Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  A sobering display of German naval might greeted him when he transferred to a Danish steamer at Kiel on the morning of 2 May. He was en route to Norway, and would not properly enter the Reich for another week. Even so, the dreadnoughts and battle cruisers cramming Kiel’s inner fjord presented their great guns, and rank upon rank of sailors saluted him as he cruised out of the harbor.

  From where he stood on the steamer’s bridge, he could glimpse the entrance to Kaiser Wilhelm Canal, crossing the Jutland peninsula. A miniature of his own project in Panama, it showed signs of ominous enlargement. Those dreadnoughts would soon have no problem moving between the Baltic and the North Sea.

  Denmark opened out to port: flat, fertile, easily conquerable. King Frederick VIII was unavailable to greet the Roosevelts in Copenhagen, being out of the country on vacation. But by royal command, they were put up at the palace, and entertained by Crown Prince Christian. Roosevelt was informed that the last occupant of their suite had been the King of England, whom he might or might not be seeing later in the month.

  According to news reports, Edward VII was not at all well.

  They journeyed on to Christiania by night train, arriving there at noon on 4 May. Again they received a royal welcome. King Haakon VII and Queen Maud were on hand at the station, more palace accommodations provided, and the inevitable state banquet loomed.

  Norway, despite its energetic attempt at pomp and circumstance, looked to Roosevelt “as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opéra bouffe.” Crowds lining the streets cheered with a peculiar barking sound. The royal family was palpably bourgeois: “It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king.” However, given the inability of Europeans to think of continuity except in terms of heredity, he had to admire the way Norway had democratized its monarchy.

  On the following day, he braced himself for a round of academic exercises in honor of his Nobel Peace Prize. He did so without enthusiasm, resentful of pressure from Andrew Carnegie to make a speech pleading for arms control, prior to lobbying the Kaiser. The pesky little millionaire (“Here is what I should say to His Imperial Majesty, were I in your place”), then expected to be invited to a follow-up disarmament conference in London—as a return, presumably, for financing Roosevelt’s safari.

  Christiania was the obvious forum for a condemnation of the Anglo-German naval race, which vied with the Balkan situation as a likely cause of Europe’s next war. But what Roosevelt had seen of uneasy peace in North Africa, fractious peace in Austria-Hungary, and resentful peace in France had revived his old doubts about “the whole Hague idea of talking away conflicts that had to happen.”

  In addition, he had developed a case of bronchitis. It was too late, though, for him to wheeze regrets. Christiania was bedecked with flags and evergreens. Long before he arrived at the National Theater, where the Nobel Committee awaited him, all 1,800 seats were taken by eager members of the public.

  Roosevelt’s oration was understandably brief and hard to hear. It drew little applause. He thanked the Committee for honoring him, and said he had dedicated his prize money to a foundation, not yet active, that would help resolve major labor disputes. “For in our complex industrial civilization of today, the peace of righteousness and justice—the only kind of peace worth having—is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations.”

  This was not the kind of peace Carnegie, or the Committee, hoped he would salute. When he did raise the subject of the naval arms race, he said only that “something should be done as soon as possible” to check it. He gave conditional support to the idea of arbitration treaties between powers “civilized” enough to hate war, and was prepared to believe that a Third Hague Conference might improve on the First and the Second. Finally he said something unequivocal. “It would be a master stroke if those great Powers honestly bent on peace would form a League of Peace, not only to keep the peace among themselves, but to prevent, by force if necessary, its being broken by others.”

  The idea was arresting, if hardly new. It went back to Hugo Grotius’s “Society of States” linked by one law. Even the phrase “League of Peace” had been used before, by the British statesman Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. But Roosevelt gave it an original twist by warning that such a body would count for nothing if it did not have punitive, as well as judicial, authority. The impotence of the permanent court of arbitration at The Hague tribunal was a case in point. World peace, in his opinion, could be effected only by a concert of mature nations exercising “international police power.” He repeated the words police and power, as well as force and violence, three times each before sitting down.

  Carnegie, disgusted, gave up all faith that the Colonel would serve as his personal peace envoy at Potsdam. “There’s a trace of the savage,” he wrote, “in that original compound.”

  THE NEXT ROYAL PERSON to greet Roosevelt, at Stockholm’s Central Station early on the morning of 7 May, was Crown Prince William. He had news that threw into disarray all the future plans and protocol Lawrence Abbott had been working on. King Edward VII had died of pneumonia during the night.

  Coughing and feverish himself, Roosevelt was relieved to have an excuse to shorten his stay in Sweden. Five weeks of being the most famous man in the world had been enough for him. He was happy to cede his title to a corpse, and did not care if he never stayed in another palace with European plumbing.

  He sent a telegram to Berlin, asking if the Kaiser—King Edward’s nephew—might “in view of the circumstances” like to withdraw his gracious offer of accommodations in the Royal Castle. Word came back that the German court had gone into official mourning. His Majesty, however, looked forward to entertaining Colonel Roosevelt privately, and to riding with him at the military exercises in Döberitz Field. After that, Wilhelm would leave for Great Britain, to attend the royal funeral. So would almost every other head of state and government leader on the Continent. The exact date of the ceremony would not be announced for several days. Only then could Roosevelt decide what to do about his own British engagements.

  Meanwhile, there hung in the sky over Europe, fading slightly in the light of dawn, the immense apparition of Halley’s Comet. It had shone with peculiar radiance in the small hours just after Edward died.

  THE FIRST THING Roosevelt noticed, when his train reentered Germany on Monday, 9 May 1910, was the smallness of the crowds at every railway station. Some depots offered no welcome at all. Throughout every country he had traversed so far, he had been greeted “not as a king, but as something more than a king”—to quote one reporter in his entourage. Here, people who bothered to notice him at all were at best civil.

  It was not dislike that showed on their faces, so much as lack of interest. They stolidly believed that Germany was the foremost nation in Europe, and would soon eclipse Britain as the world’s dominant power. To them, Theodore Roosevelt represented a republic of inferior culture, distant, disorganized, racially inchoate. Their press was free, their educational system unsurpassed, their economy explosive, their social security the envy of other states. They had the strongest army on earth, and the second strongest navy. How long could Britain—with aging, inefficient factories, acute class conflict, and twenty-one million fewer citizens—afford to keep ahead of the Kaiserreich in battleship construction?

  Germany’s fields and forests were beautifully tended, its towns clean, its roads and rails smooth, its factories new and thrumming with energy. There were no equivalents of the peasant hovels of Hungary and Belgium, the slums of Italy, the trash heaps and hideous advertising that blighted the American scene. Neat shops and markets bulged with produce. The efficient movement of traffic in the streets, obedient to every police signal, bespoke a national desire for order and discipline. This was plainly a country where everything worked.

  Except, to Roosevelt’s amusement, the timing and choice of terminus for his arrival in Berlin. There was a frenzied scurrying of imperial officials before he was apologetically re
ceived at Stettiner Bahnhof at 9:15 A.M. on Tuesday. They said that the Kaiser would have been present if protocol had not confined him to Potsdam. His Majesty expected the whole Roosevelt family there at noon.

  Checking in first at the American Embassy, Roosevelt sprayed his bronchi and prepared to meet a ruler he felt he had gotten to know almost personally as president. The prospect was not intimidating. Wilhelm II in 1910 was no longer the most dangerous man on the international scene. Two years earlier, he had come close to abdicating, after boasting too frankly about the German naval program to a British reporter. Since then, he had been further embarrassed by a homosexual scandal involving his circle of intimates. The hushed-up details were lurid enough for Wilhelm to remain in dread of the oligarchy of generals, admirals, and professors who held real power in Germany.

  “THEY STOLIDLY BELIEVED THAT GERMANY WAS THE FOREMOST NATION IN EUROPE.”

  The Reich around the time of Roosevelt’s visit. (photo credit i2.2)

  Fortunately for him, those Prussians were archtraditionalists, devoted to Hohenzollern rule. They thought of him as their homeland king, more than they cared about him being emperor of the multipartite Reich, which had yet to celebrate its fortieth anniversary. And he (a fantasist of Münchausian dimensions) saw himself as Frederick the Great reincarnated, with his love of male society, his need for performance art, and his obsession with military display.

  He received the Roosevelts outside Frederick’s Neue Palais, wearing the white-and-gold tunic of the Garde du Corps and a brass helmet, on which rode a silver spread eagle. Removed, the helmet revealed gray hair fast turning to white. At forty-nine the Kaiser was still, with his slate-blue eyes and erectile mustache, a transfixing figure—even if some of the fixity was provoked by his too-small left arm, cramped by forceps at birth.

  Were it not for that deformity, and the laughable contrast between his finery and Roosevelt’s black frock coat and top hat, the two men were alike enough to be brothers. They were the same height at five feet nine, the same weight at two hundred–odd pounds, and both hyperenergetic, with punchy gestures and body-shaking laughs. Their diction was clipped (the Kaiser spoke flawless English) and their talk torrential. But whereas Roosevelt was a careful listener and responder, Wilhelm heard little. He deviated in all directions, not out of evasiveness, but instability.

  “HE … SINCERELY BELIEVED HIMSELF TO BE A DEMI-GOD.”

  Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, ca. 1910. (photo credit i2.3)

  They sat apart during lunch in the Jasper Room, doing duty with each other’s wives. Elsewhere around the six small tables, Kermit and Ethel followed suit with diplomats and government officials, including Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg. When the party adjourned to the Shell Room, Wilhelm and Roosevelt began a marathon conversation. They stood face-to-face under corals and iridescent coquilles, taking no notice when their aides consulted pocket watches.

  Reporting afterward to the British historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Roosevelt wrote that he found the Kaiser affable and modest, and more humorous than most Prussians—although the humor turned to pomposity when Wilhelm was quizzed on subjects that he did not understand, “such as matters artistic and scientific.” Military, economic, and social affairs found them both on equal ground, as did the “fundamentals of domestic morality.” But Wilhelm would not go as far as Roosevelt in applying those fundamentals to foreign policy.

  At least we agreed in a cordial dislike of shams and of pretense, and therefore in a cordial dislike of the kind of washy movement for international peace with which Carnegie’s name has become so closely associated.…

  I said to the Emperor that it seemed to me that a war between England and Germany would be an unspeakable calamity. He answered eagerly that he quite agreed with me, that such a war he regarded as unthinkable; and he continued, “I was brought up in England, very largely; I feel myself partly an Englishman. Next to Germany I care more for England than for any other country.” Then with intense emphasis, “I ADORE ENGLAND!”

  Roosevelt asked about the possibility of a moratorium in the Anglo-German arms race. Wilhelm at once stiffened, saying there was no point in discussing it. Germany “was bound to be powerful on the ocean.” However, with his immense army, he was happy to let the Royal Navy maintain a strategic edge at sea. But English politicians must stop demonizing Germans as people bent on war.

  This sounded reasonable enough to Roosevelt, and confirmed his impression that neither the Kaiser nor Bethmann-Hollweg had designs across the Channel. Wilhelm seemed much more concerned about the “Yellow Peril” of Japanese expansionism. “This I was rather glad to see, because I have always felt that it would be a serious situation if Germany, the only white power as well organized as Japan, should strike hands with Japan. The thing that prevents it is Germany’s desire to stand well with Russia.”

  BY THE TIME the Colonel got back to Berlin that night, his voice was completely gone. He was diagnosed with laryngitis on top of bronchitis, and begged off a dinner in his honor. But before he could retire, a cable from the White House removed all doubts about his future itinerary:

  ROOSEVELT CARE AMERICAN EMBASSY BERLIN

  I SHOULD BE GLAD IF YOU WOULD ACT AS SPECIAL AMBASSADOR TO REPRESENT THE UNITED STATES AT THE FUNERAL OF KING EDWARD VII. I AM SURE THAT THE ENGLISH PEOPLE WILL BE HIGHLY GRATIFIED AT YOUR PRESENCE IN THIS CAPACITY AND THAT OUR PEOPLE WILL STRONGLY APPROVE IT. HAVE AS YET RECEIVED NO OFFICIAL NOTICE OF THE DATE OF FUNERAL BUT IT IS REPORTED THAT IT WILL TAKE PLACE ON THE 20TH OF THIS MONTH. PLEASE ANSWER.

  WILLIAM H. TAFT

  He cabled back, “Accept,” and went to bed.

  MORE VOCAL WEAR and tear threatened in the morning, when a yellow imperial limousine came to transport him to Döberitz Field for the army exercises. The Kaiser awaited him, resplendent in blue and gold. Roosevelt’s slouch hat and khaki riding suit looked dingy in contrast. Henry White stood discreetly by, ready to mediate if needed.

  “Roosevelt, mein Freund, I wish to welcome you in the presence of my guards,” Wilhelm said, as the three men climbed onto their horses. “I ask you to remember that you are the only private citizen who ever reviewed the troops of Germany.”

  Roosevelt knew this was not true. General Leonard Wood, his old colleague from Cuba days, had been accorded the same courtesy in 1902, albeit as a senior officer of the U.S. Army. Perhaps Wilhelm was emphasizing the word private. But there was more to bother a foreign visitor, now, than semantics. The maneuvers he witnessed for the next five hours both amazed and depressed him. Five cavalry, six infantry, and four artillery regiments engaged in a clash of arms that made the charges at Vincennes look puny in comparison. Then the whole force split into two armies, each commanded by a Hohenzollern prince, and collided again. Battle conditions prevailed, with no hint of “game” playing, even when all three thousand troops marched past at the end, goose-stepping in salute to the Kaiser.

  Lifting his hat every time Wilhelm touched his helmet, Roosevelt mantained a genial façade, but was aware only of the vast difference between himself and his host. It was not simply that the Kaiser held power, while he had none, nor the obvious fact that they were king and commoner. It was that he, self-made, had an integrated point of view, whereas Wilhelm personified the classic German neurosis of the Doppelgänger. Born to power, but also to disability, the Kaiser had “a sort of double-barreled perspective” on everything. One self—the imperial—surveyed the passing troops, exulting in supreme command. The other self—Wilhelm’s “mental ghost”—had ridden some way off, and was observing the whole scene with a quizzical detachment. Of the two, man and ghost, the former was the more disturbing to Roosevelt. “He was actually, as far as I could discover, one of the last of those curious creatures who sincerely believed himself to be a demi-god.”

  “THE COLONEL OF THE ROUGH RIDERS LECTURING THE CHIEF OF THE GERMAN ARMY.”

  Wilhelm II’s caption to this photograph of himself and Roosevelt at Döberitz. (photo credit i2.4)r />
  When Edith saw her husband alone, late in the day, she got the feeling that he had undergone an epiphany. “I’m absolutely certain now, that we’re all in for it,” he told her. “Facts and figures … aren’t half so convincing as the direct scrutiny of a thing—especially such a monstrous thing as this!”

  HE RECOVERED HIS CHEERFULNESS overnight, along with much of his voice. This encouraged him to address the University of Berlin in person, dispensing with the offer of a substitute reader. The proceedings in the Aula auditorium amounted to a Germanic replay of those at the Sorbonne, only now, Roosevelt was made a Doktor of philosophy, and spoke with an emperor smiling and nodding at his feet.

  Wilhelm had never visited the university before, so the atmosphere was stiff. Five jackbooted commanders of the student army corps stood immobile on the platform, swords drawn, throughout Roosevelt’s eight-thousand-word speech. He gave it in English, but in view of its length it was untranslated, and received in a heavy silence. Defining his theme as “The World Movement,” he began with a hoarse preamble on the rise and fall of civilizations. Germans, he said, had developed early as “castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers.” They had turned back waves of barbaric invaders from the East, and helped Christianize Danes and Magyars and Slavs. He made much of the day when “the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront of the nations of mankind.”