Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [22]
* “I myself am a free thinker.”
CHAPTER 2
The Most Famous Man in the World
As long as Fame’s imperious music rings
Will poets mock it with crowned words august;
And haggard men will clamber to be kings
As long as Glory weighs itself in dust.
ON 2 APRIL the Colonel arrived in Naples, and found that his celebrity in Africa was nothing compared to that awaiting him in Europe. Municipal, ecclesiastical, and military uniforms glowed and glittered. Evidently he was to be treated everywhere as if he were still a head of state. He fobbed off several dozen reporters with advance copies of his Sorbonne, Berlin, and Oxford speeches, to hold until delivery, and that night sought refuge at the opera. But his entry precipitated a ten-minute ovation. He saw less of Giordani’s Andrea Chénier than of constant visitors to his box, begging to be introduced.
Moving on to Rome the following day, Roosevelt managed to clear from his calendar any appointments with Catholic clerics. Cardinal Merry del Val, the Vatican secretary of state, would not back down on the see-no-Methodists condition of a papal audience, while Reverend Ezra Tipple, an American preacher given to calling Pius X “the whore of Babylon,” publicly boasted that the Colonel would at least see him. The comic-strip aspects of this squaring off of two clerics with bibulous names delighted Roosevelt, and gave him the chance to outmaneuver both. He acknowledged the Pope’s right to decline audiences “for any reason that seems good to him,” while claiming the same right for himself. And he canceled an embassy reception that Methodists would have attended, on the grounds of Tipple’s discourtesy toward the Holy Father.
His own tolerance—religious, social, and political—embraced, with humor and an easy response to all cultural challenges, the schedule of engagements that now crowded upon him. He rejoiced in the fact that both the mayor of Rome and the Prime Minister of Italy were Jews—“in the Eternal City, in the realm of the Popes, the home of the Ghetto …!”—and treated King Victor Emmanuel III as a fellow scholar, equally well informed on the Savoyard preference of Roman over Lombard law. Flattered, the king held a dinner for him in the Palazzo del Quirinale that had all the trappings of a state function. Roosevelt was unfazed at having to sit between Queen Helene, a Montenegrin, and her niece, the Princess Royal of Serbia. Conversing in rough but rapid French, he revealed his command of Balkan history and a lively interest in Slav literature, citing in particular some translations of Romanian folk songs by Carmen Sylva. They were enchanted, and teased him about having a daughter nicknamed “Princess Alice.”
BEFORE THE ROOSEVELTS PROCEEDED with their European tour, they snatched a brief family vacation at Porto Maurizio, on the Italian Riviera. Edith’s unmarried younger sister, Emily Carow, lived there. She called her home Villa Magna Quies—“house of great quiet”—but its peace was disturbed on 11 April by the arrival of Gifford Pinchot.
Lanky, passionate, and sad-eyed, the former chief forester had a litany of sins against progressive Republicanism to blame on President Taft. He specifically cited sixteen. In his monomaniacal hostility toward all who would not believe as he did, Pinchot was not unlike Reverend Tipple—except that for him, God was in nature, and man’s duty was to serve the Almighty with practical works: environmental, economic, and social. Physically hard and cold, he had spent his life trying to make himself more so, sleeping on the floor with a woodblock pillow—outdoors, if possible—and getting his valet to douse him every morning with buckets of ice water.
Roosevelt admired the hardness, if not the narrowness that came with it. Pinchot, born to Main Line wealth, had never had to live on equal terms with the “plain people” he invoked so patronizingly. Unmarried at forty-four, he had fathered no children, lost no electoral campaigns, faced no bullets in battle. Roosevelt, in contrast,