Shipyard awarded peace prize replica Facility’s role in 1906 negotiations cited

NEW CASTLE, N.H. – A replica of the Nobel Peace Prize was presented Sunday to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in recognition of the yard’s role in historic peace negotiations a century ago.

Diplomats from Russia and Japan spent a month at the yard negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for arranging the negotiations.

A committee that organized last year’s celebration of the treaty’s centennial presented the replica to Navy Capt. Jon Iverson at Wentworth-by-the-Sea, the sprawling hotel in New Castle where the diplomats stayed. The shipyard is nearby in Kittery, Maine, on an island between Maine and New Hampshire.

The treaty recognized Japan’s dominance in Manchuria and Korea.

Roosevelt spent the summer of 1905 at his home in Oyster Bay, N.Y., and never attended the negotiations. But he followed their progress closely and his back-channel contacts with the parties helped keep the talks on track.

The replica, from the Nobel Institute in Norway, was presented by Chuck Doleac, the Portsmouth lawyer who headed the centennial committee.

During Sunday’s luncheon presentation, Doleac said Roosevelt’s involvement in the negotiations gave the United States moral authority at a time when it was emerging as a world power.

“This Nobel Peace Prize anniversary is a time to remember not the Theodore Roosevelt who wielded ‘big stick’ diplomacy but the Theodore Roosevelt who as president understood how to use a great nation’s diplomatic good offices for peace,” Doleac said in remarks prepared for Sunday.

“Roosevelt’s Nobel recognizes that Roosevelt’s unique diplomacy was the first that used all of the forces that have since distinguished the United States on the world stage: the capacity of the American people for good will, the military’s tradition as peacemaker, and the respect for the individual nations’ ability to negotiate their differences between themselves,” he said.