Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Roosevelt had learned as president that the Kaiser needed praise as much as oxygen, so he kept invoking imperial values as he went on. But when he remarked on the longevity of some cultures, as opposed to others that died, he used one of Wilhelm’s least favorite words, dropping it like acid into the balm of his previous flattery. “Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman.”

  Nor was he finished:

  The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus … [yet] he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.

  The last statement, at least, was calculated to get the Kaiser’s head nodding again. Roosevelt swung into his main argument, which was that the spread of Greco-Roman culture across half the globe presaged the “world movement” now known as Western civilization. He listed the main features of European history since the invention of printing, in such primer-like fashion that scholars in the audience—many of whom had spent their careers studying the complexities of each—listened with expressions ranging from surprise to bemusement. Those who could understand English did not know whether they were being patronized, or merely disregarded by this species of genus Americanus egotisticus. Roosevelt certainly seemed to care little for the Kaiser’s racial phobias:

  Here and there, instances occur where … an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud … intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

  So much for the Yellow Peril. Roosevelt went on to suggest that the best aspirations of all modern cultures were connected, as never before, by a web of global communications. “The bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.”

  As at the Sorbonne, he spoke too long, and equivocated too often. So the most cautionary part of his address, a reminder that the world’s new inter-connectedness could just as easily bring about its destruction, lulled more than it alarmed:

  Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousand-fold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.…

  The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself.

  But it was a warm afternoon, and the auditorium was stuffy. Here and there, grayheaded professors slept.

  ROOSEVELT’S BERLIN UNIVERSITY ADDRESS was even less of a success than his speech in Christiania. Local newspapers gave it scant attention. Nevertheless, he enjoyed substantive interviews over the next two days with many eminent Berliners, from Bethmann-Hollweg and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz to the aeronaut Count Zeppelin and the wildlife photographer C. G. Schillings. The German he had learned as a teenager in Dresden came back to him, and he had no difficulty making himself understood.

  Back at the embassy, he was tickled to receive a set of photographs of himself and the Kaiser conversing at Döberitz. Each print was annotated on the back by Wilhelm, with heavy Prussian humor:

  The Colonel of the Rough Riders lecturing the Chief of the German Army

  A piece of good advice: “Carnegie is an old Peace bore”

  The German and Anglo Saxon Races combined will keep the world in order!

  Just before he left for London, an emissary came to ask if he would mind returning the pictures. Clearly, someone in the imperial suite dreaded that they might be published. But Roosevelt could already see them framed in glass, front and back, on display at his home in Oyster Bay.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “His Majesty the Kaiser gave the photographs to me and I propose to retain them.”

  * “When one speaks French, one handles the clearest and most precise instrument that exists.”

  * “You unite morality with politics, and right with might.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Honorabilem Theodorum

  The man Flammonde, from God knows where,

  With firm address and foreign air,

  With news of nations in his talk

  And something royal in his walk,

  With glint of iron in his eyes,

  But never doubt, nor yet surprise,

  Appeared, and stayed, and held his head

  As one with kings accredited.

  ROOSEVELT EMERGED FROM his train at London’s Victoria Station early on Monday, 16 May, with a band of black crape round his silk topper and another band around his left coat sleeve. A solemn and silver-bearded gentleman bade him welcome. It was Whitelaw Reid, whom five years before he had appointed American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Another familiar figure pushed forward, lean, long-faced, unmistakably English: his old friend Arthur Lee, M.P. Both men were wealthy, with stately homes in the country, and both were competing to introduce Roosevelt to the ne plus ultra of British society.

  Reid had won the first round, since protocol demanded that the special ambassador stay in his official residence, Dorchester House. But Roosevelt planned to escape from that gilded prison as soon as the funeral obsequies were over. He preferred the self-effacing Lee to Reid, who, like so many former press barons, was inclined to be pompous.

  For the next six or seven days, he had to behave with extreme formality. He was assigned a royal carriage, a military attaché, two British aides-de-camp, six grenadier guards, and even a bugler, to herald his comings and goings. Reid explained that he must make calls at all the noble houses and ranking embassies in London, and be at home when his calls were returned. He should be particularly solicitous toward the monarchs and ministers who had entertained him in Europe. On Thursday, he would take his place among the grandest of these grandees at a pre-funeral banquet in Buckingham Palace, and on Friday, join them in following Edward VII’s cortège to Windsor Castle.

  Although his special status would lapse after that, Roosevelt found himself committed to a packed schedule of interviews, reunions, lunches, teas, and dinners that would fill his every waking hour for the next three weeks. In short, he would see little of Edith and even less of his children. In view of Kermit’s apparent resolve to mourn Edward in a panama hat, that was probably just as well.

  First of all, homage had to be paid to the new king. Roosevelt breakfasted at the embassy, then proceeded with Reid to Marlborough House, where George V awaited them.

  His Majesty turned out to be a fortyish retired naval officer, simple and unaffected in manner. He thanked Roosevelt for making a salutary speech at Cairo University, and wondered if “something of the kind, but stronger,” could be said in London. Roosevelt offered to do so at a reception planned for him in the Guildhall, at the end of the month. But it would be necessary to get the approval of Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary. The King gratefully kept talking for almost an hour, and introduced him to Queen Mary and other members of the royal family.

  Roosevelt’s laryngitis was still bad enough that he spoke with occasional gasps. For the first time in his life he obeyed a royal command, and went to Edward VII’s personal thro
at doctor for treatment. As a result, he was hard-pressed to make his appointments with other heads of state before lunch.

  His “at home” sojourn that afternoon offered little respite. No sooner had he climbed Reid’s marble stairway to deal with his correspondence than a footman portentously announced, “The King of Norway is below, sir.”

  Roosevelt threw down his pen in mock annoyance. “Confound these kings; will they never let me alone!”

  HIS LAST VISITOR of the day was royalty of another sort. If Alice Roosevelt Longworth was no longer, at twenty-six, the scintillating “Princess Alice” she had been before her marriage, she had matured into a more complex, richly eccentric personality. Always exquisitely dressed, in rembrandt hats and fabrics that complemented her long-lashed, amethyst eyes, she now sported a cigarette holder, and knew just when to wave it, as she smokily discharged one of her patented sarcasms. In contrast to her sedate half sister, Alice was a born socialite, happiest under the chandeliers of the very rich. However, she also had a yen for rough, male political parlors—as her father had, in that never-mentioned period when he was married to the original Alice.

  She floated into Dorchester House an hour before midnight, fresh from a transatlantic steamer, bringing a gale of Washington gossip with her. Alice’s chat amounted to primary information, for she was a favorite of President Taft, and the wife of one of his closest associates, Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati. She clearly saw that her father’s return home was going to cause a crisis of leadership in the Republican Party. At all costs he must stay aloof from politics—unless in his heart he wanted to be president again. Alice certainly wanted that in her heart. She had buried what she called “a voodoo” in the White House garden.

  “A BORN SOCIALITE, HAPPIEST UNDER THE CHANDELIERS OF THE VERY RICH.”

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ca. 1910. (photo credit i3.1)

  FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK Roosevelt went about his business, while hundreds of other envoys fulfilled similar obligations. Name after titled name crowded his calendar: the Princess Royal, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, King George of Greece, Prince and Princess Christian, the Duke of Norfolk, Princess Henry of Battenberg, the Marquess of Londonderry, the Duchess of Argyll, Lords Lansdowne, Clarendon, and Cromer. More to his taste was an interview with Sir Edward Grey—“one of the finest fellows I ever met.”

  Emerging one morning from Buckingham Palace with Henry White, he was pounced on by Wilhelm II. “My dear friend, I am so glad to have arrived in time to see you.… I have an hour to spare, and we can have a good talk.” Roosevelt glanced at his watch and said that, unfortunately, he was not quite as free. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”

  His bluntness was so unlike the reverence Wilhelm was used to that it beguiled rather than offended. The Kaiser settled for as long as he would stop, and was rewarded with inside information on what members of the House of Lords felt about Germany’s naval program. Roosevelt was uninhibited in saying what he thought of scaremongers like Lord Londonderry: “No more brains than those of a guinea-pig.” Wilhelm quoted this remark in a cable to Bethmann-Hollweg. It did not seem to cross his mind that the Colonel might be just as frank in talking about him to British leaders.

  By late Thursday afternoon, as Roosevelt sat at tea in Dorchester House with a large company of English and American guests, he was beginning to show symptoms of explosive effervescence, as always in periods of intense activity. “I’m going to a Wake this evening,” he wheezed, chortling. Heads turned in shock as he repeated, “I’m going to a Wake at Buckingham Palace!”

  “I HARDLY KNOW what else to call it,” he wrote afterward, in a private account of his service as a diplomat. At one protocol level, the “wake,” hosted by George V, was a gathering of some seventy special ambassadors, many of them royal; at another, it amounted to a dinner in honor of Wilhelm II, the senior monarch present.

  In contrast to the star-studded uniforms on display, Roosevelt wore what the State Department considered appropriate for a representative of the New World: a swallow-tailed black suit with black studs in his boiled shirt-front. Minus the studs and plus a top hat, it would do him as well at the funeral. For all the severity of his appearance and carefully solemn expression, the satirist in him saw that the next twenty-four hours were going to be rich in comedy.

  He was buttonholed at once by the self-styled “Tsar” of Bulgaria, who was a pariah at the party for having recently declared his country an empire. The bearded former prince was triumphant after denying Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary transit rights through his wagon-lit on the train they had shared from Vienna to Calais. As a result, the archduke had been forced to alight at station stops whenever he got hungry, and march furiously down the platform to the dining car.

  Wilhelm II did not find this as funny as Roosevelt did. Seeing him in conversation with the Tsar, he walked up and thrust himself between them. “Roosevelt, my friend, I want to introduce you to the King of Spain. He is worth talking to.”

  That proved to be the case, although there was a chilly moment when Alfonso XIII said, “I have admired your career, and I have also admired your military career, though I am sorry that your honors should have been won at the expense of my countrymen.” Evidently, memories of the Spanish-American War still rankled south of the Pyrenees. The King went on to express gratification over the Vatican incident, saying that Catholicism in Spain had begun to encroach intolerably upon civilian life, and was causing an anarchist backlash, not unlike that in the Balkans. “I assure you that much though I object to the anarchists, I do not regard them as more dangerous to my country than are the ultraclericals. Of the two, I mind the extreme right even more than I mind the extreme left.”

  Roosevelt had been saying the same thing, in almost identical words, for at least ten years, and was proportionately impressed.

  His solemnity was further strained when Stéphen Pichon, the French minister of foreign affairs, approached him for a republican tête-à-tête.

  He is a queer looking creature at best, but on this particular evening anger made him look like a gargoyle. His clothes were stiff with gold lace and he wore sashes and orders.… He got me aside and asked me in French, as he did not speak English, what colored coat my coachman had worn that evening. I told him that I did not know; whereupon he answered that his coachman had a black coat. I nodded and said Yes, I thought mine had a black coat also. He responded with much violence that this was an outrage, a slight upon the two great republics, as all the Royalties’ coachmen wore red coats, and that he would at once make a protest on behalf of us both. I told him to hold on, that he must not make any protests on my behalf, that I did not care what kind of coat my coachman wore, and would be perfectly willing to see him wear a green coat with yellow splashes—“un paletot vert avec des tauches jaunes” being my effort at idiomatic rendering of the idea, for I speak French, I am sorry to say, as if it were a non-Aryan tongue, without tense or gender, although with agglutinative vividness and fluency. My incautious incursion into levity in a foreign tongue met appropriate punishment, for I spent the next fifteen minutes in eradicating from Pichon’s mind the belief that I was demanding these colors as my livery.

  The Kaiser swooped again when he saw Roosevelt being accosted by the henpecked Prince Consort of Holland. The King of Denmark introduced the King of Greece, whom he already knew. Monarch vied with monarch in getting him to tell stories of Africa, Cuba, and “the Wild West.”

  As the all-male evening dragged on through dinner and cordials and cigars, Roosevelt was treated to royal confidences of embarrassing intimacy. Prince Ernest of Cumberland complained that “if it were not for him”—glowering across the table at Wilhelm II—“he would be the King of Hanover.” The King of Greece begged him to lend his voice to Greek claims on Crete, just as George V wanted him to do on behalf of British rule in Egypt. Even after he had said goodnight, three more kings pursued him to the palace door.

  They knew that I was not coming
back to Europe, that I would never see them again, or try in any way to keep up relations with them; and so they felt free to treat [me] with an intimacy, and on a footing of equality, which would have been impossible with a European.… In a way, although the comparison sounds odd, these sovereigns, in their relations among themselves and with others, reminded me of the officers and wives in one of our western army posts in the old days, when they were shut up together and away from the rest of the world, were sundered by an impassable gulf from the enlisted men and the few scouts, hunters and settlers round about, and were knit together into one social whole, and nevertheless were riven asunder by bitter jealousies, rivalries, and dislikes.

  FRIDAY, 20 MAY 1910, was a day so beautiful that all London seemed to want to be outdoors and see the procession scheduled to depart from Buckingham Palace at 9:30 A.M. Hours before the first drumbeat sounded, a mass of humanity blocked every approach to the parade route along the Mall to Westminster Hall. There was little noise and less movement as the crowd waited under a cloudless sky. Green Park was at its greenest. The air, washed clean by rain overnight, was sweet and warm, alive with birdsong.

  Roosevelt arrived early in the palace yard, where horses and coaches were lining up, and was again accosted by a furious Stéphen Pichon. The Duke of Norfolk had decreed that because of their lack of royal uniforms, they could not ride with the mounted mourners. Instead, they were to share a dress landau. Pichon noted, in a voice shaking with rage, that it would be eighth in a sequence of twelve, behind a carriage packed with Chinese imperials of uncertain gender. Not only that, it was a closed conveyance, whereas some royal ladies up front had been assigned “glass coaches.”