BEFORE THE ROOSEVELTS PROCEEDED with their European tour, they snatched a brief family vacation at Porto Maurizio, on the Italian Riviera. Edith’s unmarried younger sister, Emily Carow, lived there. She called her home Villa Magna Quies—“house of great quiet”—but its peace was disturbed on 11 April by the arrival of Gifford Pinchot.
Lanky, passionate, and sad-eyed, the former chief forester had a litany of sins against progressive Republicanism to blame on President Taft. He specifically cited sixteen. In his monomaniacal hostility toward all who would not believe as he did, Pinchot was not unlike Reverend Tipple—except that for him, God was in nature, and man’s duty was to serve the Almighty with practical works: environmental, economic, and social. Physically hard and cold, he had spent his life trying to make himself more so, sleeping on the floor with a woodblock pillow—outdoors, if possible—and getting his valet to douse him every morning with buckets of ice water.
Roosevelt admired the hardness, if not the narrowness that came with it. Pinchot, born to Main Line wealth, had never had to live on equal terms with the “plain people” he invoked so patronizingly. Unmarried at forty-four, he had fathered no children, lost no electoral campaigns, faced no bullets in battle. Roosevelt, in contrast, had—and in those respects alone was the bigger man. Which probably explained Pinchot’s increasing devotion, now that neither of them held power.
They spent most of that day and evening together. Pinchot got the attention he craved (“One of the best & most satisfactory talks with T.R. I ever had”), while Roosevelt pored over a sheaf of disturbing letters from other progressive Republicans. All warned that some of his most cherished reforms were doomed, unless something was done soon to check the alliance developing between the administration and reactionaries in Congress.
He was more impressed by the letters than by their carrier. Perhaps Taft had been right to fire so uncompromising a person. “Gifford is a dear, but he is a fanatic.”
FOUR DAYS LATER, Roosevelt and Kermit, traveling stag while Edith and Ethel proceeded independently to Paris, arrived in Vienna. A familiar, courtly figure awaited them at their hotel: Henry White, whom Taft had so brusquely removed as American ambassador to France. Roosevelt was overjoyed to see him. He had written ahead to ask if White, schooled in the nuances of Old World diplomacy, would consider being at his side in Berlin and London.
“ ‘GIFFORD IS A DEAR, BUT HE IS A FANATIC.’ ”
Gifford Pinchot, former chief forester of the United States. (photo credit i2.1)
Vienna was a plus. As somebody who had dealt personally with many of the monarchs he was to see during the next month and a half, White would be a useful adviser—particularly on how to handle Wilhelm II, that constant imponderable on the international scene. Roosevelt could look after himself in republican France. He wanted to avoid the danger of becoming an emissary between the four most truculent powers in Europe. No matter how often he protested that he was “merely a private citizen,” he could not ignore the consequences of his presidency, his Nobel Peace Prize, his international circle of acquaintance, and (perhaps most persuasive of all) the publicity glow he generated in motion, like that of the great comet currently approaching Venus.
After a reunion breakfast, the two men went over to the Hofburg palace at the invitation of Emperor Franz Joseph. White sat in an anteroom while Roosevelt had the disarming experience of being hailed as the embodiment of “the present and future” by an octogenarian who admitted to being “the last representative of the old system.”
Franz Joseph had held Austria and Hungary together, with difficulty, for sixty-one years. He spoke in French, out of courtesy to the Colonel’s rusty German, and confessed that he was curious to see for himself how somebody so modern “felt and thought.” Roosevelt had detected a similar tempora mutantur wistfulness in the conversation of Victor Emmanuel, who seemed resigned to socialistic trends in Italy. Both rulers evidently felt that republicanism would soon be the doom of royalty, in Europe as well as Russia.
Aware that he was gazing for the first time into the eyes of a Habsburg, he was interested, but not awed. The best that could be said of the old monarch was that he was “a gentleman”—in Roosevelt’s mind, the highest of social categories. Not so the Emperor’s nephew and heir apparent. Archduke Franz Ferdinand struck him as “a furious reactionary in every way, political and ecclesiastical both.”
Meeting later with the Austrian Prime Minister, Richard von Bienerth, and Baron Alois von Aehrenthal, minister of foreign affairs, Roosevelt felt more at home. They were statesmen like himself, well-born Realpolitikers, executives of driving force. Yet he sensed a strategic insecurity in their conversation, not unlike that of condominium officials in Egypt. They clearly relied on Germany to hold their multicultural empire together. At the same time, they were worried about German disapproval of Austria-Hungary’s recent annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the hyphens alone betrayed the looseness of the overall structure), not to mention calls for revenge in Russia and Serbia, likely allies in any Balkan war. Germany’s fear of such an imbroglio was understandable: if Russia marched to Serbia’s aid, the Reich was treaty-bound to defend Austria-Hungary.
Roosevelt repeated to Bienerth a prophecy he had heard from the Duke of Abruzzi in Rome, that two great wars were certain: one between Great Britain and Germany, and another between the United States and Japan. He said he personally doubted the latter, as long as his government kept up a strong defense, and fortified Hawaii and the Panama Canal.
For the next thirty-six hours, he had to submit to the same quasi-royal honors that had at first amused, then exasperated him in Italy. Trumpets blared, swords and rifles clashed, and crowds blocked every street and square as he moved from the sixteenth-century Spanische Hofreitschule, through the Jockey Club to a medieval country castle, and finally to Schönbrunn Palace. He tried without success to make his hosts understand that he was no longer President of the United States. The non-republican mind, it seemed, could not conceive of sovereignty as finite.
Surrounded by flunkeys, guarded wherever he went, Roosevelt was screened off from the extraordinary changes occurring at lower levels of Viennese society—changes more radical than anywhere else in Europe, and coincident with Austria-Hungary’s thrust into the Balkans. He did not see the pornographic nudes of Klimt and Schiele, Kokoschka’s explosive studies of angst-filled burghers, the rectilinear architecture of the Secessionists. He was deaf to the atonality of Schönberg and the warnings of local poets and playwrights that an apocalypse was coming.
All he knew, as he attended a dinner in his honor at Schönbrunn Palace, was that he had chosen the right country to be born in. Halfway through the banquet, he watched aghast as Franz Joseph and fellow guests performed an ablution dating back to the days of Maria Theresia. Finger bowls were brought in, each with a small glass of water, and the flower of Habsburg aristocracy proceeded to swig, rinse, and spit.
These people, Roosevelt realized, were not merely old-fashioned, but “living in a world as remote from mine as if it had been France before the revolution.”
REMOTER STILL WAS that of the Magyar oligarchy in Hungary, where Serbs and Slovaks were suppressed with such discrimination that only one citizen in twenty could vote.
Roosevelt was met at the border by Count Albert Apponyi, an old patriot resentful of the “Dual Monarchy” linking royal Budapest to imperial Vienna. He noticed, as he and Kermit rode to Apponyi’s castle for lunch, that each village they passed through had a separate ethnic identity: either Slav, or Magyar, or Teuton. It was Sunday morning, 22 April. Catholic and Protestant churches disgorged their separate congregations.
Multicultural himself, he flabbergasted Apponyi with a long, almost verbatim quotation from a Magyar saga, which he said he had not thought of in twenty years. Proceeding after dark to Budapest, where thousands welcomed him in heavy rain, he scrupulously alluded to Franz Joseph as their “king,” not their emperor. Next morning, he made an extempore address to the mostly Ma
gyar members of parliament. He pretended to be surprised when they reacted in ecstasy to his rapid-fire citations of Árpád, St. Stephen, Mátyás Corvin, the Golden Bull, the Battle of Mohács, the Bogomil heresy, and other episodes from Hungary’s history. He was, of course, showing off, in a way that would have made Edith Roosevelt cringe, had she been there. But his audience had never heard a foreign statesman express such understanding of them.
Twenty-four hours later, after a round of visits to ambassadors and state officials, Roosevelt was accorded the greatest popular demonstration seen in Budapest since the return of Franz Liszt in 1846. His carriage had to force its way through well-wishers along the esplanade. Cheers pursued him into his hotel until he reemerged to make a speech of thanks. It was translated line by line into Magyar. Cal O’Laughlin, standing by, reported: “With every expression there was a shout which rolled over the berg across the river and came back in a thundering echo. I have seen many demonstrations, but that one by the Danube has not been surpassed in my experience.”
BY THE TIME ROOSEVELT reached Paris on the twenty-first, it was apparent that he was the most famous man in the world. In their respective sovereignties, the Kaiser, King Edward VII, and the Tsar of Russia might be better known, but none had his democratic appeal, nor his press appeal across three continents. “When he appears, the windows shake for three miles around,” one overawed correspondent wrote. “He has the gift, nay the genius of being sensational.”
He knew enough of fame not to expect it to last. But with seven kingdoms still to visit, and reports of a massive homecoming being planned for him in New York, he had to brace himself for more and more adulation. “Like the elder Mr. Weller’s Thanksgiving turkey,” he joked to Robert Bacon, the American ambassador waiting to greet him at the Gare de Lyon, “I am old and tough and I will be all right for everything.”
Jules Jusserand, Bacon’s opposite number in Washington, was also on the platform. Roosevelt adored the spry little diplomat, a medieval scholar and veteran of his White House “Tennis Cabinet.” It had been Jusserand’s idea to have him address the Sorbonne. Both ambassadors had been working for some months to balance their desire to have him meet France’s political elite, and his preference for the society of intellectuals. As a result, his calendar for the next week juxtaposed the names of President Armand Fallières, Prime Minister Aristide Briand, Foreign Minister Stéphen Pichon, the Radical leader Georges Clemenceau, and other public men with those of Edith Wharton, Auguste Rodin, the historians Victor Bérard and Pierre de La Gorce, and a brace of literary barons, Paul d’Estournelles de Constant and Pierre de Coubertin.
En route to the Sorbonne on Saturday, 23 April, Roosevelt stopped off to thank officers of the Académie de Sciences Morales et Politiques for electing him an associate member. He did so in French, apologizing for his abuse of the language of Voltaire. “Quand on parle français, on manie l’instrument le plus précis et le plus éclair qui existe.”*
Shortly before three o’clock he entered the grand amphitheater of the university to a standing ovation. Jusserand had seen to it that he was flanked onstage by representatives of the French Institute’s five academies: Arts, Letters, Sciences, Belles Lettres, and finally the Académie Française itself, represented by eleven green-robed immortels. Elsewhere sat ministers in court dress, army and navy officers in full uniform, nine hundred students, and an audience of two thousand ticket holders. The vice-rector of the Sorbonne announced that the greatest voice of the New World was about to speak. Turning to Roosevelt, he said, “Vous unissez le moral à la politique et le droit à la force.”*
No thirteen words could have better proved the Colonel’s linguistic point, made just an hour earlier. He stuck to English, with the help of an interpreter, as he proceeded to read his long oration, entitled “Citizenship in a Republic.”
Acknowledging the right of the French to be proud of their old and sophisticated civilization, he made no apology for the relative rawness of his own. He boasted that the first Roosevelts in New Amsterdam had fought off hostile Indians and lived on equal terms with “traders, plowmen, woodchoppers, and fisherfolk.” This somewhat rusticated his family’s urban history. But he sought to emphasize that “primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities” before a nation could think of becoming a republic. Even after it did, it was likely to exhibit “all the defects of an intense individualism” for a century or so. The “materialism” of contemporary industrial America was simply the pioneer spirit redux.
Politically, however, the United States and France were of mutual stature. Sister republics in a world of Empire, they represented “the most gigantic of all possible social experiments,” that of perfecting democratic rule. They were not dependent on the excellence, or incompetence, of hereditary monarchs; they must rely on the quality of the average citizen.
And on his fertility too. With a directness probably not heard at the Sorbonne in a century, except in lectures on anthropology, Roosevelt declared: “The chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land.” France (he did not need to name her in this connection: her falling birthrate was well-known fact) had to fight “the curse of sterility.” She must breed soldiers to protect her and assert her rights.
This touched on France’s other neurosis: fear of conquest by a Germany expansive on land and at sea. War, he granted, was “a dreadful thing.” But shrinking from it when it loomed was worse. “The question must be, ‘Is right to prevail?’ … And the answer from a strong and virile people must be, ‘Yes,’ whatever the cost.”
Roosevelt bit off every word as was his habit, with snapping teeth and wreathing lips. Spectators in the farthest recesses of the hall could feel the force of his opinions even before the interpreter translated them. Their ears, attuned to the mercurial flow of French speech, had to adjust to his raspy, jerky delivery (accompanied by smacks of right fist into left palm) and the strange falsetto he used for extra emphasis. Nothing could be less mielleux. But his foreignness excused him, and won repeated applause.
The loudest came when he attacked skeptics “of lettered leisure” who, cloistered in academe, “sneered” at anyone trying to make the real world better.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
IF ONLY BECAUSE ROOSEVELT clearly identified himself with the man in the arena, he had scored one of his greatest rhetorical triumphs. The Journal des Débats printed the speech as a special Sunday supplement, declaring that nobody who heard it could help being “attracted, seduced, disoriented, and conquered.” Le Temps sent copies to every schoolteacher in France. Royalist as well as republican commentators praised it as a call for centralized authority over Marxist sedition. Military patriots rejoiced in the Colonel’s moralization of war.
Only two chauvinistic journals, L’Éclair and La Patrie, sneered at him for uttering American banalities. That did not stop Librairie Hachette from issuing a luxury reprint of his address on Japanese vellum. A popular pocket-book edition sold five thousand copies in five days. Translations appeared in many European cities, while the original text became known to British and American readers simply as “The Man in the Arena.” Roosevelt was surprised at its success, admitting to Henry Cabot Lodge that the reaction of the French was “a little difficult for me to understand.”
He wanted to spend 27 April, his last day
in town, sightseeing with Edith. But Jusserand informed him that the German Emperor was planning “a big review” in his honor. France would “take it amiss” if he did not recognize her, too, as a great military power. Roosevelt saw that the ambassador was upset, and agreed to watch troops stage a mimic battle at Vincennes.
Command headquarters of the French army, the castle glittered with national pride—or what was left of pride, besmirched by the conspiracism and antisemitism of l’affaire Dreyfus. For two and a quarter hours that morning, Roosevelt sat on horseback as cannons boomed and blank bullets rattled. The action was fought at double-quick pace, to accommodate his schedule. He could have been viewing a Pathé newsreel, yet in color and with sound. Across the vast field beyond the garrison, relays of infantry charged. Cavalry forces engaged them in rearguard action. At the end of each rush, machine guns spat fire.
NEXT DAY, THE COLONEL and his entourage (now including Cal O’Laughlin as a press spokesman, and two aides, Lawrence Abbott and Frank Harper, courtesy of The Outlook) reentered the world of monarchy. They traveled east via Brussels, where they were received by King Albert and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. The huge, awkward young ruler endeared himself to Roosevelt with his “excellent manners and not a touch of pretension.” Queen Wilhelmina of Holland repelled him with exactly the opposite combination. He thought her “not only commonplace, but common … a real little Dutch middle-class frau.”
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