hay on Britain’s request and the trip to Kiel, 27 May 1903

01 The telegram

A typed telegram of 27 May 1903 from Theodore Roosevelt, to the Secretary of State, John Hay: Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, reel 413, frame 0026 (Theodore Roosevelt Center record o266250). It is in numbers, with several clear words (of, think, it, junketing, at, the) and two cancelled groups. The ledger (catalogue 762) listed it with “no decoding noted”. William Echols read it with GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and sent the transcription, the key and the reading; the project could not reach the scan or the codebook and checked the submission for coherence.

02 The code

The groups are from the State Department’s Red Cipher of 1876, compiled by John H. Haswell: a codebook in which each five-digit group stands for a phrase, the first three digits giving the printed page and the last two the entry. The plain side is the column headed “Message or true reading”. The codebook is in the National Archives (catalog id 417267710, microfilm T1171); a repository note says it is also printed in Weber (1979), which was not consulted here. Names the book lacks are spelled with a table keyed by the first group of the message, here 56169: the coded letters U A W C give K I E L. Florentijn van Kampen’s study of the State Department codes supplied the clue for the group 10000 and pointed to the digitized book. The key was found to fit, not recovered from the ciphertext.

These entries are the contributor’s, from codebook pages that the project could not see. What was checked here is the count and the sense: the transcription has 23 groups (22 distinct), each with an entry in the table above.

03 The reading

What is the object of British governments request? I do not think [think] it desirable that the trip should be made a junketing one. If they touch at English port it should be after the [the] trip to Kiel in my judgment.

That is the contributor’s literal decipherment; the brackets mark clear words that the book’s entries repeat. Read as a sentence: Roosevelt asks what the object of the British government’s request is, does not think it desirable that the trip should be made a junketing one, and says that if they call at an English port it should be after the trip to Kiel. The contributor’s gloss is that Roosevelt asked what Britain wanted from a visit by the American squadron; the history is his and was not checked here.

04 What remains uncertain

• No codebook entry, page number or spelling-table row was compared with the codebook pages by the project, and the 23 groups were not compared with the scan; the evidence is that 23 groups taken from a codebook give a coherent English telegram, which is what the contributor reports; no alternative book was tested.
• The squadron and the Kiel visit are the contributor’s gloss of the text; the telegram itself names neither the squadron nor the year.
• Whether Hay’s received copy or a printed edition of Roosevelt’s papers carries the decipherment was not searched by the project or, as far as the submission says, by the contributor.
• No statistical validation is recorded; it does not apply to a codebook lookup.

Full texts

The transcription and the decryption of every document on this page, so that the reading can be used and checked. Short files are shown here; all are in the repository.

Telegram of 27 May 1903, Roosevelt to Hay (LoC Roosevelt Papers reel 413 frame 0026)

Roosevelt, asks the Secretary of State what the object of the British government's request is, says he does not think it desirable that the trip should be made a junketing one, and says that if they touch at an English port it should be after the trip to Kiel, in his judgment.

# Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress, reel 413, frame 0026; Theodore Roosevelt Center record o266250. Roosevelt to John Hay, 27 May 1903.
# Transcription as given by the contributor (William Echols, issue #353). A [cancelled] mark is a cancelled group.
56169 41276 of 18427s 47372? 33900 52844 think
it 25361 [cancelled] 52597 53664 38401 10000 junketing 41798.
34036 53279 at [cancelled] 28040 43758 36556 16440 11698 the
53664 53149 U a w c 34553 36885.

# Literal decipherment (the contributor's): the groups replaced by their entries, clear words as written; brackets mark clear words repeated by the decipherment.
What is the object of British governments request? I do not think [think]
it desirable that the trip should be made a junketing one.
If they touch at English port it should be after the [the]
trip to Kiel in my judgment.

# Telegram of 27 May 1903, the text read

What is the object of the British government's request? I do not think it desirable that the trip should be made a junketing one. If they touch at an English port, it should be after the trip to Kiel, in my judgment.

The literal decipherment has no possessive apostrophe in "governments" and repeats "think" and "the"; the sentence above normalises those and adds the article before "English port" (decipherment: "at English port").

Key: key_excerpt.tsv

05 Sources

• Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, reel 413, frame 0026; Theodore Roosevelt Center, record o266250 (record); the scan is not reproduced here.
• The State Department Red Cipher of 1876 (J. H. Haswell), National Archives catalog id 417267710, microfilm T1171; also printed, a repository note says, in Weber (1979), not consulted here. The codebook pages are not reproduced here.
• William Echols, issue #353: the transcription, the key identification and the reading.
• Florentijn van Kampen, study of the State Department codes, (hdl.handle.net/10062/109746): the clue for the group 10000 and the pointer to the codebook.

The documentation, the key excerpt, the transcription, the reading and the check are in targets/roosevelt1903.