Colonel Roosevelt (17 page)

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
.

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:

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

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:

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.”