Theodore Roosevelt Abroad by J. Lee Thompson Read Free Book Online

holding it. 69
    While he gave Taft as much aid as he thought wise, TR crafted several speeches of his own for delivery in Europe. The first of these sprung from his inability to resist the intellectual prestige in an invitation from the chancellor of Oxford, George Nathaniel Curzon, Baron Curzon of Kedleston, to give the Romanes Lecture at the university in June 1910. The lecture also afforded an official reason to visit England. A delighted TR replied to Curzon, “surely no man was ever asked to do a pleasant thing in such a pleasant way as you have asked me!” 70 Roosevelt practiced the speech, which he wrote while having his portrait painted by Joseph De Camp, on Ambassador Jusserand and Archie Butt. He also sent a copy of the lecture, titled “Biological Analogies in History,” to his friend Henry Fairfield Osborn, the president of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Osborn recalled that it was “full of analogies between the extinct animal kingdom and the kingdoms and principalities in the human world.” Several of these, that he felt “likely to bring on war between the United States and the governments referred to,” he advised TR to omit. 71
    When news of the Romanes Lecture got out, a torrent of invitations followed. So as not to hurt French sensibilities, and his friend Jusserand, Roosevelt agreed to give a Paris address at the Sorbonne. Then, after the Kaiser sent an invitation, the University of Berlin was added to the progress. He first turned down an invitation from the Nobel Committee to make a belated address in Norway for the Peace Prize he had been awarded for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. However, TR finally heeded the urgings of Carnegie and others and decided to accept.
    All this swept away TR’s original intention not to go near a European capital. He had declared that he would sooner give up the trip than let it be made into a “peripatetic show”; however, as he told his friend Henry White, the U.S. ambassador in Paris, though he would like to avoid seeing any sovereigns, he realized this might make him look “churlish.” He wanted to travel as a private citizen and was no “hanger-on to shreds of departing greatness.” Therefore, he wanted any introductions to be as informal as possible and, so that he could actually speak with the rulers, under no circumstance did he want any formal dinners or other entertainments. Roosevelt supposed that when he reached England, he would be “informally presented” to Edward VII, who had sent his best wishes for the safari across his possessions, but he feared this would hurt the feelings of the German Kaiser, with whom he had also had a pleasant correspondence and in whom he found much to admire. 72 In the end, accepting the Berlin address also meant accepting Wilhelm’s invitation to “meet somewhere and get personally acquainted.” 73
    Making allowances for Edward and Wilhelm opened the royal floodgates. TR’s larger than life personality and reputation led other kings, great and small, to vie with each other to honor him. European royals, as far as they gave their attention to anything or anyone outside their own inbred society, looked upon him as an interesting curiosity, a prince who had succeeded an assassinated ruler and then been elected temporary king is his own right in 1904. Roosevelt had also made a warrior’s name for himself as Colonel of the Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, living out a martial fantasy from which twentieth-century monarchs were excluded. More recently he had, in light of the bloody Philippine experience, curbed his expansionist imperialism and turned peacemaker. 74 The same year he won the Nobel Prize, TR also helped to foster an agreement at the Algeciras Conference in Spain called to settle the differences between Germany and France over the Moroccan crisis, which had threatened the peace of Europe and the world.
    Any looming threat to Roosevelt’s domestic policies also appeared