Colonel Roosevelt (11 page)

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.

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.
”

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.