Theodore Roosevelt Abroad (21 page)

Neither Pinchot nor Roosevelt would comment on the substance of their meeting for publication, but TR did announce that he planned to give a speech on conservation in Colorado on August 27. He also permitted O’Laughlin to state, in a
New York Times
article, that “No event in Col. Roosevelt’s trip has been of greater importance or interest to the American people” than the conference between the two men. TR was “very much attached to Mr. Pinchot,” was very glad to see him, and listened to everything he had to say, “as I shall listen to any friend of mine or any side of any public question.” Before any conclusions were reached, O’Laughlin felt it safe to say that he believed Roosevelt would also consult with Elihu Root and Henry Cabot Lodge. He went on to note that TR’s refusal to talk about politics did not prevent him from remaining as deeply interested in all questions relating to conservation as when he was in the White House. The ex-president also felt it vital that the policies that he “inaugurated in this connection shall be carried to fruition.” He had thought when he retired from the presidency that “such a splendid impetus had been given to these policies that they could be regarded as fixed principles, and as such loyally observed and carried out.” Further, he believed that the people realized the importance of the things he advocated and would “insist upon their accomplishment in every respect.”
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The day of Pinchot’s visit, TR wrote a long letter to Lodge, who had not wanted him to receive the ex-chief forester. Though he tried to give Taft the benefit of the doubt, the Colonel told Lodge did not see how he could help him or the congress to victory in 1910 unless it was “on the ground that they are approved by the nation for having on many important points completely twisted round the policies I advocated and acted upon.” He refused to win any more elections for congressional leaders he afterwards found “cynically indifferent, or rather cynically and contemptuously hostile to doing themselves anything” and without the “slightest regard” for what Roosevelt had promised. Taft, TR reminded Lodge, had been nominated “solely on my assurance to the Western people especially, but almost as much to the people of the East, that he would carry out my work unbroken.” Now there was a widespread feeling that TR had, “quite unintentionally,” deceived them.

Roosevelt could not help feeling that “even though there has been a certain adherence” to the objects of the policies which he “deemed essential to the National welfare,” those objects had been pursued by the administration in a “spirit and with methods” which had rendered the effort “almost nugatory.” He did not think that under the “TaftCannon-Aldrich régime” there had been “a real appreciation of the needs of the country” and he was certain there was “no real appreciation of the way the country felt.” The Colonel told Lodge that he “earnestly hoped that Taft would “retrieve himself yet” and be the next nominee. TR had played his part and had “the very strongest objection to having to play any further part.” If, from whatever causes, the present political position of the party was hopeless, he “most emphatically” desired that he should “not be put in the position of having to run for the Presidency, staggering under a load which I cannot carry, and which has been put on my shoulders through no fault of my own.”
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Leaving the ladies behind for a few more days at Porto Maurizio, TR and Kermit went on to Venice, Vienna, and Budapest. At the first, they took lunch with the American consul on a gondola excursion under the Bridge of Sighs and on to the statue of Colleoni which Roosevelt regarded as the most imposing sculpture in the world. During a whirlwind day they also visited St. Marks, admired the old masters at the Palace of the Doges and toured the Academy of Bella Arti with its masterpieces by Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Carpaccio, and Tintoretto. As he left for Austria, Roosevelt commented “If there were only one country in the world outside our own I would send my sons to Egypt; if there was only one city, I would send them to Venice.”
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At Vienna, the popular reception outdid Rome. Everywhere the streets were lined as if Roosevelt were visiting San Francisco or St Louis. From this point across Europe, at capital after capital, the people and their rulers viewed him as “still the great American leader, the man who was to continue to play in the future of American politics something like the part that he had played in the past.” In the end he finally gave up trying to disabuse them of this notion. Roosevelt was greeted by the Austrian Ambassador to the United States, Baron Hengelmuller von Hengervar, and Richard Kerens, the American Ambassador to AustriaHungary. He made a formal call on the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Dual Monarchy. The archduke, who would be assassinated at Sarajevo four years later, was the only royal TR met that obviously did not like him. He in turn dismissed Franz Ferdinand as an “ultramontane, and at bottom a furious reactionary in every way, political and ecclesiastical both.”
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Roosevelt had a much higher opinion of the Austrian foreign minister, Count von Aehrenthal, whom he thought a man of strength and ability. Two years before, the Austrian government had been appreciative when the then president “cordially approved” of their annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he considered more a “changing of the title, although not really the substance, of the Austrian occupation.” At some point he hoped the Balkan states might stand on their own but the example of Serbia was “not sufficient encouraging” to make him believe the two small states would make more progress alone than under Austria, whose rule was infinitely preferable to that of Turkey.
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Neighboring Serbia, however, and her friend Russia, looked upon the annexations with hostility and a fuse had been lit in 1908 which would explode with cataclysmic fury six years later.

Carnegie had let it get into the newspapers that Roosevelt was to speak to Wilhelm II about his peace plans and this had alarmed the German Foreign Office and the Kaiser. Consequently, when he called in Vienna on the prime minister, Richard von Bienerth, the Austrian broached the subject for his German ally. TR informed von Biernerth that when he was president he had sounded all the powers to see if something might be done to limit the size of armaments, at least by limiting the size of ships, but he had found that England and Germany would not consent. He added that, though he had no proposal of his own, he did “wish that the German authorities would seriously consider whether it was worthwhile for them to keep on with a building programme which was the real cause why other nations were forced into the very great expense attendant upon modern naval preparation.” Two days later the Berlin papers revealed that Roosevelt wished to talk to the German Foreign Office about the subject of universal peace and disarmament, but they declared they did not believe for a moment that he would be “so lacking in the requirements of the situation” to take advantage of his friendly personal visit to “broach a subject which would be very distasteful and which the government authorities would have to refuse to discuss.”
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In Vienna Roosevelt also had an audience with the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, who had been on the throne since the revolutions of 1848. The two chatted in French about hunting and politics. The Emperor struck Roosevelt as an interesting, although not very able, gentleman of good instincts who in his long reign had “witnessed the most extraordinary changes and vicissitudes.” He in return told TR that he had been particularly interested in seeing him “because he was the last representative of the old system, whereas I embodied the new” and that he had wished to “know for himself how the prominent exponent of that movement felt and thought.”
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Franz Joseph extended to Roosevelt the signal honor of hunting in the royal game preserves, should he wish. All were shocked when the Colonel, pleading that his overfull itinerary would not allow it, asked to be excused from the privilege, which had never before been offered to a commoner, much less turned down by one.

When Roosevelt arrived at Budapest on the Danube at nine in the evening on 17 April there was, despite a driving rain, a crowd of thousands on hand at the train station. After a reception hosted by the Archduke Joseph at the palace the next day, Count Apponyi and a delegation representing the International Peace Union gave TR a formal welcome at the historic Parliament House. There he was presented with an illuminated address which recorded his achievements on behalf of human rights, human liberty and international justice. In his remarks, the gifted orator Apponyi called Roosevelt “one of the leading efficient forces for the moral improvement of the world.” The Colonel in return praised Hungary for the “tremendous influence it has exercised upon the world in beating back, by the dauntless courage of its warriors, the hordes of barbarians who sought to overwhelm Europe.”
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At Budapest, Kermit and TR boarded the Orient Express for Paris, where the family was reunited on April 21. They stayed with their friends, the new U.S. ambassador, Robert Bacon, and his wife Martha. This luxury made the city “an oasis in a desert of hurry and confusion.” Roosevelt and Edith were able to get away to revisit several museums and art galleries, including the Louvre, where, he told Bacon, “I shall
keep clear of the Rubens gallery, which I loathe, but there are some of the pictures which I must see.”
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The couple met the sculptor Rodin at his house and were able to see
Manon
and
Samson and Delilah
at the Opera and
Oedipe Roi
at the
Comédie-Française
, where they experienced another embarrassingly long ovation. TR made a much watched visit to Napoleon’s tomb, which set off a renewed avalanche of editorial cartoons showing him in Napoleonic garb returning from Elba, some with the dark cloud of Waterloo in the distance.

Roosevelt enjoyed the company of all the Frenchmen he met, including the premier Aristide Briand, the president Armand Fallières, and various other members of the government and the opposition. After Fallières gave him a dinner at the Élysée Palace, one French newspaper cartoon depicted a scene with the president in which the Colonel is giving his host an account of his life in Africa. Roosevelt says: “Of evenings I used to read the Pensées de Pascal aloud; and the first hippopotamus that dared yawn—Bang! In His Jaw!”
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TR later put down to his “complacent Anglo-Saxon ignorance” the fact that he had previously considered French public men “people of marked levity.” During this visit he found them “just as solid characters as English and American public men” with the added “attractiveness” which to his mind made the “cultivated Frenchman really unique.” He came to realize that it was “not they who were guilty of levity,” but “the French nation, or rather the combination of the French national character with the English parliamentary system” instituted after the fall of Napoleon III. In his opinion the English system had not worked well “in a government by groups, where the people do not mind changing their leaders continually,” and were “so afraid of themselves that, unlike the English and Americans,” they did not trust “any one man with a temporary exercise of large power for fear they will be weak enough to let him assume it permanently.”
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In Africa the Colonel had been notified of his election to the French Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, one of the five Academies forming the French “Insitute,” and he officially took his seat while in Paris. Jusserand reported to him that this was not simply an honorary achievement, his credentials had been seriously debated and that in the end “everybody agreed that if there was one man who should become a member as having devoted his life to politics and morals, never dividing the one from the other, it was you.”
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Roosevelt met a number of men of letters whom he greatly admired, including Victor Bérard, translator of
The Odyssey
, as well as a talented writer on contemporary politics. An enchanted TR gushed, “What a charming man a charming Frenchman is!” In return he was received warmly, in fact he captivated the normally blasé city for the entire eight day visit. Only the royalist press, being Catholic, was cold because of his trouble with the Vatican.
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Before leaving America, Roosevelt had agreed to give a speech at the Sorbonne, which he praised to his audience as the “most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover.” For his text TR chose individual citizenship. This was because, for republics such as France and the United States, “the question of the quality of the individual” was supreme. In the long run, success or failure depended upon the way the average man and woman did his or her duty as a citizen. To be a good citizen needed “a high standard of cultivation and scholarship,” underpinned by a sound body and mind, but above all stood character. This Roosevelt defined as “the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor.” Education for all the people, beyond book learning, should also foster “the great solid qualities” such as self-restraint, self-mastery, common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility, and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution. These were the qualities which “mark a masterful people.”
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Roosevelt also praised the “commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues,” including “the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children.” The average man must earn his own livelihood and the good man should be strong and brave, to be able to serve his country as a soldier. To the “well-meaning philosophers” who declared all war unrighteous, TR replied that war was a dreadful thing and an unjust war was a crime against humanity, but because it was unjust, not because it was a war. The question must be, Is the right to prevail? Every honorable effort should be made to avoid war, but no self-respecting nation, “can or ought to submit to wrong.” The greatest of all curses to Roosevelt was not war, but sterility. The “chief of blessings for any nation” was that it should “leave its seed to inherit the land.”
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