Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [24]
Roosevelt repeated to Bienerth a prophecy he had heard from the Duke of Abruzzi in Rome, that two great wars were certain: one between Great Britain and Germany, and another between the United States and Japan. He said he personally doubted the latter, as long as his government kept up a strong defense, and fortified Hawaii and the Panama Canal.
For the next thirty-six hours, he had to submit to the same quasi-royal honors that had at first amused, then exasperated him in Italy. Trumpets blared, swords and rifles clashed, and crowds blocked every street and square as he moved from the sixteenth-century Spanische Hofreitschule, through the Jockey Club to a medieval country castle, and finally to Schönbrunn Palace. He tried without success to make his hosts understand that he was no longer President of the United States. The non-republican mind, it seemed, could not conceive of sovereignty as finite.
Surrounded by flunkeys, guarded wherever he went, Roosevelt was screened off from the extraordinary changes occurring at lower levels of Viennese society—changes more radical than anywhere else in Europe, and coincident with Austria-Hungary’s thrust into the Balkans. He did not see the pornographic nudes of Klimt and Schiele, Kokoschka’s explosive studies of angst-filled burghers, the rectilinear architecture of the Secessionists. He was deaf to the atonality of Schönberg and the warnings of local poets and playwrights that an apocalypse was coming.
All he knew, as he attended a dinner in his honor at Schönbrunn Palace, was that he had chosen the right country to be born in. Halfway through the banquet, he watched aghast as Franz Joseph and fellow guests performed an ablution dating back to the days of Maria Theresia. Finger bowls were brought in, each with a small glass of water, and the flower of Habsburg aristocracy proceeded to swig, rinse, and spit.
These people, Roosevelt realized, were not merely old-fashioned, but “living in a world as remote from mine as if it had been France before the revolution.”
REMOTER STILL WAS that of the Magyar oligarchy in Hungary, where Serbs and Slovaks were suppressed with such discrimination that only one citizen in twenty could vote.
Roosevelt was met at the border by Count Albert Apponyi, an old patriot resentful of the “Dual Monarchy” linking royal Budapest to imperial Vienna. He noticed, as he and Kermit rode to Apponyi’s castle for lunch, that each village they passed through had a separate ethnic identity: either Slav, or Magyar, or Teuton. It was Sunday morning, 22 April. Catholic and Protestant churches disgorged their separate congregations.
Multicultural himself, he flabbergasted Apponyi with a long, almost verbatim quotation from a Magyar saga, which he said he had not thought of in twenty years. Proceeding after dark to Budapest, where thousands welcomed him in heavy rain, he scrupulously alluded to Franz Joseph as their “king,” not their emperor. Next morning, he made an extempore address to the mostly Magyar members of parliament. He pretended to be surprised when they reacted in ecstasy to his rapid-fire citations of Árpád, St. Stephen, Mátyás Corvin, the Golden Bull, the Battle of Mohács, the Bogomil heresy, and other episodes from Hungary’s history. He was, of course, showing off, in a way that would have made Edith Roosevelt cringe, had she been there. But his audience had never heard a foreign statesman express such understanding of them.
Twenty-four hours later, after a round of visits to ambassadors and state officials, Roosevelt was accorded the greatest popular demonstration seen in Budapest since the return of Franz Liszt in 1846. His carriage had to force its way through well-wishers along the esplanade. Cheers pursued him into his hotel until he reemerged to make a speech of thanks. It was translated line by line into Magyar. Cal O’Laughlin, standing by, reported: “With every expression there was a shout which rolled over the berg across the river and came back in