Colonel Roosevelt (16 page)

THAT EVENING ROOSEVELT
and his best English friend, Sir Cecil Spring Rice, were entertained to dinner at Brooks’s Club by Lord Haldane, the Liberal minister of war.

“
Dear old Springy” was now fifty-one, and a senior ambassador in the British diplomatic corps. He was deeply versed in the affairs of Germany, Belgium, Russia, and the United States, as well as those of Turkey, Persia, and Japan. From his current posting in Stockholm, he was able to keep a close watch on German naval aggrandizement in the Baltic, and quailed at it even more than Lord Londonderry.

Roosevelt enjoyed discussing grand strategy with Spring Rice, but the presence of another guest at Haldane’s table diverted his attention. David Lloyd George, the merry-faced chancellor of the exchequer, was the most revolutionary force to erupt in Parliament since the days of Reform, eighty years before. His “People’s Budget,” enacted just one week before King Edward’s death, had plunged Britain into a governmental crisis so acute that Conservatives—Arthur Lee agitatedly among them—were predicting the collapse of its historic class system into socialism, or worse. Lloyd George was no socialist, but for years, as the Liberal Party’s radical evangelist, he had looked for a means of destroying the power of the House of Lords. He had found his weapon in a budget that proposed a supertax on all unearned income and inherited estates. Prime Minister Asquith’s government was now threatening a general election, in order to force through a Parliament Bill that would abolish the notion of an unelected upper house. If that happened, nearly a thousand years of landed privilege were to be swept away by the little Welshman who now sat breaking bread at Brooks’s.

Fond as Roosevelt was of Tories like Lee, he found himself more drawn to Lloyd George, Haldane, and other Liberals who had come to power during his own, increasingly progressive, second term as president. (One exception was
Winston Churchill, whom he considered to be a boor and a turncoat, and refused to see.) He admired the laws they had passed to benefit workers, pensioners, aspiring homeowners, and small traders. They seemed to be irresolute in formulating foreign policy, but he suspected that Sir Edward Grey supported the new king’s desire for a stronger imperial presence overseas.

Five days after the funeral, he breakfasted with Sir Edward and showed him a draft of his proposed Guildhall speech. It was as provocative toward “Little Englanders” as his Cairo address had been toward Egyptian Nationalists.
The foreign secretary approved every word, unconcerned that many members of the British establishment were bound to find it presumptuous.

BY THEN, ROOSEVELT
had forsaken Whitelaw Reid’s luxurious hospitality (“Not exactly what I am used to at home”) and was staying with Edith and Alice in Arthur Lee’s town house on Chesterfield Street. Kermit and Ethel were off on a tour of Scotland. He could not escape so easily. Determined visitors kept ringing Lee’s doorbell: Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, the hunter Frederick Courtney Selous, Kogoro Takahira, the former Japanese ambassador in Washington, even Seth Bullock, the sheriff of Deadwood County, South Dakota. They were more congenial to him than the royals he had endured for the past seven weeks. “I felt if I met another king I should bite him!”

On 26 May he went to Cambridge University to accept an honorary LL.D. and found, to his pleasure, that undergraduates seemed to be in control there. A Teddy bear greeted him, sitting with outstretched paws on the ancient cobbles. At the end of the ceremony in the Senate House, a second, monstrous Teddy was winched down from the gallery to hang over his head. He was informed that Charles Darwin had been similarly saluted with an ape, and Viscount Kitchener with an effigy of the Mahdi.

Coincidentally, he met Kitchener two days later at Chequers, Lee’s Elizabethan manor in Buckinghamshire. The hero of Omdurman repelled him as a large, squinting loudmouth, “everlastingly posing as a strong man.” Just back from seven years in command of the Indian Army, Kitchener was as overbearing as he was opinionated. He said that the United States had made “a great mistake” in not building a sea-level canal in Panama. Roosevelt cited the advice of engineers to the contrary.

“
All I would do in such a case,” Kitchener declared, “would be to say, ‘I order that a sea-level canal be dug, and I wish to hear nothing more about it.’ ”

“If you say so. But I wonder if you remember the conversation between Glendower and Hotspur, when Glendower says, ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and Hotspur answers, ‘So can I, and so can any man, but will they come?’ ”

Lee’s other guests that weekend were easier to take.
The most distinguished of them was Arthur James Balfour, who had been prime minister during Roosevelt’s first term as president, and was now leader of the Opposition. Balfour, like Kitchener, was a bachelor, but in all other respects the viscount’s opposite: languid, cerebral, delicate as any aesthete drawn by Aubrey Beardsley. The delicacy was deceptive. For thirty-five years Balfour had trodden softly on the bodies of men who underestimated him.

He was now sixty-one, with a good chance of becoming prime minister again, if the Liberals failed in their assault on the House of Lords. At first, Roosevelt was not inclined to show him much respect. Balfour, he thought, was responsible for much of the war talk he had heard in Europe, having recently announced that there was an international consensus that Great Britain was “
predestined to succumb in some great contest,” with a country that sounded very like Germany.
Was the Tory leader just another doomsayer like Lord Londonderry, and had British Conservatism become a negative force, recoiling from the new dynamics of the twentieth century?

Arthur Lee wanted to counteract such doubts by getting them into a strategic conversation. The problem was, Balfour was shy and needed to be warmed, like a cold honeycomb, before any sweetness began to flow.

That happened sooner than Lee expected. Balfour, the author of several works of philosophy, had admired Roosevelt for years as a fellow scholar in politics. He had been overwhelmed in 1908 to receive a two-thousand-word letter from Roosevelt in praise of his book
Decadence
. In it, the President of the United States had swallowed whole his basic premise—that a civilization could not advance unless its elite was made to comprehend technological revolutions—but had extended it into the field of biology, comparing the disappearance of South America’s post-Tertiary fauna to just such a failure to adapt to what was new and strange.

“
So it is, of course, with nations,” Roosevelt had written.

In view of his own party’s failure to adapt to the rise of the Liberal species, Balfour had begun to wonder if the torch of Western leadership should not pass out of British hands into those of this prodigal American. Who was better qualified to become the first truly global statesman of the twentieth century, pulling together North America, Britain, and the whiter parts of the British Empire into one giant power bloc?

He had gone so far as to draft a proposal, entitled “The Possibility of an Anglo-Saxon Federation,” for Roosevelt and Edward VII to consider before they met. Perhaps the former president could be put at the head of such a superpower, balancing the Occident against the Orient, the Northern Hemisphere against the Southern, and, by virtue of overwhelming naval superiority, dictating universal peace.

“
It would be a fitting conclusion to Roosevelt’s career,” Balfour wrote in a covering note to the King, “that he should go down in history as the prime author of the greatest confederation the world has ever seen.”

For some reason, possibly relating to Edward’s death, he had abandoned his grand design. But
Arthur Lee was delighted to see the former prime minister and former president hitting it off. Their minds, in his own expression, “fizzed chemically.”

The other guests at Chequers that weekend—Field Marshal Earl Roberts
of Kandahar, Alfred Lyttelton M.P., and Cecil Spring Rice—shared a gloomy sense of Britain’s imperial decline. Roosevelt took advantage of their presence to discuss his forthcoming speech on Egypt.

“
I never heard a man talk so continuously, or eloquently about himself,” Balfour’s secretary J. S. Sandars wrote afterward. “Amusing too after his fashion. He said that if we allowed Egypt to slip, as it was doing, out of our control, the first consequence would be seen in India.”

WHICH WAS MORE
or less what Roosevelt said again at the Guildhall the following Tuesday, ignoring the stares of the Lord Mayor of London and his red-robed aldermen. They had just awarded him the freedom of the city, and had not expected a lecture in return. But he was no longer an ambassador, and
felt it his duty to help King George and other defenders of the Empire.

He said he had just spent nearly a year in four British protectorates on the African continent. “You are so very busy at home that I am not sure whether you realize just how things are, in some places at least, abroad.”

This allusion to the crisis in Parliament got a few nervous laughs. In venturing some advice about handling native unrest along the Nile, he said, he wished only to pass on what he had learned himself, as President, during the Philippines insurrection. “You have given Egypt the best government it has had for at least two thousand years—probably a better government than it has ever had before; for never in history has the poor man in Egypt, the tiller of the soil, the ordinary laborer, been treated with as much justice and mercy.… Yet recent events, and especially what has happened in connection with and following on the assassination of Boutros Pasha three months ago, have shown that, in certain vital points, you have erred; and it is for you to make good your error.”

Sir Edward Grey, sitting on the dais with Balfour and Arthur Lee, whispered delightedly, “
This will cause a devil of a row.” Some other distinguished guests, including Conan Doyle and John Singer Sargent, applauded more out of surprise than gratification. Were they being spoken to, or scolded?

Britain’s “error,” Roosevelt explained, lay in doing too much, rather than too little, to appease Egyptian feelings. “Uncivilized peoples” needed education and example. Fanatics in their midst throve on softhearted concessions. The willingness of Egyptian Nationalists to engage in sedition and murder had shown that they had no real understanding of democratic process. They would make “a noxious farce” of independence, if it was granted any time soon. “Of all broken reeds,” Roosevelt declared, “sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness can lean.”

Scattered cheers were heard as he grew more peremptory:

“
I just
love
that man,” Balfour said afterward.