Theodore Roosevelt Abroad Read online

  Andrew Carnegie was not privy to the Hale interview, but a month after TR and Elihu Root had both left office, the former Secretary of State sent Carnegie an even grimmer letter of warning. Based upon his repeated personal experiences, Root told Carnegie, “no well informed person” could doubt that Germany, “under her present Government,” was “the great disturber of peace in the world.” Whether on arbitration, disarmament, the prevention of war, or any attempts to “lessen the suspicion and alarm of nations toward each other,” Germany stood against all progress. Root went on that the truth was that Germany “does not in the least agree as to the views of international duty and right conduct which have inspired the Hague Conferences.” To the contrary, she looked “with real contempt and loathing upon the whole system of arbitration” and considered “all talk about it to be mere hypocrisy. She believes in taking what she wants with a strong hand and with her, friendship among nations is merely the application of the wise policy which prohibits having too many enemies at one time.”16 This was a prescient view which Carnegie failed to heed.

  In Norway a year later, King Haakon and Queen Maud “frankly commiserated” with Theodore and Edith when they found they were to stay at the palace in Berlin. They looked back with a “lively horror” to the way Wilhelm had “drilled” them when they stayed there. Maud told them she was “so frightened that I finally grew afraid to speak to any of them; and when I tried to speak to the servants I found they were just as much afraid of me!” The day Roosevelt left for Sweden, the last stop before Berlin, the news came of Edward VII’s death. Maud had told them much about her close family relations and was heartbroken. Her father had been very pleased that she had fallen in love with Haakon, or Prince Carl of Denmark as he was then, and insisted that he would not force any of his daughters into loveless matches simply for considerations of state.17

  TR and Edward had both been looking forward to meeting the other when he reached England.18 The King had voiced his disappointment that Roosevelt had stooped to becoming a “penny a liner” journalist with the Scribner’s series but sincerely admired his bravery in the Spanish-American War. Spring Rice wrote to TR that the King had wanted to “get into personal relations with you” as the two had “certain aims in common.” Edward desired to send Roosevelt something from his personal collection and Spring Rice suggested a miniature of John Hampden, who he knew to be one of Roosevelt’s heroes. The picture was of great historical value, but because it was of a man who had led a successful rebellion against the English crown, it was “not at all the sort of thing” a King of England might be expected to give to an American president. That, however, was the reason Edward “jumped at the idea at once.” His librarian and others objected strongly, but he insisted. Spring Rice was very sorry Roosevelt would not now meet the King but hoped he would not “forget what I tell you now—quite privately for yourself.”19

  So it was with real sadness on several counts that the Colonel and his family departed on May 7 for Stockholm which Roosevelt nevertheless considered a “delightful” city and the Swedes fine people. As in Hungary and France, the reception given him was not merely one of general friendliness, but, in his opinion, it came from people who felt they were “jeopardized alike by the apostles of reaction, and by the preachers of license under the guise of liberty, and who clutched at any leadership which could be regarded as genuinely popular and yet genuinely sane.” He toured several museums and was very interested in the battlefield relics from the era of Gustavus Adolphus to Charles XII, Sweden’s seventeenth-century era of martial glory. However, in the present TR was saddened to see how socialism had grown among the people in a “very ugly form” which included an appeal to stop having children. Roosevelt could not comprehend anyone “so bitter in their class hatred as to welcome race destruction as a means of slaking it.” And in view of what the Russians were doing in neighboring Finland, he felt it “came pretty near being a crime against all progress and civilization.” Since Sweden had not only free but almost democratic institutions he could not understand the extreme bitterness of the socialist attitude.20

  The Swedish monarch, Gustavus V, was absent and the family stayed at the palace with the Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus and his wife Margaret, a daughter of the Duke of Connaught and a niece of Edward VII. The Swedish royal family, in concert with the others across Europe, was in mourning for the King of England, so that court entertainment was suspended. The travelers dined only with the members of the family, a state of affairs Roosevelt greeted with great relief. He appraised the Crown Prince as a “thoroughly good fellow, very serious and honest, of fair ability.” The kind of man, he told his British friend Sir George Otto Trevleyan, who would have made, if he were in England, a “good but not brilliant, rather radical, Liberal Member of Parliament.” His wife was “physically, mentally and morally a thoroughly healthy and charming woman,” and their three little children were as “attractive, busy, vigorous, small souls as one could wish to see.”21

  From Sweden the family crossed to Germany. The death of Edward VII gave Roosevelt the opportunity to send word to the Kaiser that, under the circumstances, perhaps it would be more appropriate for the family to stay at the U.S. Embassy rather than the palace. The offer was gratefully accepted. Almost all the plans that had been made, including the Emperor’s intention to greet Roosevelt personally at the rail station, were canceled or altered. The state of mourning for Wilhelm’s uncle aside, in Germany Roosevelt noted a different attitude across society than in any other European country. He was treated with the proper civility, and the authorities showed him every courtesy, but he encountered no boisterous popular receptions, no decorated and overcrowded streets or cascades of applause at theatres that had become the norm elsewhere. In Sweden tens of thousands had gathered on every occasion, in Germany a few hundred curious citizens might be at a train station or other event.

  Roosevelt’s chief interest was in Wilhelm II, whom he considered “an able and powerful man.”22 Besides sharing these attributes, the two were similar in several other ways. They were only three months apart in age, TR being the older. Both had overcome childhood disabilities, Roosevelt asthma and eyesight which had given him a mole-like perspective on the world until corrected with glasses—the Emperor a withered left arm which he hid in splendid uniforms. As adults they were similarly burly and active men who dominated their surroundings physically and conversationally. Both were moralists who nevertheless had curious and wide-ranging intellects, the Kaiser’s being somewhat limited in scope by his inward-looking Prussian military upbringing. Given this last factor it is somewhat surprising that Wilhelm shared TR’s passion for building up his country’s fleet, which both men saw as amongst their greatest national legacies.

  The Kaiser also considered Roosevelt to be one of the few figures on the world stage with stature great enough to be treated as an equal. After a luncheon on the first day, a special train took the party, which included the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, to Potsdam where the Kaiser proudly showed the family the Sans Souci palace. Wilhelm took the Colonel aside for very rare private talk lasting an hour in which, Roosevelt told Arthur Lee, the Emperor surpassed “even his wildest expectations and treated him with a fulsome familiarity which was as horrifying to the entourage of the ‘All-Highest’ as it was distasteful to T.R. himself.”23

  The Colonel was able to spend two other afternoons in conversation with the Emperor, the first on horseback for five hours while reviewing army maneuvers at Döberitz. Wilhelm was resplendent in a Hussar General’s uniform and helmet, while Roosevelt wore a simple khaki riding suit and black slouch hat, which he from time to time raised to acknowledge the troops. The Kaiser honored TR before his officers by making a point of addressing him as “mein Freund” and asked him to remember that he was the only private citizen who had ever reviewed German troops.24 The Colonel found Wilhelm very interested to know how he was viewed abroad and in reply to a question about American opinion replied, �
��I don’t know whether you will understand our political terminology; but in America we think that if you lived on our side of the water you would carry your ward and turn up at the convention with your delegates behind you—and I cannot say as much for most of your fellow sovereigns!” After some explanation, Wilhelm was “immensely pleased and amused” at the answer.25

  To Roosevelt’s surprise, the Kaiser spoke perfect English and displayed a real sense of humor about the things he knew, such as Germany’s industrial and military conditions. Wilhelm’s mischievous nature was also displayed in writing on the backs of several photos of themselves on horseback that he gave TR to commemorate the military review. On one depicting them talking seriously the Kaiser wrote, “the Colonel of the Rough Riders instructing the German Emperor in field tactics.” On another he inscribed, perhaps more seriously, “When we shake hands we shake the world.” The German Foreign Office, afraid of yet another royal indiscretion becoming public, asked for the photos to be returned. TR refused and had them framed in glass so that both sides could be seen.26

  The two men agreed on fundamental points of domestic and religious morality, but there was a “good deal of dogmatic theology” which meant much to Wilhelm that to Roosevelt was “entirely meaningless.” They also completely disagreed on many points of international morality, which TR found understandable given that Wilhelm was brought up in the school of Frederick the Great and Bismarck, while his own heroes were champions of freedom such as Timoleon, John Hampden, Washington and Lincoln. They did concur, however, in a cordial dislike of “shams and pretense” and therefore of the “kind of washy movement for international peace” with which Carnegie’s name had become so closely associated. On a photo he sent Roosevelt of the sham battle staged for them, the Kaiser wrote that such exertions would take care of that old “peace bore” Carnegie.27

  Such an attitude on the part of Wilhelm, coupled with the death of Edward VII, doomed any small chance their meeting might have had of furthering Carnegie’s dreams of peace. However, the newspaper revelations that he planned to speak to the Kaiser about universal peace and disarmament did give Roosevelt an opening to broach the subject. The Austrian ambassador in Berlin “nearly choked trying to invent some appropriate remark in response” when TR informed him that sending the conversation in Vienna with von Bienerth to the German Foreign Office had given him the “chance to say what I had to say” and “otherwise probably would not have had.” Roosevelt told Wilhelm “he was by no means a peace-at-any-price man” but he felt that the “subject was of such importance as to warrant consideration as to whether or not it was feasible to do something practical toward limiting expense and putting difficulties in the way of war.” The Emperor was very courteous, and said he really had no control over the matter, which was “something which effected the German people,” who would “never consent to Germany’s failing to keep herself able to enforce her rights either on land or at sea.”28

  Roosevelt had especially desired to talk with Wilhelm about the alarming naval rivalry between Germany and England, and raised the possibility of limiting the ever-increasing battleship expenditures of the two nations. The Kaiser responded there was no real use in discussing the matter, as the element he represented in Germany was determined to be powerful on the ocean. The Colonel then confessed that if he were an Englishman he would feel that “naval supremacy was a vital matter” and that under no circumstances would he “permit the fleet to sink to such a position that its mastership of the ocean” could be threatened. He was surprised that Wilhelm agreed and said that, were he an Englishman, he would feel the same way.

  Since his mother was Queen Victoria’s oldest daughter, Wilhelm had been brought up partly in England and thought of himself as partly English. He claimed, next to Germany, that he cared for England more than any other country and added with “intense emphasis, I ADORE ENGLAND.” He did not object to England’s keeping up her fleet relatively to all other powers, but he did complain because English statesmen, including the former Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, who ought to know better, continually held up Germany as the nation against whom they specially needed to prepare. Wilhelm then earnestly asked TR to tell any British leaders he had the chance to meet all he had said and in particular that he was not hostile to England and “on the contrary admired England and did not for a minute believe there would be war between England and Germany.” Such a war, both men agreed, would be an “unspeakable calamity.”29

  This did not mean, however, that the Emperor’s attitude was entirely without menace. TR reported to his friend Trevelyan that Germany had “the arrogance of a very strong power, as yet almost untouched by that feeble aspiration towards international equity” which the United States and England had at least begun to feel. Germany wanted a navy so strong that she could treat England as she had France over Morocco. This had shown how far Germany was willing to go in doing what she believed her own interests and destiny demanded, in total “disregard of her own engagements and of the equities of other people.” If Germany had a navy as strong as England, Roosevelt did not believe “she would intend to use it for the destruction of England,” but he did believe that “incidents would be very likely to occur which might make her so use it.”30

  Personally, Roosevelt was fascinated to see in Wilhelm what he already had noticed traces of in other royals, namely “a kind of curious dual consciousness of events” in relation to himself and his fellow monarchs. The Kaiser knew perfectly well he did not have absolute power. At present whenever Germany made up her mind to go in a given direction, he could only “stay at the head of affairs by scampering to take the lead in going in that direction.” Down at bottom Wilhelm knew this, but he also knew that as Kaiser in the German system he had still a “genuine power not shared by the great majority of his fellow sovereigns.” Taking into account the “curious combination of power, energy, egotism, and restless desire to do, and to seem to do, things” which Wilhelm’s character showed, TR could not help but wonder how he would have fared had he been an absolute monarch or Roman Emperor. Unlike several of the other sovereigns he met, Roosevelt did not regard Wilhelm, or Germany, as pleasant prospective neighbors.31

  While he was in Berlin the Colonel was pleased to be able to talk to the architect of the modern German Navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, whom he considered an exceedingly able man. One night at dinner the Admiral told Edith that he had always heard the Emperor and her husband were alike, and now he saw the resemblance. But of course Roosevelt had had to take responsibilities and make his own way, and do things for himself, “which naturally made a difference” between them. Von Tirpitz was particularly interested in the voyage of the Great White Fleet round the world and told Roosevelt frankly that he had not believed it could be done successfully and that the British Admiralty and Foreign Office had felt the same way. TR responded that he had been aware of this which made the Fleet’s success all the more satisfying.32

  The Admiral had expected Japan to attack the American fleet while it was on its journey and asked if Roosevelt had feared the same. TR replied that he had not expected such an attack but thought it possible. His view was that if the Japanese attacked it would have been a sign that they meant to strike at the first favorable moment. He had been doing his best to be polite with Japan but had become aware of a “slight undertone of veiled truculence” in regard to affairs on the Pacific slope, and that the Japanese thought him afraid of them. Roosevelt had found out through various sources that Japan’s war party believed themselves superior and that they could win. It seemed to him that the British thought the same, so that the time was ripe for a “showdown.” He had great confidence in the U.S. Navy, and felt that, in any event, if the fleet was not able to get to the Pacific in first class shape they had better find out. He told von Tirpitz that, once the fleet started, it meant the United States had gained three months and it was doing what it would have to do in case of war. In TR’s view, if the Japanese did attack, it would
be proof positive that he had followed exactly the right course, and if they became peaceful, the same was true. As it fell out, “every particle of trouble” with the Japanese Government and press “stopped like magic as soon as they found out our fleet had actually sailed and was obviously in good trim.” It was a good thing, he told von Tirpitz, that the Japanese should know that there were “fleets of the white races which were totally different” from that of the poor Russian Admiral Rojestvensky annihilated in the Russo-Japanese War.33

  Before leaving the United States, Roosevelt had agreed to make a German academic address, which he delivered at the University of Berlin on May 12, after he received an honorary doctorate. The scene was noteworthy for the picturesque combination of military uniforms, academic gowns and what Lawrence Abbott considered the “somewhat bizarre dress” of the undergraduate student corps. The ceremony began with fine renditions of Hail Columbia and the Star Spangled Banner by the student chorus, “harmonized as only the Germans can harmonize choral music.”34Though suffering from an attack of bronchitis, Roosevelt nevertheless persevered through his subject, “The World Movement,” which traced the history of civilization from ancient times to the present. In his view the modern movement towards a world civilization had begun its march four hundred years before with the discovery of printing and the “bold sea ventures” which culminated with the discovery of America. This was followed in Europe by a “tremendous religious ferment” which set off a “moral uprising” matched by a revolution in science. Since then, century by century, the changes had “increased in rapidity and complexity.”35