Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  … Now, either you have the right to be in Egypt or you have not. Either it is or it is not your duty to establish and keep order. [“Hear! Hear!”] If you feel that you have not the right to be in Egypt, if you do not wish to establish and to keep order there, why, then, by all means get out of Egypt. [“Hear! Hear!”]

  “I just love that man,” Balfour said afterward.

  WHEN ROOSEVELT CAME DOWN to breakfast next morning, Lee greeted him with, “Well, the attitude of the English newspapers can best be expressed in the one word ‘gasp.’ ”

  Liberal newspapers were infuriated that a foreigner, however distinguished, should instruct His Majesty’s government in condominium policy. “No summary can do justice to the vulgarity and ignorance of the oration which Mr. Roosevelt delivered at the Guildhall,” the National Review remarked. The Daily Chronicle felt he had “outraged every conventional canon of official and international propriety.” The Nation excoriated his “jackboot doctrine” of might over right, and obvious contempt for Islam. “Mr. Roosevelt talked as if the whole Egyptian people had adopted assassination as a political method,” commented the Manchester Guardian. “This is not robust or virile thinking; it is muddled, boyish thinking.”

  Conservative reactions were more favorable, if stunned. The Pall Mall Gazette—Lee’s kind of paper—said that the former president had delivered “a great and memorable speech that will be read and pondered over throughout the world.” The Times reproved him for taking freedom of the city too far, but granted that his basic intent was “friendly.” The Daily Telegraph praised him for his candor, and asserted that Britain had “no intention of going,” either from Egypt or India. And the editor of The Spectator thanked him for “giving us so useful a reminder of our duty.”

  After a few days, two of the most acerbic columnists in the country weighed in. George Bernard Shaw praised Roosevelt’s performance “in his new character of the Innocent Abroad,” and suggested that if Britain was indeed qualified to govern other peoples without their consent, it should re-colonize America. W. T. Stead, the editor of Review of Reviews, remarked apropos of the murder of Boutros Pasha, “We have caught the assassin, tried him, and sentenced him to death. What more did Mr. Roosevelt do when an assassin made him President of the United States?”

  WHEN FURTHER COMPLAINTS were heard in Parliament about Roosevelt’s “insult” to the intelligence of the British people, Balfour rose in his defense. “I was an auditor of that speech,” he said, “and I hope I am not less sensitive than others.” No foreign observer could have delivered “a kindlier, more appreciative, and more sympathetic treatment of the problem with which we have long had to deal, and of which America is now feeling the pinch.”

  Sir Edward Grey spoke next. “I should have thought that to everybody the friendly intention of that speech would be obvious.… It was, taken as a whole, the greatest compliment to the work of one country in the world ever paid by the citizen of another.”

  So with hyperbole on both sides of the aisle, the Little Englanders were confounded. Roosevelt spent a few relaxed days in London, gallery-hopping with Edith and lunching with a grateful King George. “He has enjoyed himself hugely,” Spring Rice wrote to a friend, “and I must say, by the side of our statesmen, looks a little bit taller, bigger and stronger.”

  The Colonel declined to be taken too seriously. When a report went around that he had murmured, “Ah! Tempora mutantur!” in front of one of Frith’s vast panoramas of Victorian life, he telegrammed a denial to the editor of Punch.

  STATEMENT INCORRECT. I NEVER USE ANY LANGUAGE SO MODERN AS LATIN WHILE LOOKING AT PICTURES. ON THE OCCASION IN QUESTION MY QUOTATIONS WERE FROM CUNEIFORM SCRIPT AND THE PARTICULAR SENTENCE TO WHICH YOU REFER WAS THE PRE-NUNEVITE PHRASE HULLY-GEE.

  ONE LAST PUBLIC appearance was required of him before he left the Old World for the New: his Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on Tuesday, 7 June. For once, Roosevelt was not sure of himself. He wanted to strike the right donnish tone, which did not come as naturally to him as the hortatory. His subject, “Biological Analogies in History,” was one he had pondered since discovering, as a teenager, that he was equally drawn to science and the humanities. It seemed to him that these disciplines, rigorously separated in the nineteenth century, might draw closer again in the twentieth, as scientists looked for narrative explanations of the mysteries of nature, and scholars became more abstract and empirical in their weighing of evidence. Evolutionary science, in particular, had much to teach historians studying the rise and fall of civilizations.

  At first, the proceedings in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre seemed appropriately formal. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the university chancellor, introduced him in Latin as “Honorabilem Theodorum Roosevelt,” who by virtue of public achievements, merited a doctorate in civil law. As beadles escorted him onstage, Curzon’s prose turned to poetry:

  Hic vir, hic est, tibi quem promitti saepius audis,

  Cuius in adventum pavidi cessere cometae

  Et septemgemini turbant trepida ostia Nili!

  A translation of these lines was helpfully printed in the official program:

  Behold, Vice-Chancellor, the promised wight,

  Before whose coming comets turned to flight,

  And all the startled mouths of sevenfold Nile took fright!

  Roosevelt took his place amid general laughter. It became evident that members of the Oxford faculty fancied themselves as classical wits. Perhaps they had heard about his telegram to Punch. Speakers compared him to Hercules in his battle against the trusts, and to Ulysses for his wanderings after a period in Africae solitudinibus. Henry Goudy, regius professor of civil law, archly noted that the Colonel had served two terms in the White House, and might yet extend that record to three—numero auspicatissimo, “most auspicious of numbers.”

  Curzon, draping Roosevelt in scholarly silk, hailed him as Strenuissime, insignissime civium toto orbe terrae hodie agentum—“Most strenuous of men, most distinguished of citizens dominating today’s world scene.” In a final access of humor, the chancellor praised his friendliness toward all men—ne nigerrimum quidem—“even the blackest of the black.”

  At least there was no giant Teddy bear to detract from Roosevelt’s dignity when he mounted the podium and began his lecture. He said that as an eighth-generation American visiting the heart of English academia, he felt less “alien” than one of his Dutch, French, Irish, or Scottish ancestors might have, in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth.” The phrase was a quotation from Tennyson. He left it unattributed, not wanting to condescend to his hosts, and swung into his main text with an eloquence that made their earlier joshing sound sophomoric:

  More than ever before in the world’s history, we of today seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian forms” the creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the yesterday—a few score thousand years distant only—when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet. And studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.

  Only the continued use of blind quotations betrayed his uncertainty as an academic speaker. Echoing Balfour, he called for a scientific literature that went beyond jargon, so that tomorrow’s humanists could synthesize and explain what today seemed so confusing. He conceded that patterns in natural and human history did not duplicate one another. “Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.” He spoke for almost a quarter of an hour about the
development of higher life-forms, from Eocene beginnings through the arrival of Homo erectus. Phylogenetically, he said, the word new denoted only a trend deviant enough to seem original. The same was often true of obsolescence: what looked like extinction might just be transformation. Thus, the small three-toed Neohipparion had variously become the horse, the donkey, and the zebra.

  Clearly enjoying himself, Roosevelt ranged over some of the factors, environmental, pathological, and geomorphological, that determined which species should flourish or disappear. He applied them to the evolution of societies. All the modern countries of Western Europe had arisen from earlier Teutonic and Nordic ethnic overflows, mixing like cold rivers with the warm sea of Roman civilization. He defined two types of neonate states—those growing out of barbarism, and those mutating from previous cultures—and left unsaid the implication that the difference between them was that obtaining between Germanic or Slavic nations on the one hand, and Britannic or Japanese on the other. Evolution aside, there were differing types of “death” in human societies, such as those of the Greeks and Romans who once dominated all of Asia Minor and North Africa. For nearly a thousand years they had flourished, civilizing each community they absorbed. “Then they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion.”

  Roosevelt nudged his thesis into modern times by arguing, in words he would certainly not have risked at the University of Berlin, that anthropological science now clearly perceived “how artificial most great nationalities are.” At least, in the racial sense: “There is an element of unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something ethnologically sacred.” Nationality was not myth, but a matter of common speech and purpose, of values shared between peoples whose origins might be various.

  He acknowledged “that these great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses.” But whatever romance attached to nationalism had little to do with race.

  Roosevelt was using the last word carefully, distinguishing it from ethnic, which he made clear had only cultural connotations for him, as ethnos had for the Ancient Greeks. Turning to a subject much more sensitive to his audience, he ventured some of the reasons why empires went into decline. One was when the sovereign authority devolved too much power to its provinces. In that case, “the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal,” and the whole flew to pieces. He cited also greed, love of luxury, declining birth-rates, and loss of the “fighting edge.”

  These drumskins, which he had been pounding for a quarter of a century, awoke the politician in him. The Romanes Lecture of 1910 degenerated into a stump speech, so prolonged it made his Sorbonne and Berlin orations seem epigrammatic in comparison. Toward the end—Roosevelt had been speaking for well over an hour—he did make one notable claim, that he considered himself “a very radical democrat,” opposed to any long-term domination of one group over another. But it was drowned out by the thunder of his exhortations.

  “It would appear that the biological analogies in history are three,” a weary Oxonian remarked afterward. “Longitude, Latitude, Platitude.”

  AFTER A FAREWELL dinner at Dorchester House, attended by the heads of the government, judiciary, and Anglican Church, Roosevelt left London for Southampton early on Thursday, 9 June. His ship was not due to sail until the following day, but he had an unusual assignation in Hampshire, en route to the port.

  For years he had dreamed of roaming the English countryside “at the time of the singing of the birds.” Bird-listening was his primary delight as an ornithologist—almost his only delight in childhood, when he had been so myopic he had difficulty tracing the source of any song. Now, with his left eye blinded, he again wanted to hear, if not see, some of the British species he had studied as a boy.

  Sir Edward Grey was happy to act as his guide through some melodious plot of beechen green. The foreign secretary was a passionate outdoorsman, extremely knowledgeable about avian life. He had suggested they tour the meadowlands around Highland Water, deep in the New Forest. There was a country inn nearby at Brockenhurst, where they could spend the night. Southampton lay only eight miles away. Roosevelt’s wife and children could travel there separately the following morning, and meet him at the docks.

  With one of the longest days of the year to spare, the two men took a preliminary hike down the valley of the Itchen. Then they drove to Stoney Cross and fortified themselves with tea. At 4:30 P.M. they disappeared into the New Forest, and were not seen again until nine o’clock that evening.

  The weather was overcast and the season late for a full chorale, but Grey was able to identify twenty-three different songs of forty-one observed species. Roosevelt listened and watched with a sense of literary familiarity. He had read Marryat’s Children of the New Forest as a boy, and many of the names his guide whispered to him—the nightingale, the skylark, the thrush, the blackbird—evoked poems he had by heart. But the beauty of their live music thrilled him. The cuckoo wrought its traditional spell, and the “ventriloqual lay” of the sedge warbler mocked him among the river reeds. If the “singing and soaring” of a skylark reminded him of Wordsworth, rather than Shelley, and its melody degenerated sometimes into chatter, he felt it deserved its place in the quotation books.

  He heard nothing that quite equaled, to his ear, the chimes of the American wood thrush, the high, brilliant tessitura of the northern winter wren, or the unstoppable mockingbird that had once kept him awake one moonlit night in Tennessee. Nevertheless, “the woods and fields were still vocal with beautiful bird-music, the country was very lovely, the inn as comfortable as possible, and the bath and supper very enjoyable after our tramp; and altogether I passed no pleasanter twenty-four hours during my entire European trip.”

  ROOSEVELT SAILED FROM Southampton the following afternoon on the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria. “Take care of him,” Rudyard Kipling wrote to a friend in New York. “He is scarce and valuable.”

  The ship was crowded with a record number of American passengers, many of whom had shortened their vacations in order to accompany the Colonel home. Stateside, his voyage was already being called “the Return from Elba.” Similar imagery was employed in France. “Never since Napoleon dawned on Europe,” Le Temps remarked, “has such an impression been produced there as has been made by Theodore Roosevelt.” Some British commentators, still smarting over the Guildhall speech, would not have been sorry to see him head for St. Helena. “He is an amiable barbarian with a veneer of European civilization,” wrote S. Verdad, foreign correspondent for The New Age. “To give him credit for any diplomatic talent is a huge joke.” But the Westminster Review spoke for the majority in declaring, “Mr. Roosevelt is becoming more and more the commanding figure of the English-speaking world.”

  All this attention—not to mention eight thousand letters received to date by his overworked secretaries—testified to a fact obvious to many, if denied by himself: that he was perceived as the once and future President of the United States. Those jokes at Oxford about him running for another term had been diplomatic. So, looking further back, had the state receptions, the military reviews, the royal confidences lavished on him since he stepped ashore in Khartoum. He would not have been mein Freund to the Kaiser, or George V’s chosen oracle of Empire, nor even Sir Edward Grey’s bird-watching buddy, if specialists in the Wilhelmstrasse and Whitehall really believed that he was headed for retirement. And the vehemence with which Muslims attacked him (a spokesman for the Young Egypt Party regretted that he not been shot dead in Cairo) bespoke a new neurosis in international relations: fear that the United States, which he had personally shaped into the great Western power, would expand its influence eastward under a third Roosevelt administration
. Maybe even a fourth: he was still only fifty-one.

  There was, of course, the complicating factor of William Howard Taft. One of the longest letters in the Colonel’s prodigious stash of mail came from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a litany of Taft’s personal and political troubles, beginning with, “I have had a hard time” and ending with an indirect appeal for help: “It would give me a great deal of pleasure if after you get settled at Oyster Bay, you could come over to Washington and spend a few days in the White House.”

  HEADING FOR HOME, Roosevelt was a different person from the gregarious, Africa-bound adventurer of two springs before. He paced several hours a day on the first-class deck, a black hat shading his eyes. Fellow promenaders sensed his distraction and left him alone. He was willing to pose for the occasional “kodaker,” and made himself available for a general handshaking session. Otherwise, passengers saw little of him. He spent most of his time with Edith and Alice in their respective staterooms, while Ethel roamed the ship with a little black dog, and Kermit played bridge in the smoking room. Invariably, the family ate together in the ship’s exclusive “Ritz Carlton” restaurant.

  They had much to talk about, and more to ponder individually, with changes looming in all their lives. Edith wanted nothing more than to have her husband back at Oyster Bay for good. Her dream was to grow old with him in Sagamore Hill, their big house overlooking the sea, filling it with more books as it emptied of children. But she knew him well enough not to bet against some urge for action taking him away from her, sooner or later. She had seen him brood at Omdurman, noticed how he huddled with Pinchot in Porto Maurizio, heard him exalt the Man in the Arena in Paris, registered what he said the night he came back depressed and raspy-voiced from Döberitz. At Windsor, she had watched as he walked with kings, and—in Kipling’s cliché—kept his bearing. At none of these times had Theodore looked like a spent force.